Appendix E: Quote Bank

“A couple of people in a very tiny dinghy in the middle of a big storm in the middle of the ocean.”

“I would think of it as a collection of little islands. Beautiful tropical islands that are somewhat connected, but not very well networked.”

“I see it as plastic cling wrap. A web that can hold things together, but it also is frail, and can get holes in it, it can be ripped apart, and it can be stretched so thin that it can then break. But it can also withstand boiling. And should be, by design, transparent. Strong in nature. And moldable by the people.”

“It's like a blank canvas. I'm not aware of what everyone's doing. I don't know who's doing what, but I know there's opportunity there, and an opportunity for us all to do some paint strokes on it.”

“Sparse. A stand of trees with very few trees. They're not particularly thriving, healthy trees. It's not a forest. And none of the trees are old.”

“Siloed, fragmented. Kind of like this amorphous blob that's undefined. And I would also say, frightened in some ways. And I would also say, galvanizing.”

“Lost together. To quote an Old Blue Rodeo song.”

“I think of a page with a bunch of organizational logos. A lot of the work gets separated out into different non-for-profit entities.”

“Energetic, but disaggregated, and uncoordinated. A lot of enthusiasm, a lot of big ideas, and a lot of energy for change, and not a huge amount of rowing in the same direction.”

“Fragile.”

“What I picture is like a thin mesh that's holding things together, that's sort of holding society together, building on so many of the elements of what makes us Canadian, and sort of inclusion and connection, and difference, and sort of some of the concepts of things like human rights, all of those things sort of held together by the sector, by the community.”

“I picture a jigsaw puzzle that has been put together, or that has been partially put together, but all the pieces are there. Most of the pieces are there, most of them know how they can fit to create the picture that we're looking for, but they're not put together yet.”

“I was just recently in Brussels at a democracy conference, and they have this sculpture that's this giant Atom, and it's these big silver balls, and it's quite beautiful and large, but there are all of these different pieces that are connected sometimes individually to each other, but the, you know, one piece is here and one piece is here, and they're not talking to each other.”

“I guess the image that comes to me is a bunch of leaky boats. In which each boat is focused on plugging its own leaks, not necessarily on where the flotilla is going, and certainly not forming something like a fleet.”

“Well-intentioned, but fragmented. The sum is less than the whole of the parts, or whatever that expression is.”

“Elections Canada. Urban. Niche. Closed off. Siloed.”

“Like a scatterplot map with no connected lines. I spend a lot of time in the US, working with democracy orgs there. And they have conferences, and they have working groups, and the funders meet, and the NGOs meet. It's not that that never happens here, but it's not systemic.”

“A constellation without lines drawn between the stars. Very dedicated organizations doing important work, but maybe without a shared strategy, common standards, or the infrastructure needed to operate as a whole.”

“A map with glowing points where I can see all the organizations. And then I can see these kind of cross-cutting flashes of light. It's not a stable beam.”

“Courage and commitment in the face of challenge.”

“Unprepared, disparate. I don't think that the sector as a whole has faced this level of threats around authoritarianism and creeping fascism. So I get nervous.”

“Pieces for a mosaic. There's some materials that we can collect. And I think as we collect the materials, we probably can build out a beautiful mosaic. I choose the mosaic because it is fractured. But also, it comes together and forms something really beautiful that's diverse and separate, but together.”

“Still not convinced we have a sector yet, formally. But I think that takes time.”

“It's almost as after the primordial soup in the beginning of the life cycle of life. So we're past that. We have, my sense is that we've got a lot of single-celled organisms that are floating around. Bumping into each other, creating, procreating, and then dying. But no sense of systemic sort of glue that's holding them into a more complex organism.”

“A map of Canada, and, like, a bunch of dots in different places, and, like, very initial beginnings of, like, connections between those different dots.”

“Fragmented. Not at scale. And ineffective.”

“I suppose it's something like a community in peril, something like that. A group of people imperiled or threatened. I'm kind of getting the sense of, like, you know, the villagers in a zombie movie.”

“It is like going to the zoo. You can go and check in with a lot of different organizations who are doing a lot of different things. You can sort of see organizations that are talking about increasing voter turnout. You've got organizations who are focused on human rights. You've got a lot of really interesting pieces, and each on their own, they are telling a very interesting... they're interesting to observe.”

“Hit and miss. There doesn't seem to be a strong enough connection between individuals or groups, organizations that are doing this kind of work.”

“If I had to think, it would be some kind of flashing hot points, as opposed to a network. People with expertise, kind of hotspots on a map, as opposed to a networked arena.”

“A lot of people in a crowd. And at times, they're bumping into each other, and they're walking together, and at times, they're moving in opposite directions. Everyone's role is important and needed, but the crowd is moving in a disorganized fashion, rather than moving straight forwards to actually achieving democratic goals that we have in common.”

“A web, but the web is not bound together with firm lines. There's a lot of checkered lines and areas that have firmer kinds of networks and collaboration, and then sporadic lines.”

“I see a distributed network, something that looks like a constellation, but with limited connections between the celestial bodies that make up the constellation. So, lots of dark space, but some bright spots.”

“Before 2019, my image of Canadian democracy is that it's a strong democracy that is a global role model. Now when I close my eyes, the first thing that comes to my mind is disconnection. The Canadian democracy is disconnected from itself.”

“There are three kind of islands. One large island taken up by those involved in electoral politics. Another big island around the political economy, scholarly space. And then another island, which does not see themselves as being part of the democracy space, but are adjacent, the civil society space.”

“We were discovering in real time that we're working on very similar parallel things. And that kind of thing happens all the time, where there's amazing work happening, but there are few connections.”

“We become aware of projects that people are working on if we happen to, you know, cross paths, whether it's at an event, or at a conference, or by chance, and we learn about the amazing work that people are doing, or how there's all kinds of synergies between us.”

“You can walk between their offices. It's pretty sad in a country this vast.”

“The rest of Canada have no idea all the things we do here. And inversely, we don't always pay attention or haven't are informed of what's happening in the rest of Canada.”

“If we want to be truly effective, we have to be truly national. That means that this work has to be seamless in both official languages, and we actually need strength in Quebec. And I think often these conversations have Quebec as an afterthought, and I don't think that can work.”

“No one can even define what we mean by democracy. What democracy entails. Like, we're talking about a suite of institutions, we're talking about a bunch of conventions.”

“I don't think people really know there is a democracy sector.”

