Thanks.
Like a lot of my colleagues who are appearing as witnesses before you today, I want to live in a world where there's a high public trust in higher education and universities to allow us to do our work. We all know that public trust is eroding in a series of institutions from media to.... There are various claims of expertise. The point of the testimony that I'm offering to you today is that, while I don't want there to be a lack of public trust, I can sympathize and see why there is a lack of public trust, especially in, say, the 41% of the population who voted for the Conservative Party in the last election.
As they listen to experts who show up in The Globe and Mail, on the CBC or wherever and tell them there is a consensus on topic X or topic Y—pick your topic—what they can know is that the expertise is not made up of a diverse array of people who represent their viewpoints. Just like a group of African Canadians might be skeptical of a group of white experts telling them what the truth is on a certain topic, it'd be crazy to think the same would not also be true for these kinds of things. Obviously, we're living in a moment of a crisis of institutions more generally. On this problem, I think there are solutions that we can and should achieve.