For three days in March, we came together. We listened, we challenged ourselves, and we brought to life a national discussion about Canada’s future.

We did it by engaging tens of thousands of Canadians from coast to coast to coast in a substantive and at times eye-opening dialogue about what kind of country we want to be in 2017 and what we have to do today and tomorrow to get there.

This report highlights the challenges we talked about in Montreal.

Challenges like Seneca College President Emeritus Rick Miner’s wakeup call that unless we act now “the new norm will be jobs without people, and people without jobs.” Miner was describing two major trends that will impact our future productivity: the retirement en masse of baby boomers starting in 2011 and our failure to produce enough highly skilled workers to replace them.

Or like Former Governor of the Bank of Canada David Dodge’s forecast that as Canadians live longer, we’ll need to save more during our working years and retire later in life.

We also heard from leading Canadian thinkers and doers like former Competition Bureau of Canada commissioner Sheridan Scott who noted that we will only succeed in promoting Canadian culture in a digital age if the right policy tools are in place.

And on Canada’s place in the world, we heard from Associate Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto Sujit Choudhry that Canada has lost stature on the international stage on key issues such as climate change, international development and cultural diplomacy.

These are the issues we are grappling with as a country. And these are the challenges that Liberals will tackle as we meet in Quebec, Dartmouth, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver and online, throughout June, to debate and shape the Liberal policies that will make up our next platform.

Please read this summary report, consider the challenges raised and imagine the solutions required.Use the form below to share you ideas with us. Use the form below to share you ideas with us and then join me and Liberal MPs at these meetings to take the first step toward building the Canada of 2017.

Thank you.

Michael Ignatieff
 

This weekend was supposed to be a national conversation, much bigger than the room here in Montréal. And, in the end, it was.

More than 70 satellite events across Canada. 52,000 hits on this website. (Hello, world!) 6,200 participants in the live-chat. And more than 20,000 webcast viewers.

We were the #1 trending topic on Twitter all weekend long. Questions came in by Skype from across the country—from Glace Bay to Whitehorse.

The numbers were impressive and unexpected. But what floored us was the quality of the conversation. We didn’t come here to talk about tactics or electoral strategy, or to choose priorities with political ends.

For three days, we talked about ideas. Big ideas. Bold ideas. The political filter—the one that emits a high-pitched beeping sound in the split second before taking a political risk—was switched off, and we were uncensored. It was a welcome, refreshing change. You can’t build a future on personal attacks and wedge politics.

Tomorrow is another day and the real test will be whether this weekend’s conversation can continue without being drowned out by the empty calories of Canadian politics—who’s up, who’s down, and so on.

This weekend was a glimpse of what our political discourse can achieve. Whether that continues is up to us.

We hope you’ll keep in touch.

Slides: http://can150.ca/slides/barton_e.pdf