“I call it fragmented accountability. All of us are in our own organizations, and all of our accountabilities lead away from each other. Organizationally, we all have a board of directors, we all have funders. All of those lines of accountability lead away from the center.”

“Lack of coalition.”

“We've become issue-centered rather than concerned with the structures and stability of democracy itself. That leads to factionalism.”

“Money. Money. Money and public understanding of the work and the importance of the work.”

“Man, we are so scrappy, and we've been so scrappy for so long. I think we all kind of just figure it out.”

“We're such a critical part of the fabric of society, but we were literally on shoestring budgets.”

“Our executive director has been around at times when we couldn't pay any staff. And for the majority of her tenure, she's been the only full-time staff.”

“technically we are a for-profit company, although we cannot make a profit to save our lives, because we're doing democracy work.”

“I've been working in this organization, one of the few doing democracy work in Quebec for 15 years. And we never had any philanthropic funding.”

“Vote16 Canada is a totally volunteer-run organization. We don't have a budget. The money we have goes to our website and our MailChimp newsletter, and that's, like, from our own pockets.”

“Some of us are going part-time to buy ourselves more time. Because we don't want to lose any of our institutional knowledge and our employees have been around for a long time with the organization, we just elected to collectively go part-time until we're able to come back up.”

“Some organizations are literally facing a moment where they have no funding, and they are at risk of going down. At the risk of losing a lot of institutional knowledge.”

“We are existentially threatened right now if we don't find money soon, and if we don't exist, then there is no organization in Canada that is looking at the issue of organized hate that is incompatible with our multicultural democracy. We are Canada's only watchdog that focuses in this space.”

“The main grant that we were receiving and really relied on is gone. It's dead. Goodbye.”

“The entire democracy sector, however we define it, is between 20 to 30 million a year. It's really small.”

“The moment you get money into civil society organizations, they're going to start working like fuel. You don't have fuel in the car, how's the car gonna run?”

“Money, money, money. Number 2, money. Number 3, money. Give me money. I've got the best people to work with me. I've got the best people in the ecosystem. Let's go.”

“In the US, my minimum is 100K. I don't go to a donor if I'm not getting a minimum of 100,000 US dollars. In Canada, that's like what some foundations give as multi-year. And I'm like, how do you hire people in that ecosystem?”

“Predictable multi-year funding that is unrestricted and not without the requirement to spend down by the event.”

“it's very hard to create a successful program and have it jump out, fully formed, perfect, no iterative process needed. You need, really, years to grow and create an effective program that's responsive to trial and error and to community needs, and it's very, very hard to do that when you don't have funding to look ahead to for the next year.”

“Funding in the democracy sector has often prioritized innovation, but that just means every year they're looking for something new, rather than investing in something that has been shown to work.”

“providing small project-based grants is only just keeping groups on life support. It's giving them no ability to think longer term, and actually drive impact.”

“we just cannot do elite work when we spend all of our time thinking about where our staff's next paycheck's gonna come from.”

“The project-based funding doesn't allow for the agility to respond to urgent needs from the citizen.”

“It's always, like, survival and, like, project management, project-funded based.”

“Even for us, setting up a 2- or 3-year strategy is very difficult, because you just don't know what the funding is going to be like.”

“A lot of foundations and government, they fund projects and not the organization. I feel like we're really good at doing projects and doing them well, but what we're not good at is bolstering our organization.”

“Sometimes the older idea is also good, you know?”

“Short-term funding that's spread too thinly. People really like to fund the new projects instead of those that are maybe more successful.”

“I've worked on so many important and great programs that end after a year, and I have so many assets that just sit and are not doing anything for us.”

“By and large, the interests of the funding community to support infrastructure have evaporated over the last 20 to 30 years. Because what I just talked about was digital readiness, was databases, and digital software, and people to actually activate that. It's not very sexy. They want to fund programs.”

“Living in a world where all we do is project funding is... it drives a scarcity mindset, it drives people towards a competitive culture that limits their willingness to engage with each other and be open about their failings and their faults, and it just pushes us into negative places.”

“some of the people that I work with are literally uncertain how they're going to pay their bills in two months. And to see, to be in this place and see someone else sort of scooping up the funding for something that isn't bad at all is a very frustrating place to be.”

“The environment that we work within as charities and not-for-profits is, really is, because of the structures, encourages competition rather than collaboration and cooperation. We're all competing against each other for the same calls for proposals, the same call for funding... the model doesn't support a partnership.”

“It's so ineffective, the way we need to compete with one another. I don't know how to solve that, but it is a massive waste of time and energy.”

“Max Bell approached 10 different organizations, asked if we could all submit an application to write this report. We thought, well, you know what? Maybe we could just come together as a group and do it, everyone do a bit of it, and a little funding comes towards all of that. Max Bell was not interested in that.”

“Everybody is beholden to their own board of directors and their own financial statements at the end of the year... which is very much, in my experience, a limitation for organizations willing to collaborate, simply because they need to keep raising money to be viable, to justify their existence.”

“It's a survival instinct that kicks in. So ultimately, you play for yourself and preserving your own backyard. Instead of trying to think through what the future looks like for the greatest benefit of the entire industry that you're participating in.”

“Nothing scares a donor more than trying to talk about the inequality of wealth, for example, and the system that produces it.”

“I literally had a donor say, I have a business. Their interest is in having special access to power.”

“You have to believe every election matters. Ask every funder that, because I bet you the answer is some elections matter more than others, and that can fundamentally not be the question.”

“I often say they want to be political strategists and play around, even though it's not about the outcome.”

“Philanthropy is one of the most risk-averse sectors that I've been in. There's an unhealthy preoccupation with how does it look?”

“Half the time, foundations in Canada don't even share what they're working on. There's a level of secrecy around what people are funding.”

“There are 3 almost identical initiatives that are currently being run by funders. They all feel that there is sufficient difference between what they're doing. But the overlap between progressive media and human rights media is almost a full circle.”

“I'll be chatting with one funder, and they'll say, oh, well, we would never work with X Foundation, and I'm like, well, they also fund us, it's on our website.”

“The instinct of philanthropy and the instinct of funders is always to reinvent the wheel.”

“Their ideas get elevated over others, and not always on the basis of the merit of those ideas. They also set the metrics, and those metrics aren't always well-informed.”

“They'll keep talking about it, and then they'll keep going back, and they'll go back to their boards, and the boards will authorize a new exploratory granting program in this area, and that exploratory granting program will issue between 10 and 30 grants. They'll do their own mapping exercises. And we go right down the line, right? In each institution.”

