Human Resources committee  Several provinces are engaged. The ones that are most active are British Columbia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Nova Scotia. As I mentioned, Saskatchewan has launched a social impact bond already. I dare say that both B.C. and Ontario will make some announcements in the near future, not necessarily about social impact bonds, but definitely about social finance.

Human Resources committee  Yes. On that one, it strikes me that this is something related to volunteerism. The example you provided about people contributing or volunteering their time at the local level to assist others is a good example of the spirit of volunteerism. In that case, different initiatives have been introduced to support and encourage that.

Human Resources committee  Yes. When I—

Human Resources committee  Do you mean a budget in the Government of Canada or just generally?

Human Resources committee  No. I work in a policy area, not in a program area, so I do not have a dedicated budget to look at this. This is part of ongoing work, because I work in social policy generally, so I'm interested in different innovative approaches.

Human Resources committee  In the work I do on the policy side, I look at a range of approaches. If you recall, I said that this is one additional tool in the tool kit. Anytime that I'm asked by my minister to provide advice on something that could be done to address a social challenge, I look at a range of instruments that could be used, whether it's the tax system or other things.

Human Resources committee  You're right: just over 150 concepts were received over several months from across the country. What we did in the report is just profile some of them. None of them were funded. We were interested in getting a sense of whether Canadians had a familiarity with social finance and whether they had some ideas about innovative approaches that could be used in the context of social and labour market interventions at the local level.

Human Resources committee  That's an excellent question. There hasn't been one social impact bond project that has ended yet, so we don't know. The contracts are still in place. The Peterborough one is the one that was initially launched, but it hasn't concluded yet. That's the one in the U.K. Other social impact bond projects are ongoing across different states, so it would be too soon to say what governments might choose to do at the end of those, or indeed what not-for-profit service providers might choose to do at the end of those.

Human Resources committee  We're not engaged in any social impact bonds. The one project that we're doing in the area of literacy and essential skills does have some elements of a social impact bond. It is in the process of development, but it hasn't fully launched and therefore hasn't concluded, so I couldn't say what the government might decide to do with that at the end.

Human Resources committee  Quickly, I imagine you'll hear from different witnesses who will tell you that there are some challenges in the current legal and regulatory environment. I think they'll be better placed than I am to explain those from a practitioner's perspective. But that is certainly something we hear.

Human Resources committee  I don't think there are major barriers. If you go back to the slide on the market, I think that like any market you have to move forward all components at the same time, and that means engaging with all players and all players have to be interested and willing. I think it's just a timing issue to move them forward.

Human Resources committee  Sure. It would be my pleasure. You're right that traditionally social enterprises have a hard time accessing capital in our country, but it's not just in our country. I think that's because we've had a traditional view of that sector as being not-for-profit. Of course, it's important to note that it falls under certain legislation; that's important to keep in mind as you as a committee look at this going forward.

Human Resources committee  I can't comment on the gap; I'm not a program evaluator. I don't really know what systems exist across different countries, so I can't comment on that. But the data collection does need to take place. In many cases we do it already. A good example from my department is the homelessness partnering strategy where, in the context of moving to the current iteration of the program, we have worked with communities across the country to be able to collect data on the homeless population.

Human Resources committee  Yes. We've seen in other social impact bonds that it varies. We've seen different models, depending on the country. In the U.K., the U.K. government didn't get involved with a third party organization to collect some data related to the Peterborough pilot, but we've seen variations in the U.S. and Australia.

Human Resources committee  If it was appropriate, but it really depends on what kind of data you want to collect. Statistics Canada does a lot of survey work and that might or might not be appropriate for a local level intervention that is working across multiple policy areas. It might work, and it might not work, but you might want to have community health centres involved or local not-for-profit organizations that are involved in the intervention.