Public Safety committee  They're your neighbours. They're often people who belong to a faith community. They're moms and dads. I have to tell you, when I looked at the folks sitting around the table at our retreat, there were 30-year-old people with new families, with young children, some of them churchgoers, some of them not, and they were saying, “If I don't do this, how can I say to my children that I did anything to protect them in society as much as I possibly could?”

Public Safety committee  If you talk to a room full of people and say, “How about it? Let's provide the support and accountability network for sexual offenders,” they'll run you out of the room. And if you go back to your constituencies and say that, you're not going to get re-elected. But if you're talking about the reduction of victimization, about protecting children, about protecting college students, that's what we're about.

Public Safety committee  The committee has them.

Public Safety committee  The support that's provided to people coming out of jail, first of all, provides stability. One of the largest protective factors against reoffending that I can think of is stability in terms of housing, in terms of relationships, in terms of a place to go during the day to combat isolation, and other sorts of things.

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  I mentioned that the Correctional Service of Canada was the primary funder outside of the National Crime Prevention Centre. So prior to NCPC's involvement—and your summation of the involvement of NCPC is entirely correct——the other organizations that were involved in terms of funding were the Mennonite Central Committee Canada, the Mennonite Central Committee Ontario, the Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver, and a number of other small funders across the country for their projects, such as the Ontario Trillium Foundation and a number of other similar funds in other centres, the Alberta foundation in Calgary, and some police forces.

Public Safety committee  The organizations I have just mentioned I would see as intermediaries and not as people who would actually invest. The organizations I've mentioned don't have any money to invest. But yes, absolutely, while we have ethical concerns and we see that there may be some ethical questions to be answered, we're open to at least talking and entering into dialogue about these possibilities, because—oh, my gosh—we don't have much more than about 11 months before we'll be almost dead in the water.

Public Safety committee  Thank you. That's a great question. It has occurred to us that if we were to have a corporate investor, along with government, in Circles of Support and Accountability, they might hesitate. Indeed, the comment in the last presentation was that perhaps there's the tendency to go after the low-hanging fruit.

Public Safety committee  Yes. I was at a COSA retreat this week. We claim to be a community-based group and so we're now looking at our communities and our provinces to replace at least some of the funding. Some of our circles will fail. They don't have the backing in their communities and are unable to find the backing in their communities.

Public Safety committee  I think the social justice and criminal justice areas are probably the places where you'd find the most immediate benefit. Certainly, I would recommend a program like ours, to be selfish about it, and say it's ready for that kind of investment. I don't know who would invest in it.

Public Safety committee  Not particularly. We haven't gone after individual investors. We have been educating ourselves as much as possible in terms of what this is. The findings from Great Britain, I understand, are actually quite mixed in terms of success and effectiveness, so we're mindful of that. At this stage, we're still looking to government as being the primary funder—governments from the federal government all the way down to municipal governments—and individual police forces, but we have not, no.

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and committee members. It's a pleasure to be here to address parliamentarians in my country and to talk to you about something that I'm very passionate about. Unfortunately, I don't have a formal presentation to make to you today. My call to the committee came the day before yesterday while I was on retreat in the country with a group called Circles of Support and Accountability, or CoSA.

Justice committee  I think what I want to say, and emphasize, is that, as Ms. Kennedy has just said, the safety of the victim is always paramount. They should not routinely be left in the home. I'm certainly not saying that. I'm not saying that at all. In fact, in part of my submission I said that there are cases when families will want the perpetrator removed from the home.

Justice committee  I have no specific comment on it that would not be subsumed under my comments to date.

Justice committee  I don't think I'm advocating that in all cases of an incest offence the perpetrator should be left in the home.