“When you hold on to those expectations and those results orientation when you're funding something, that's not funding, that's not philanthropy, that's not democracy, that's oligarchy.”

“So often, philanthropy looks like it can appear to be taking place in a black box.”

“A lot of interest and resources will flow into organizations who know very well what they're doing, but that money will draw their mandate away from something that maybe it shouldn't. And then, like all days in the sun, they pass.”

“The American foundations are putting billions of dollars into this space in the US. Governments of some countries are putting billions of dollars into this. And we're giving out grants of $50,000, $100,000.”

“We need 5 big institutions with millions of dollars a year in operating funds, doing few key things that we think are gonna be priorities, and that are urgent. And how do you get the $100 million? Or $200 million to do that.”

“This is how poor we are and under-resourced we are, that we think 100 million is like some dream amount. I don't think it is, because every ecosystem requires its own resources.”

“the funding lens is just purely, like, it's the wrong lens for thinking strategically. It's purely about organizations very understandably trying to keep the lights on, and so that's a very defensive crouch kind of lens on things.”

“the absence of viable business models. That's a bit more precise than just saying lack of funding, because obviously there's money out there. The weakness of the sector is that they're quite poor at attracting those resources.”

“The extreme decentralization of the funding system in Canada operates to the advantage of each individual funder and to the detriment of the sector as a whole.”

“Herding cats is easy if you have a can of tuna.”

“5 years ago, no funders were thinking about funding democracy work expansively. And now democracy is a pillar of some foundational funding priorities.”

“Going back over a decade, everyone's interest was contingent. I constantly had to make the case for funding us based on interest in something else. We never got any money that was just for democracy.”

“When funders are hearing something that is consistent, they're more likely to move capital than if there's just different. When things feel disorganized to someone who's outside, especially in philanthropy, capital doesn't flow.”

“Kudos to the funders for getting their act together. It's the rest of us who are the problem at this stage. We need to get our act together.”

“That capacity to really achieve results and be effective with small amounts of money, it should be noted and it should come out strong. But I know that some of this is on the backs of people, and I think that's not right.”

“That piece around left-wing politics, to me, that's the existential threat, that people associate us, like they do in the U.S., with a party or with a side of the spectrum.”

“I think democracy work necessarily needs to step back and be sort of outcome agnostic, but process-obsessed.”

“It is misinformation to start labeling democratic work as left.”

“When you start trying to put democracy into a binary definition like this, this is the problem. It shouldn't be in this conversation. That's what happened to DEI.”

“The minute this gets labeled progressive, the soonest democracy gets truly conflated with a political agenda, that is an existential threat to this work, and I'm actually really worried about it.”

“You cannot define yourself by what you are not. Because if you define yourself by what you are not, when other people change, the definition of what you can talk about is constantly going to change as the partisan polls move around.”

“What we're fighting is authoritarian tendencies. It's not the left or the right.”

“If it's about advancing your political view, it's not about democracy. It's about politics.”

“If anything that we collectively do is, or could be seen to be, partisan, it will fail. Period.”

“I think there is a strong case, actually, around the risk of tying democracy work to progressive causes. I think that is actually very risky.”

“Would you call it democracy work if we're mobilizing the religious right to advance abortion restrictions? Like, probably not.”

“Is your primary mission to strengthen democracy?”

“When you show up for the hockey game, you need to know that the referee isn't rooting for one team or another. And all the different teams need to agree upon the basic set of rules, otherwise the game isn't legitimate.”

“If they start saying that saving democracy means acting on climate change, then we're using the same words to describe 'I want to score on the net' and 'the rulebook.'”

“I'm not gonna sit here and also make a statement about Gaza. Because that erodes my credibility with stakeholders that maybe I need to work with in other areas. Maybe that needs to just be okay.”

“Please leave democracy outside of that, because if we get sucked into that, it's very hard to do our work.”

“As soon as a group says they're nonpartisan or multipartisan, they mean NDP Liberal or Green.”

“Democracy has become trendy. Democracy means different things to different people.”

“It's very harmful that democracy is now seen as leftist.”

“People won't trust this whole initiative if they think it's just a left-liberal push.”

“there is a feeling that is actually widely held among the Canadian public that progressive organizations and institutions are actually acting in a way that is counter to liberal democratic tenets and values.”

“The public will perceive some work as being lefty, but I think that's a failure of narrative. Our narrative has been very, very weak in actually educating the public around what nonpartisanship does not mean non-political. It just means nonpartisan.”

“I sense sometimes an NGO may narrow the definition of democracy so that it has almost like a political leaning to it. Whereas for me, democracy means tolerating the full political spectrum of views. It's more of a process.”

“Well-intentioned, academic in focus. Maybe to the left, or to social justice orientation, whether directly or indirectly, by just the participation of the leaders.”

“A bunch of white liberals sitting around a table. Talking about, values and ethics. Of democracy, in a theoretical sense.”

“And they're all lovely people, right? And they're all lovely people. Make sure that's part of the quote, please.”

“If democracy becomes a bad word... it doesn't take... it's the right political pundit, or the right celebrity, and democracy becomes a bad word, I think that becomes a very existential threat.”

“If they get labeled as partisan. And that will be an existential threat to democracy itself too.”

“Democracy is sort of like a very loaded word. It's almost like a communications exercise to repackage it in a way that people can connect with.”

“There's nothing inherently more partisan about democracy the civil society voice on democracy policy or electoral or governance policy than there is the civil society voice on environmental or health policy.”

“Very academic. Perhaps... maybe because I've just had a conversation with my boss... often, like, can be woke.”

“Progressive movements in general have a tendency to confuse the audience that they are seeking to influence with the community itself. Focus more on changing allies, rather than working with an ally to change the nation.”

“I worry we're saying the latter, but doing the former. If that makes sense. And that mismatch is dangerous. So, if you're gonna say... fascism. And then you're gonna do micro-grants to climate initiatives. We're not matching the solution with our framing, in my view.”

“Classic Canadian conservatives should be able to see themselves in how we're describing democracy, otherwise we're contributing to the decline of it.”

“You've got, on one side, part of that being hammered at and chipped away at by folks who are wanting to take away things that we've been thinking of as democratic. And then we have these moderates who are left over, who are being told, you don't belong in this other version of democracy. So where's left for them to go? They're becoming abandoned or orphaned.”

“It's not about ousting people who are perceived as partisan in one way. It's about adding people who are perceived as partisan in the other, and being able to hold that.”

“I think going in with confidence that we are protecting liberal democracy, and that is a shared value across the Canadian political spectrum.”

