Thank you, Chair, and thank you, members of the committee.
I hope to provide a little bit of context for social innovation, my experience with it, and my vantage points, a bit about the B.C. experience, and then some ideas that may evolve from that. We've been working on it in B.C. since back in the days of public-private partnerships in the early 2000s. At the time, we were looking at infrastructure development. I was searching for ways that we might be able to impact the delivery of social programs and the delivery of correctional programs.
In 2010 a privately prepared report, called “Mobilizing Private Capital for Public Good”, was released. I had the chance to read it prior to its release. Our finance minister of the day went to a federal-provincial-territorial meeting and came back with a copy of it. Minister Flaherty had given a copy to every finance minister in Canada and said that this was the future of the delivery of social programs, and we had to look at that in services. That issue brought it more into prominence in British Columbia, I think, despite having worked at it for some time.
Policy issues today are even more complex, more horizontal in many ways, and more intractable than ever before. In today's global information economy, every issue facing Canada has an international dimension, as well as a federal, provincial, municipal, local, and aboriginal perspective. On every issue, concerned citizens have a voice. There are many more players in the policy field today than in previous years. This is a good thing. “Governments must be receptive to ideas and inputs from many sources” is a quotation from the 2012 report of the Prime Minister's advisory committee on public service. I think it reflects both the new complexities and the new opportunities that we face as a result of dramatic societal shifts, shifts socially, economically, technologically, and environmentally. Boundaries are blurring. Cooperation, coordination, and collaboration are now keywords in policy development.
From my personal perspective, I have listened to some of your proceedings. You have received testimony from a wide range of experts involved in social innovation and social impact bonds, and there have been some common themes. You have clarified issues with your questions. While you seem to have slightly different perspectives from different members of your committee, you are all searching for ideas and new approaches, as we did in B.C. and continue to do in B.C.
My interest in public policy as it applies to crime reduction comes from working as a youth probation officer in the streets of Surrey, riding with the RCMP in a floater car that was called to all the youth gang and domestic violence issues. I was the one who went out in the car to respond to those issues. It comes from being a board member of some 15 non-profit societies and service providers. It comes from being a foster parent with some five adolescents, some who had significant conflicts with the law. It comes from being a warden at B.C.'s largest youth custody jail for over 10 years, and talking to thousands of youths who were in custody, who were repeat offenders, and who in too many cases were going on to adult prisons.
Through most of this time, for 35 years, I also worked on crime reduction as a city councillor, as a mayor for 10 years, as an MLA, and as a minister in three different ministries, including as Minister of Children and Family Development. I tried to learn other practices and theories while working through that process.
I think my experience in policy development at the provincial level, and I think perhaps it also applies to the federal level, is that we as politicians never get close enough to an issue to understand and experience it viscerally and emotively or far enough away from it to see the patterns that start to exist there. I've worked hard at trying to get to both ends of that continuum. I'm currently finishing off my doctorate at Simon Fraser University, looking at the issue of public policy and how we can look at public policy as a motivator for a subjective sense of well-being, how we can manage that.
We have all faced new challenges, economic downturns, fewer resources, and we have reached for new approaches to old problems. We have historically relied on governments and foundations to solve our problems. I think it's time we engaged citizens and communities in looking at some of those solutions.
In 2002, public-private partnerships, as I mentioned, gained prominence in B.C., and we formed Partnerships BC to shift some of our risk on infrastructure development to the private sector. We searched for ways to leverage dollars for social health and education programs to help address some of our growing social problems in new ways, and we certainly had challenges in that.
In 2005 our throne speech talked about social innovation. We didn't get very far with it as a result of our good intentions. In 2010 I was appointed the Parliamentary Secretary for Social Innovation. I have just provided a copy of that report to the clerk with the 11 recommendations that are contained therein.
Cooperation, coordination and collaboration, and transparency became the useful principles in terms of looking at that, and as we've been working on it, we've tried to use those principles in our legislature as well.
I was invited on two occasions to brief the NDP caucus on the issues of social innovation.
I had meetings with the president of the B.C. Government and Service Employees' Union looking at it. I noted that the federal union president said there are 10 reasons to oppose social impact bonds. I've looked at those, and I respectfully disagree with a number of his assumptions or presumptions in that.
We have looked at crowdsourcing. We implemented something we call BC Ideas. This was to ensure that we are actually looking at things across the province, and looking at small communities and the ability of small communities to respond to and take advantage of the opportunities that exist in social innovation, social enterprise, and social impact bonds.
We had over 400 entries in our BC Ideas. We have references to what those look like and how we've been able to respond to those on some of the issues in small communities. We had donations of funding that allowed us to allow those ideas from small communities on their social issues and how they might take those to scale, how they might have those funded. We have had, through the Ashoka model, international experts who came in and helped local communities to look at and respond to the types of things they might do.
Certainly, social impact bonds, social innovation, is moving very quickly. The U.S. Senate has just held hearings on social innovation, particularly on social impact bonds. A number of states are looking at the models around that. I was asked to present at the Canadian Congress on Criminal Justice, a biennial event hosted by the Canadian Criminal Justice Association, last November on social impact bonds, and did so. I invited two people who appeared before you with respect to that. One was from MDRC Rikers Island. That person and Shawn Tupper came to present some of that with me.
We've also held our first aboriginal conference on social innovation, or actually the aboriginal community held that and I was invited to speak, and look at and manage that.
The process that we followed was we established the BC Social Innovation Council in January 2011. The Speech from the Throne in October committed us to holding a summit on social innovation. We released a report entitled “Together: Respecting our Future”. British Columbia held its summit in November 2011. We had three premiers present at that and were able to have a number of discussions with them. Our premier, Premier Clark, sent a letter to all premiers of Canada to promote social innovation nationally, and British Columbia introduced legislation to create community contribution companies.
The models in British Columbia and in most provinces in Canada are the non-profit model and the business model, the corporate model. We created something in the middle, loosely modelled after the British model of community interest corporations, and we think we've improved on that.
A community contribution company is somewhere between those two. You can sell shares in a community contribution company. You can do business and you can own businesses, which non-profits cannot. You can distribute, in our model, 30% of any annual profits you have to shareholders, and if it is dissolve, all the assets go to the social purpose with respect to that.
We are currently working on our venture capital act. Most governments use venture capital acts to have a flow-through tax credit to encourage investment in various sectors that they see as being important. We've primarily used it in both mining and high tech. We believe there is an opportunity to use the venture capital act for a flow-through tax credit.
We use a 30% flow-through tax credit. We think there's an opportunity to use that for looking at health, social, environmental, and educational types of programs.
I've been working with a group of parents of autistic children, who are very interested in taking some more responsibility for the development of the services for their children. They see creating a community contribution company as potentially a way to do that. If they were able to get the flow-through tax credit...for instance, if you put $1,000 into that, you would immediately get a cheque back from government for one-third of that. That is the process.
Our province puts about $32 million to $33 million a year into the venture capital act, and it has traditionally been under-subscribed.
As I mentioned, the Innovation Council presented their action—
