Public Safety committee  I would say the more you improve the model, the more people will come to want to use it.

Public Safety committee  You're asking for a comment. I certainly don't deny that Calgary has the luxury of a lot of headquarters and a lot of money. But look at the example of Vancity in British Columbia. Their region of operation is the entirety of the province. I haven't looked at their numbers in a

Public Safety committee  Our experience with that is that, when we were out looking at potential partners, one of the elements we confronted the most was “we don't want to deal with sex offenders”. We spent a lot of time educating those potential partners about just what and who a sex offender is. The f

Public Safety committee  Right now we think theoretically the answer is absolutely yes, because we can identify partners and we know that we have individuals who are interested in making investments. For instance, one of the communities that we work with is an immigrant settlement organization. We were i

Public Safety committee  Very quickly, our current model is basically based on a project proponent coming forward and making a submission. We work with that organization to make sure they meet the criteria of our program, and if they do, they basically enter into the competitive pool. This program is ove

Public Safety committee  I think the challenge is to find the willing partners, but I think there are willing partners. Indeed, in my view the theory behind this concept is to allow people from outside of government to explore their ideas about how they can contribute to resolving some of the social prob

Public Safety committee  I think the biggest key is the locality or the community element of it, that it is a locally based investment and it's building on the assets of the local community. The other aspect is the sustained intervention itself. It isn't people coming in to lecture. It isn't short term.

Public Safety committee  That was a fascinating project in the United Kingdom. In finding their seed money for that bank what they did was they went to their five Merlin banks, the biggest banks in the U.K., and they identified all of the dormant accounts. Because they hadn't done anything with them, the

Public Safety committee  I can say very quickly that I know all of the organizations you've identified because I've been meeting with them and speaking with them about our ideas over the last eight years. I'm a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, working on social financing. There is a very active comm

Public Safety committee  For a lot of people, frankly, it's part of philanthropy. A lot of corporations already spend a fair amount of money that is not about return on investment for the corporation, but rather, is about contributing to their communities. There are a lot of investors who are simply tryi

Public Safety committee  Sure.

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  Again, because of the nature of this program being experimental, we take the same models and we apply them in all sorts of different conditions. We will run the same program in aboriginal communities, rural communities, northern communities, and in urban environments, the whole p

Public Safety committee  I have, over a number of years, been working with the financial sector, particularly when I was exploring the concept of social impact bonds as it might apply in the criminal justice system. It was not hard, at all, to find people who were willing to talk with us about their inte

Public Safety committee  I don't have all that data right at my fingertips here, but that's certainly stuff that we can provide you with. Certainly in the design, the proposal would outline how we propose to gather data and measure it. Indeed, where we have an ongoing project like that one, we can start