“Let's be the ACLU and go to court to defend Nazis if that means that that allows people to protest, let's not be the Southern Poverty Law Center and end up almost defunded because of backlash.”

“Pick an issue. Get a multi-partisan team together. And publicly go after the issue, but the first thing you say is that we are a multi-partisan team.”

“The Laurentian consensus, the Laurentian elite, which is sort of academics, leaders in nonprofit world, everyone hired by the CBC, everyone is kind of from the center-left. And we get sort of portrayed as troglodytes and Neanderthals, and so eventually what happens with polarization is they withdraw more and more from the constellation of discussions like this.”

“I'm out now, so I can be a little bit more the conscience of maybe the conservative side of the house.”

“Conservatives still trust the principle of the rule of law. What may be happening is a perception that courts are less committed to the rule of law, simply applying the law as it's been passed through a political process.”

“If judicial appointments in the courts come to be perceived as partisan, I think there's a line there that's very, very difficult to come back from if we cross it.”

“I'm proud of the fact that Runnymede has demonstrated there's a significant number of students in law who really care about protecting Canadian democracy and have an inclination that it's something that can be lost and must be defended.”

“I challenge these free speech purists, because they actually don't really understand what that means. It really does need, mean hearing the other side.”

“I actually think there can be done more grassroots in terms of outcomes. I actually think you can get them to engage, not just in terms of more voting and more representation, but in this civic communitarianism, where you join a Legion, or a Rotary Club, or a Lions Club, and do something to grow your community. Apart from government.”

“I've seen people threaten to drop out of conferences because Sean Speer is there.”

“Finding progressive conservatives who actually want to do this work in this space is very, very difficult.”

“You can't say, well, I'm not doing my part because you're not doing your part. That's not actually the work of adults and Canadian leaders in this space.”

“I don't think conservatives sit around and say, how can we invite more liberals to the table so there's not a perception of bias? I think this is a uniquely liberal preoccupation.”

“70% of Canadians identify themselves as centrists, and yet 54% of people on the left and 38% of people on the right believe they have nothing in common with the other, even though 70% of them sit in the middle. There's a huge gap between perception and reality.”

“if you look at people who would now be seen as center-right, given the way the Overton window has shifted, a majority of them within the last 10 years considered themselves center-left, or still feel that they are center-left in terms of what center-left was 10 years ago.”

“The extreme right is recruiting in the gyms. And I find this really interesting, because that's where they're finding men who are isolated, and looking to belong, and they're inviting them out to these rallies. But then I'm like, why are they recruiting in the gym, and why aren't the other movements recruiting in the gym?”

“They're like clubs that you need to pass a test to join, and that test probably involves looking a lot like them, and some kind of purity test around new democracy cred.”

“Preaching to the converted.”

“Our single greatest weakness as a community: we're afraid to engage with people who are very polarized, or alienated, or angry, or disconnected.”

“We never get any conservative senators. We haven't in the last, I guess three editions of the forum... there was a party command that conservative senators will not be, will not speak in public at events, period.”

“I selected for difference. Which was not easy in and of itself, but this is the work.”

“You can elect autocracy. And I think that's where I draw a line.”

“We have a moment right now where people are paying attention to democracy. And so I think it's a question of what do we want?”

“Donald Trump.”

“The public support for fascism is rising. It's no longer a fringe idea.”

“I'm quite certain people do not understand what they're losing when they lose it.”

“The manosphere is far stronger than, what I can tell, the democracy work that we're talking about. That worries me!”

“4 out of 10 people in line at an abortion clinic protesting women getting abortions don't even feel strongly about the cause, just someone invited them! Someone invited them, and this is like, okay, where are our invites? Are we at the gyms? Are we at the churches?”

“It's not an academic exercise. And I think that when we look at fascism and what's happening that's moving extremely fast, it's quite sophisticated, and they already have years ahead of us when it comes to social media and other technology.”

“We need to act with the urgency that authoritarian forces or countries act. We need to match their boldness, their sense of urgency, and their ambitions.”

“Democracy is kind of an action, it's a muscle that you have to practice, otherwise you lose it.”

“We feel like nothing is happening in the world, and we live in sort of early 1990s. That's not the case, and it's a different world, and we have to wake up.”

“Complacency driven by a vested interest in keeping us quiet. And that's, for me, certainly tech, but also certain parts of certain sectors of industry and certain political movements.”

“We've taken democracy for granted. We've absolutely taken it for granted, and we haven't improved it. We've let it get worse and worse and worse.”

“We're already late, so don't drag your feet.”

“If you look at the history of civilization, Rome, for example. One of the greatest civilizations ever. Fell apart. And it wasn't a big explosion. It was a slow, steady erosion of important elements of Roman society. And that's what I see happening in Canada.”

“We're at a unique time now. And maybe one of the most dangerous times for our democracy. And how many of us understand that?”

“By October, we could very well not have school board elections anymore. That's, like I say, a core democratic institution gone, and nobody's really standing in their way.”

“The notwithstanding clause, we just, as a country, always thought this is basically never going to be used. It's just the last resort. Well, it's not the last resort anymore.”

“An MLA brought a motion last week to repeal the entire human rights code because of that it's being used to support equality for trans people. And to me, that was a fascinating example of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater.”

“Some 40% of young Canadians think authoritarianism would be better than democracy. That's not even just existential, that's a threat right now, active.”

“If autocracy actually ever became a thing in Canada, this pre-existing network that's able to communicate and find each other and mobilize is the number one way that we actually have a built-in system that can resist forces towards autocracy.”

“The attractivity of authoritarianism.”

“If people's basic needs are not met, don't think we'll have the privilege to consider democracy or a democratic system, because people will not buy into it as something that benefits them.”

“This isn't incremental change. It's monumental systems change.”

“We're not living in that world anymore, and I don't think these organizations understand that.”

“Democracy is precarious, which would be the word I would use. An ongoing embedded condition of democracies. They're not guaranteed. They're upheld by institutions and law, but they're sustained by a host of organizations, movements, actions, and adjacent institutions. And these things need reproduction. They need ongoing engagement.”

“Populism is a threat, because populism... it's okay to be skeptical about what the truth is, but when you don't care about what the facts are, and doubt everything that you've heard, it's very corrosive.”

“The biggest thing is that we still operate in an environment in which we take for granted that there are certain norms that may not be protected by law, that we all believe in, the Canadian values, the unwritten rules, that right now are in question.”

“I don't think we're necessarily in danger of falling to fascism in Canada.”

