Public Safety Committee on May 13th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

But it is in order and it is a substantive motion, so 48 hours.... Your notice is hereby given and it's fully understood. That will certainly come on the agenda of the committee in the due course of that time allowance.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Thank you.

I'm hoping I have a little time since we—

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Actually, you have about a minute, sir.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Okay.

In the last page on deck 12, you talk about examples of social finance mechanisms. My specific question would be this. Are you now funding projects in each of those areas, so social enterprise, social investment, pay for performance, and social impact bonds? Is the department funding projects in those areas right now?

[Shawn Tupper]

Right now we're exploring the viability of these kinds of approaches to funding our work. We are looking—as the first member who asked us questions—at how we can shift the way we currently do funding in NCPC toward using these kinds of mechanisms.

Relevant to your first comment, this is less about subject matter than it is about understanding new tools for the way we can do work within our departments. All of these tools would be appropriate to apply in the context of mental health or any other kind of substantive issue. This is really about how we can leverage our resources through partnerships so we can actually find more people to come to bear in addressing the very problems that you're identifying. So our ability to work with John Howard or another organization on a mental health issue might actually be facilitated through this kind of funding mechanism.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

You do not yet have Canadian examples of these being funded at this point?

[Shawn Tupper]

Pay for performance would be the one across government. We're doing more on that because it's an easy way to adjust our grants and contributions programs. We've investigated the others and we're considering whether we can deploy them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Mr. Richards, please.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

I was quite interested in some of the exchanges and some of the questions that Ms. James had been discussing back and forth with the two of you. At the end of her round of questioning, she was asking about the metrics and the measurements, and you've given some examples of some of the ways that you see yourselves measuring the success or the performance of the programs. I may have missed some of it but I was trying to make notes as best as I could.

You had mentioned something about the number of police contacts of the participants in the programs as being one of the measurements. I'm just wondering how you get those measurements. Do you have access to CPIC? Where does that information come from and how are you able to access that information on participants to actually be able to see exactly their contacts with police? I would say that would be a measurement of crime prevention but I'm just wondering how you gather that information and what it has shown.

[Shawn Tupper]

In all cases in our programming, it's voluntary. Our focus is on youth so primarily we'll work with either schools, school counsellors, social service agencies or parents. What will happen is that they will identify individuals that they want to bring forward and have them participate in the program. It's based on that voluntary participation that we're able to gather evidence about them.

In a school for instance, if we're running a program, teachers may identify kids who are having a lot of trouble with the law. So they'll be identified as participants in a program and it's from there that we'll build individual files or information about those individuals.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

I understand that. Once they've entered the program, you're obviously wanting to gauge the success of your involvement with that particular individual. Maybe I misunderstood. But I understood that you tracked their contacts with the police following their involvement in the program.

How is that done?

[Shawn Tupper]

That would be done again in working with our partners. Sometimes it's with policing agencies. One of the examples that Kathy noted is that we do fund policing agencies to run some of our projects. That would be exactly the way we do it. It is with local police or with schools that would have that information.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

So it would probably be fair to say that the information you would have would be somewhat sporadic.

[Shawn Tupper]

It may not be complete.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

You're not able to actually measure across the entire participant spectrum. It would be where and how you can gather information about specific individuals and somewhat on a voluntary basis. Would that be a fair characterization of the measurement then in that case?

[Shawn Tupper]

I would say that there are data sets that are incomplete but I would say that, based on the size of our population, the statistical correctness of our approach, and the methodological correctness of our approach, we're fairly confident in understanding the results that we see for a whole program.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Don't take it as me...I'm not trying to criticize or anything. I'm just trying to get an understanding of this, so I appreciate that.

You also mentioned attendance at school and work, completion of the programming, obviously. There must be obviously some other metrics. Can you give me some further examples of these metrics and how they actually link back to demonstrating a successful prevention of crime?

Obviously someone being in school is a good thing. There's no question. No one is challenging that here. But show me how you're able to link that back to measuring crime prevention in those kinds of instances.