“I don't love the focus purely on fascism. I think it obfuscates from these broader structural changes that are happening.”

“I don't agree, really, with the idea of framing this in terms of stopping fascism or dictatorship, mostly because I worry that this frame makes it easy to get hypnotized by complexity, and cowed by the size of the task.”

“The frame really ought to be on what we can achieve this year. What policy levers can you pull this year?”

“I can't see it's gonna have much success if we continue to have an information ecosystem that is sewage.”

“They're the robber barons of the 21st century.”

“The population, all age groups, in Canada has an addiction problem to the platforms that big tech controls. I think about cigarette smoking. It peaked in the 50s, it took 40 years to come down. I kind of worry that maybe that's where we are with the information ecosystem.”

“Journalism is almost inconsequential in Canada now. It's really depressing to say. But other than, like, a small community of elites that consume it, and that has, there's impact there. But aside from that, it's non-existent in the ecosystem.”

“We are talking about a far-right news ecosystem that produces more content than mainstream media. We are talking about a so-called news ecosystem that spends tens of millions of dollars every year.”

“They have an infrastructure to spread hate and demonize certain groups of people in society, which is very extremely bad for our democracy, and there is no ecosystem, or sorry, no infrastructure to push back against it.”

“Are we to accept that the internet is just a terrible fucking place? It feels like we are being asked to do that.”

“A lot of news is paywalled right now. You could imagine at the time of an election, or the next wildfire, if we're invaded, where do people go for news? So they go to a news site, it's paywalled. They go to Instagram and Facebook, not able to share news. You just see how quickly misinformation and disinformation spreads.”

“They knew that tweaking the algorithm was going to perpetuate rage and anger. If you withdraw from that, it's almost like you're missing the water cooler discussion. And so people don't want to.”

“On social media, it's like repetition and friends. So if a friend tells you something, you're more apt to believe it without verifying it. They take it as gospel, and you suggest that it's a conspiracy theory, they think you are crazy.”

“Our social cohesion is much more tense than people think. I've seen with young men, particularly. But in general, attitudes on immigration and a whole range of things just completely get upended, and a lot of it's just social media.”

“I've had young people, really well-intentioned, well-meaning, whether youth we're working with or even staff, openly repeat Russian propaganda to me. And they just assume that I already agree, because they think everyone agrees.”

“We were really concerned about cynicism. And how cynicism was going to grow, and how the platforms and the tsunami of information were going to overwhelm people. And that would result in a crisis of cynicism. That was 2017, we're 2025, and we're living it. So it's this horrible reality of our worst fears are continually coming true every year.”

“Finland is a world leader, they've been doing it frankly since the 50s, because of their concerns around propaganda, and their neighbor, and having to resist. So they've had critical thinking embedded as a lifelong learning for over 30 years.”

“I have been really surprised at the lack of community infrastructure around freedom of the press. Looking at faculties, even, in BC, journalism schools don't seem to have classes on freedom of the press. Fascinating.”

“Institutions, when they've lost their legitimacy, it actually causes them to lose one of their most effective tools, which is information.”

“The more you wall yourself off in your preference bubble, the more you think you're a free speech advocate, but you're never actually hearing speech that challenges, even respectfully, your views, or your assumptions, or your stereotypes.”

“Share some meals together. Just connect.”

“Coalitions are activated through specific asks. You can't sustain a broad coalition without a specific ask. And that's where I differentiate between the democracy ecosystem versus the democracy coalition.”

“If we're working from the assumption that we're all just gonna without any kind of shared understanding of the system, or coordinated plan, just keep doing our things, and somehow this will get better? Like, I think that's just lunacy.”

“When organizations don't have empathy for the other's theory of change, and we end up fighting about it, when we can actually both accomplish more if we just accept that we have similar goals, sometimes different goals, different theories of change. But when they align, let's play off each other.”

“the strongest movements or coalitions are always the ones that are inclusive. Exclusion tends to weaken a movement.”

“I don't think we need new organizations, necessarily. I think the key is in funding and supporting the connective tissue, and capitalizing on who does what best.”

“I often use the word cohesion rather than consensus or uniformity. I don't actually think a sector our size can ever truly gain consensus or be unified on anything, but we can be cohesive. We can be connected, we can know what each other is doing and be mutually reinforcing and supportive.”

“The pandemic response is a stellar example of how the sector came together quickly, over a sustained, relatively long, sustained period of time, and saw enormous success. That was a shining example of teamwork, kind of putting egos and logos aside.”

“There is a genuine interest in helping each other out, which I haven't really seen in other sectors as much. There's this desire that everyone realizes that the more people that are involved in politics actually helps all of our organizations.”

“There's not a lot of shit-talking that happens amongst other organizations that are fighting for scarce dollars.”

“The collective voice of 5 or 6 organizations with an op-ed piece is far more effective than one organization.”

“You could have a Zoom coordination meeting next week. There's no reason people couldn't be talking to each other.”

“It would be great to be more in community. If there was a democracy association, or heck, even just an informal working group, I would love to be more in community with those people.”

“I don't think we need to have unlimited funds to do it. We just need to have a deep commitment and a collaborative mindset.”

“If one of the pre-existing organizations does it on behalf of the rest, that will be the wrong starting point, because the other ones will start to say, you're holding disproportionate power. I actually think it has to be a really informed outsider. Insider-outsider.”

“We need to get better at focusing on the 98% that we actually do agree on. I'm drawing learnings from the anti-gender, anti-rights movement, they agree on very little, but the points that they agree on, they put all their money in, and they're really effective.”

“We cannot let perfection stop possibility.”

“Resilience requires redundancy. If the one nonprofit that did something disappeared, we would lose all of our capacity if there wasn't redundancy.”

“Progress on just one of these themes seems to infuse other spaces around it, with a sense of possibility and courage.”

“The simple answer was because nobody was talking to anybody, and they were competing... they saw themselves as competitors for funding.”

“The federal government was on record, had expressed frustration with the movement, saying, we don't know who to believe or who to listen to, because they're so often contradicting each other about what government should do.”

“I don't think more collaboration is the answer to a ton of organizations that don't have capacity. I think that replicates the lack of capacity.”

“I think we need a new kind of ecosystem where we have some, a few larger organizations, each being excellent at the things they do. As opposed to dozens being mediocre at trying to do too many things.”

“Meetings about meetings.”

“I wish we would spend less time in theory and more in practical application. Given how urgent the problem is, I think we understand, and the theory is ready, but we need to move out of theory to practice.”

“I would disagree and commit. And get on the bus.”

“I kind of think of it as the Master's in Poli Sci sector.”

“Every group wants to view themselves as playing some sort of central role towards bringing together the Canadian democracy space. Because that doesn't exist yet. And being a convener in that way creates some sort of stature or leadership.”

“There's this self-centered, ego-centered view of democracy that all of us are guilty of, because we all think our sphere is the most important thing.”

“Every time somebody learns something for themselves, they think that they invented it. And they forget to acknowledge how they're standing on the shoulders of giants.”

“Identify and stay in your lane.”

“They really think that the reason people don't agree with them is because they haven't explained it in enough detail yet. And if they just had 50 more charts and a few more hours of our time, we would all get it.”

“Hypocrisy. You must be my version of perfection, or we don't do anything with you. Results in fraction.”

“Quit with reckless empathy. Most democracy orgs are really issue based orgs. We don't like the status quo, so we want the system changed, but without having consulted Canadians.”

“The biggest weakness of the space is thinking small. Gatekeeping, people who actively want to be involved in democracy tapping into a very small protected circle of executive directors. They all want to be credited with original thinking.”

“The echo chamber that they've created is actually astounding.”

“We cannot expect people to come to us to receive democracy. If you've actually signed up for leadership, that's the job.”

“A scarcity mindset. A certain amount of elitism. And gatekeeping.”

“The term for that, I think, is progressive fratricide.”

“Turfiness, co-opetition. And it's a lack of effort around coordination. As the water pit dries out, all the herd crowds around.”

“The sector sucks at it.”

“Arrogant blissfulness.”

“Blissful arrogance. You know what they have? Tenure.”

“The most fertile ground for democracy to flourish is in its practice. And we don't fund organizing, because organizing is actually practicing democracy.”

“The right is doing that. Right-wing organizations, right-wing politicians are doing that. Jamil Jumaani is going on a college tour right now. What is that? That's organizing. But on the left, is that happening? No.”

“That's the sector strategy that Canadian philanthropy is too afraid to walk into. While the right wing, they're just doing it. They don't even engage with this group. This group is, like, irrelevant to them. They're like, listen, we just have to win hearts and minds.”

“It's pretty white. It's sort of really noticeably white, if you know what I'm trying to say. Like, not aware of its own whiteness.”

“I just imagine symposiums and lectures and textbooks and fairly interesting, but not engaging things.”

“Less jargon. I get really frustrated with the words that the sector uses, because it's not how real people talk about democracy in their lives.”

“Planning is hard. Chaos is easy.”

“We've now turned it into this big, long-term affair of planning and being polite and thinking we're going to keyboard warrior our way into a better world.”

“Turfism. I don't think you need to explain. We are all carrying a hammer, going at it on our own foot.”

“The sector is going to maintain its strength the more it serves the people. The more it serves the sector, the more that thing is just gonna die.”

“A lot of the events where we bring folks together for thought leadership, it's getting stale. You know what's going to happen before you even show up.”

“I think boomers, and some of my own generation, but particularly boomers, have hung on too long.”

“We like to look at Europe or US or some other countries, but we don't look at our own data. We take assumptions from other countries and apply them here.”

“We have a lot of jargon. We speak to the converted. We speak in terms that can be exclusionary.”

“People think there's money to be had, and so instead of staying in the specific space that actually needs the work, they start to grow their convening ambitions in order to be able to garner more money.”

“A half a credit civic course isn't enough. And if there's conversation around lowering the voting age down to 16, that means that even by grade 10, they're voting. So why aren't we engaging more conversations within the schools?”

“Outdated notions of democracy, where there's a lot of folks who think that democracy is voting, and there's a lot of elected officials that think that democracy, therefore, means them.”

“We don't talk enough about democratic culture, and recognize enough that it's people who animate those institutions.”

“We went to a senior center in Prince George, BC. They don't allow politics to be discussed as part of their programming. You can't sit around and have a political discussion at lunch. That's a huge problem, because that's how democracy happens.”

“97% of Canadians want a government that works collaboratively in the public interest. The one thing we agree on, at almost 100%.”

“The problem isn't really the erosion of democracy, it's very low level of power literacy, and so anyone that chooses to subvert democracy to amass their own power has got a pretty easy time of it.”

“We have no language to talk about power together. We're talking about it all the time, but we're using coded language and assumptions and a whole bunch of things.”

“Everybody's lives touch democracy... and yet, of all the policies, I would say it has the lowest level of literacy. It's this weird mismatch.”

“A civil society that understood the difference between educating, mobilizing, and organizing, and spent a lot more time organizing and a lot less time mobilizing would be a fantastic outcome of a healthy democracy.”

“Mobilizing is an active use of expert power. It's like, hey, we're really right about this thing, and here's a thing that's about to happen that will work against the thing we're right about. So we need you to do a thing we've already decided is the best thing to do.”

“We keep saying, yeah, we gotta teach the young people, but we don't have time to wait till they all grow up. Like, we have to deal with this now. We have to deal with people outside of school.”

“A politician is somebody who understands that policy and political discourse shapes our world. What we drive on, what we eat, where we live, how we educate our children, and what our future looks like. Every single one of us needs to be a politician, and I tell everybody I meet that.”

“You can't actually have one without the other. If you move forward on democracy or you move forward on rights without the other, you're actually going to have negative impacts. They are symbiotic and have to work together in unison.”

“How do I have a group of 8-year-olds who can recite their rights to me? Because we take it away from that elitism. It breaks it down to how it fits into everyone's lived experience.”

“Children aged 6 to 12 spend about 67 hours a week of discretionary time, and they spend about 35 hours a week in the formal classroom. And the research about the effectiveness of what happens in that informal discretionary time is shocking.”

“You can't believe in your rights to be free, to say whatever you want, but not somebody else's. That's not how these protections work, and you need to understand how those protections work in order to move this dialogue along.”

“Civic capacity to help support Canadian economic cultural sovereignty is non-existent at the moment. We don't have conscription, we don't have civic education anymore, volunteerism is emaciated.”

“You can't have a democracy without Democrats.”

“They're always waiting for Canadians to self-select in. And I think this is a big problem, because this really only gets the people who are further along that ladder of engagement. The sector has to do more to find people who are not there.”

“You can't just learn civics once, or democratic engagement is not something that you participate one time, or learn something through one program that you're gonna remember for the rest of your life. It needs constant attention.”

“One of the arguments for democracy, rather than having elites rule, is that it's up to the average person to pay attention and learn and make well-informed decisions. I don't know if we're doing a good job there.”