[Kathy Thompson]

Just to go back to the point with respect to how we collect the metrics, I think an important point to make is that the evaluation of the program is part of the funding of the program. So It's something that's done initially at the outset. It's a condition of the funding, so the metrics are very clearly established in terms of how we are going to measure success. It's established at the outset of the project. Often the projects are community-wide projects, so while you're funding an organization.... Sometimes it's an organization that's going to work with schools, it's going to work with police, etc. So it really is very often a whole-of-community approach that's being funded.

I'm sorry, your second question was...?

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Essentially what I'm trying to get at here is that you mentioned some things that I think are laudable goals: having someone in school, attending work, continuing to attend the program. That's great. I'm glad to hear you're measuring those things. I'm trying to get a sense of how you link that to crime prevention. In other words, those are good things that happen, but how do we know we're preventing crime? That's obviously the goal of the program. I'm using that as an example. I'm not picking on that specific....

[Kathy Thompson]

In some cases it's reduced risk of recidivism. We know through the metrics that are collected that they've had less intervention by the police, less contact with the police, they've stayed in school. We know that schooling helps to reduce risk factors, as does solid employment, for example. All these factors contribute, including the very metrics such as the contact with the police.

[Shawn Tupper]

We don't have longitudinal data, nor are we doing anything that could be construed as a longitudinal study.

We deal with the child for two years in a program, last year and this year. We say we have success because they stayed in the program and that should reduce crime. We don't track that child for the next 10 years, so there is no hard evidence in Canada.

We do have evidence internationally that helps us understand what these various risks mean in employment, housing, certain conditions that speak to the risk of the child. We know from available evidence from around the world that those very factors are the things you look at when you're trying to measure crime and the risk of people entering a criminal lifestyle. Again, we've only been collecting data since 2008, but we feel reasonably confident, based on our outcomes looking at international data, that we can say these methodologies work and they are reducing crime in Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you very much, Mr. Richards.

Mr. Easter, you have the floor, sir.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank the witnesses for their presentations.

The national crime prevention strategy has been around for a considerable time. I had some experience with it previously, especially with youth. I think you need to be congratulated on that strategy because I think it has obtained results.

The chart in annex 1 is intriguing. I think it shows what the potential is, but I'm somewhat on side with Mr. Garrison's question in the beginning. This study seems to be targeted at one small aspect of the national crime prevention strategy, the social finance proposal. Given the record of this government, one of the concerns we have is that this could be a way of transferring costs onto others for crime prevention, policing, and the criminal justice system. That is a worry. Increasingly in the research we have done, we're seeing cases where that can happen.

As a U.K. ministry study stated:

...that there has been a transfer of risk from the government to private sector investors. However, this transfer, and the contracts themselves, are untested in many respects....

I think as this social finance bond, or whatever you want to call it, comes into play increasingly around the world, there is also evidence around the world that cost is transferred to the private sector.

Ms. James in her questions said a number of programs have been successful. It raised the question, should they be expanded?

Neither she nor you folks went into what those programs are. I'm wondering if Public Safety Canada has a list of those programs, any analysis of the experiences under them, and if it would be possible for you to provide a list to the committee so we can have a broader example of what programs are operating and how they are being handled.

[Shawn Tupper]

We certainly have a list. Basically our programs are categorized three ways. We have proven, promising, and new. Proven programs are programs that are considered to be best practices, promising are those that we think will become best practices, and new, we just don't know. They really are experimental, trying to determine whether they can deliver the kinds of results that we would look for. We have a list under each of those three headings of the kinds of things that we have been funding and we would be happy to provide that.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you.

In one of the studies that we have looked at from the Canadian Journal of Nonprofit and Social Economy Research, they say this in terms of the challenges to government, and I'll ask you your thoughts on it. Under the section on challenges for government, they say there is a consensus in the literature that the shift to SIBs—basically a social impact bond—will not reduce bureaucracy and cut public sector costs. The costs of administrative change required by a comprehensive shift to SIBs would be significant.

They go on from there talking about the skills that are required, etc.

Do you have any thoughts on that in your experience so far on social finance and moving that way? Are there costs? Do we reduce bureaucracy?