“We want to make First Nations communities, level them up to be the third order of government, where we have a nation to nation to nation relationship. Completing Confederation.”

“Everybody deserves a seat at the table. And once we start saying you're not allowed to sit at this table, that is not democracy.”

“First Nations communities are so resilient that even when a political party gets in that is very anti-Indigenous, anti-First Nations, it's used as an opportunity to unify First Nations to fight for our rights.”

“We bring that decolonized lens. The way we did things before colonization has some lessons in it that could be used by people in today's democracy.”

“It was basically a non-Indigenous presenter saying, you guys need to work with Indigenous peoples. Not because it's the right thing to do, but because it will increase your funding opportunities. And that felt very vulture-like and insincere.”

“Well-meaning. I think of them as trying to include Indigenous perspectives, racialized perspectives, refugees, minorities, women, queer people, but sometimes that effort is superficial, you know, it's almost performative, because I'm not necessarily sure there are many democratic organizations or democracy promoting organizations that fully understand what that inclusion actually means.”

“There's a real opportunity here for advocates of Canadian democracy to make space for Indigenous approaches to democracy, to learn from Indigenous approaches to democracy, to challenge the institutions that continue to marginalize and erase Indigenous people.”

“That type of neutrality and maintenance of existing structures exclude other people... How does holding up the rules, in a neutral, nonpartisan way, result in the inclusion of people who are marginalized from democracy?”

“There has to be room in the movement for democracy to include those that are more assertive, that argue for contention, that challenge the very rules the game is played by. Those are, in my view, critical to a healthy democracy.”

“The insularity of the sector... doesn't seem, to my limited knowledge, to move beyond the sort of same core groups that have been active for a while. And that failure to conceptualize democracy more broadly, I think, will continue to gatekeep entrance to the sector.”

“Canadian society is changing. And is the democratic sector trying to hold on to an old Canada that no longer exists? Or is it adapting, like Canadian society itself?”

“As an Indigenous person, and living in the province with the, 1 out of every seven Indigenous Canadians lives in Manitoba. This is ground zero. And it's a nightmare.”

“In my own estimation, Canada has not changed for the better. I hoped I'd be living at a better time now.”

“If you understand human nature, people get sick. It erodes your mental health. In Indigenous cultures, when we look at health, we look at it holistically, mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. Make up the whole being. And if any part is damaged or struggling in the person, then it can have great consequences.”

“I have rights that I'm fighting for. Nobody else feels like they've had to fight for anything.”

“Canadians are so comfortable. And that's very problematic. I see it all the time as a First Nations woman. All of my non-native friends are so comfortable just sitting back, doing nothing.”

“We, as Indigenous people, get the least money from foundations overall. From anybody, really. Including governments. And that's where these perceptions of other Canadians are so wrong.”

“Protecting your rights can be a very costly exercise. You end up having to go to the Supreme Court. It can take many years to get a decision. And then millions of dollars.”

“Re-describing the country itself as an Indigenous nation, a nation of indigeneity. Not because we're all Indigenous, but because we stand on the land that is. And that gives us a place to begin, a place to envision a distinct and different future.”

“It's not the need for reconciliation, reconciliation is the launching to a new vision of what the place is. And that seems to me to be a really important dream to hold onto.”

“Surviving? Does that sound weird? It's like, honestly, just the fact that we're all still here, and we all managed to make it work, despite all those things that I just named, is pretty remarkable.”

“I wish it was higher, a 7. The work is hard. It's meaningful, which is why it's a 7. But the fact it's a 7 and not an 8, 9, or a 10 is just because the work is hard. And I don't know how sustainable it is. It'll break your heart.”

“Go work for an AI company! It's just kind of like, you want people to work in a field that's growing, and that has some security, and that's meaningful, and this is one where it's like, the work is meaningful, but is it growing and have security? No. And I think burnout is high, too.”

“I would very much like to be able to recommend the democracy sector to recent grads, and so if that's maybe that's something to put a little fire under the funders to know that right now, I don't feel like I, in good faith, can recommend this sector to young people, because it's so competitive.”

“Wouldn't recommend it now.”

“It's hard. It's hard to do the work we want to do. It's hard to have the resources to do what needs to be done.”

“I have never made a dime off of any of the work I've done in this sector, and I can tell you that's probably the case for quite a few people who are working in this space. If anything, it's the other way.”

“I've probably lost somewhere around $300,000 of my net worth by leading the NGO that I lead now. And that's just not good for families.”

“The mismatch between our passions and our resources creates environments that are damaging to human beings. And that's why you see high levels of burnout and high turnover. It's an unhealthy career.”

“Feast or famine is not, like, that's not a good life.”

“I'd love just a week off. I'd love to just take a nap or something.”

“What does a career in democracy actually lead to or set you up for in the long term?”

“This is my toughest year. I was despondent. Depressed. I was really having a hard time maintaining my focus and commitment.”

“I've been really sad to see over the last couple years, a lot of my women colleagues have withdrawn or retreated a little bit, having been doxxed and attacked and had deepfake porn developed.”

“Right now? Five. A year from now, I'm hoping 9.”

“The achievement is that we're still here and that we are having this conversation. That's an achievement, because there's nothing supporting for this to happen.”

“Not everything can survive as a passion project, you know, for people's well-being and to prevent burnout.”

“If you want to go home at the end of the day and say, did I do something today that made the world a better place? This is where you get it.”

“You're spending your time doing something that really matters. The people that are doing this work, they're just the best people. And it is just endlessly fascinating.”

“It gives me meaning in life, and it's the foundation of everything else, and I've seen how, if it's eroded, what happens to a country. We lost our country because of that.”

“If you want to live a life of purpose that actually is defined by values, and seeking to try and make the world a better place than it was when you first got here. I think this is very fulfilling work.”

“There's something about finding purpose. Finding something that connects with your values. Some of us have had opportunities in other sectors, and we have specifically chosen to be here. But we have to also pay people well, so they don't burn out.”

“If you want to clean up, you gotta get your hands dirty, right? You gotta go in there and do it yourself. You can't expect someone else to go and do it.”

“It would feel very empowering. Hopeful. We would have a seat at the table. Reconciliation will have officially happened. We'll stop talking about it, and we'll be reconciled.”

“I would feel relief, I would feel motivated to engage in the political system. We could get back to work.”

“It feels exciting and dynamic, it feels, it smells like trees, because there's a lot of parks there, and the parks have been created through community consultation in a way that works for the neighborhoods.”

“Safe, comfortable to be myself all the time, in public. Not having to navigate, not having to self-censor to the extent that I imagine many people do, in varying degrees, depending as well on their social location and identities.”

“this is terrible, but the other word that comes to mind is enlightened. As opposed to where how we feel like things are getting, you know, it's like Renaissance versus Dark Ages.”

“I think right now, it feels like all the choices that are being made pull us into darkness and despair and gloom for our planet and our future. But I think if all the things are working, then I feel like we can do anything.”

“It would feel the opposite of scrolling on your phone.”

“It would feel like the longing, which is pluralism. It would feel like a sense of belonging.”

“Belonging, safety, security. Yeah, less stress. Certainly. Because there's that safety net.”

“That future looks like it's one of joy. It's one of elation. It's one of possibilities. Because I'm, as an individual, I am listened to.”

“I would feel confidence and trust. It would be apparent that people disagree on things, but I would trust that people are participating in good faith, and at least listening to each other. Being willing to compromise.”

“It feels calm. It feels joyful, it feels cohesive, it feels peaceful. It looks like everybody's engaged, everyone feels valued, everybody feels seen.”

“I would feel relieved, I would feel unburdened, and I would feel prepared to have actual meaningful conversation on what political future might look like within and beyond the borders of Canada.”

“Hopefully it's gonna feel happier, and lighter and more joyful. I think the core of what I believe in and the work of my organization is really for people to be able to say what they want to say without fear.”

“There'd be a lot of arguments. A lot of tensions and balances that need to be struck, and people that are fired up with change, and others that are determined to hold on to the things that they knew, but there wouldn't be violence.”

“We should be able to talk to our family members who are anti-vaxxers. Instead of disowning them.”

“If civil society has succeeded, I think people are able to exist safely in differences, without fearing for their lives about having different opinions.”

“People who are active in their society and care about their society want to see these things happening. We want a glimmer of hope that all is not lost, and we can do something about it.”

“Relief. Probably pride of overcoming ancestral traumas, things that have kept us from feeling access to rights for ourselves and everyone in the world.”

“For my family, and a few dear friends, this is the first time I've kind of shared this sense in this way. I'm a nationalist. I believe really deeply in this place. But to hold that together requires a new kind of dream.”

“I have very, very little hope for the future, so that's just total, totally crazy.”

“I think it's about sense of belonging. I think it's such a powerful thing that adds meaning to one's life. At a personal level, but also at the community and country level as well.”

“Imagine something called a democracy observatory, a set of signals that looks at what are the drivers that are changing the contours of democracy.”

“Imagine if all these organizations say, we want to create a civic youth corps. And this is all about building out the civic muscles of all the youth in this country.”

“A youth corps is profound because it carries hope. It addresses significant challenges around youth employment. These are people who carry this on throughout their lives.”

“I'd rather see hub-and-spoke models. Imagine if it's not about a singular network, but a set of hubs. Then there's a possibility of adaptability and flexibility and difference.”

“The residency model, if there's 30 organizations, how can I be a resident of the Global Center for Pluralism? How can they be a resident of DemocracyXChange? You're creating conditions for people to inhabit the space that you're with so that they learn from you.”

“I would love to send, I'm gonna say, like, 100 people out into 20 communities across the country to do some deep canvassing. So not to canvas and tell them why ProRep is great, but to really just listen to people at their doors about how they're feeling about the state of democracy today.”

“Have us sign a pledge to respect Parliament more, and to take things to a vote. If we want to say there's a democratic renewal pledge, get people to sign on to it early on, before the various activist groups and unions get their pressure on you.”

“Local government has the lowest cost involved in policy change. They're usually nonpartisan, which means it's easier to build issue-based coalitions.”

“This isn't the kind of thing where even small successes, even small reforms around the edges, can compound, where you build a team, and the sheer sense of solidarity that comes from winning something builds to more ambitious reforms down the line.”

“The more pressing issue is not where do we find money for democracy. It's how do you create a collective structure and a shared services structure for these smaller not-for-profits, so that they can actually do the specific work without having to worry about legal fees and comms fees and executive director fees.”

“I think it's time to think outside of the box and put democracy conversations in conferences where it's not already on the agenda. If we're talking about strengthening democracy in Canada, we need to go to where Canadians are.”

“My theory is that we need to revamp the legions. The veterans are mostly getting older, they have a mandate towards democratic engagement. I can't do anything with this, I'm just literally giving this idea to anyone who could. So have it, it's yours.”

“Legal Defense Funds. For when people are targeted, when the courts start to go down the route of litigation. It's a low-hanging fruit. It requires very little from foundations.”

“We should have a war room, or call it oppositional research, or call it what you will. But we can provide the intelligence, and then we should need to be talking about how do we actually disrupt these organizations.”

“The bad guys have legal representation, through an organization called the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms. The far-right ecosystem has a law firm that does stuff for them. We could use a law firm that does stuff for us.”

“Nothing's stopping, let's say, the 5 biggest foundations to each say we're taking on one challenge. One piece of this democracy challenge, and that's our lane, and we're gonna each pick one organization that we're gonna get behind.”

“A gathering that takes over the public agenda and the public space, that would include art practice, public lectures, campaigns around particular issues, that would really congeal and coalesce movements and imagination. If it's just a convention or a conference, then it looks like inside baseball.”

“If we're gonna put all the energy into fighting, let's fight for something better while we're there.”

“A funded, visionary convening power is the number one thing, probably, that no one's had the mandate to do this.”

“If the democracy sector wants to be seen as an issue, rather than an approach, to have a really clear picture of what that issue is, without it being politicized. A little storytelling about why this matters, coming from more of a strengths-based perspective rather than a system that's falling.”

“What is the perfect articulation of success in Canadian democracy, and how do all the organizations work back from that and plot out their points?”

“Perhaps it should not be one thing that we do together. Maybe we should have a party.”

“An organization like Digital Public Square, I don't know that we are core, but we are an accelerator. Pair us with another organization that does core democracy work, we are an accelerator or an amplifier for their core work.”

“This needs to be a dynamic, nimble, adaptive set of practices that we need to contest and unpack and share all along the way. Because we don't know where we're gonna land 10 years from now.”

“Don't wait for government to find a solution to your issue. Go out and try and deliver it first and see if government can help you over the line.”

“With the absence of purpose that so many people have, particularly young people now, if they're able to deliver an outcome locally, gosh, that gives a sense of belonging, purpose, that I think a lot of people need.”