Thank you, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to the finance committee members for the opportunity to present today.
The Canadian Community Economic Development Network is a national association of community organizations, cooperatives, credit unions, foundations, municipalities and citizens that use economic tools to improve the social and environmental conditions of Canadian communities.
We have members in every region of Canada, including urban, rural, northern and indigenous communities. Mr. Kelly may be familiar with Momentum in Calgary. Cooperative development organizations, with which Mr. Fergus is very familiar in the Outaouais region, as well as the Corporation de développement économique et communautaire not far from here, in Quebec City, are also among our members.
Our members are community leaders moving towards an equitable, inclusive and sustainable economy that better serves people and communities facing barriers to prosperity.
An economy that fosters greater citizen engagement to create opportunities for all serves everyone better. We now have a moment when the government could dramatically scale up the impacts of these local leaders across the country through community-led social innovation and social finance.
In 2017, the Government of Canada established the Steering Group on the Co-creation of a Social Innovation and Social Finance Strategy. Following a year-long consultation process with Canadians, the government released the steering group's recommendations last August, which are presented in the booklet that the clerk distributed earlier.
Social innovation and social finance represent a growing collective awareness that the old silos separating private, public and community sectors are increasingly obsolete. Private companies, charities, non-profits, governments and individual citizens are breaking out of their historically defined roles, merging profit and purpose to break new ground, all for our greater good. We are at a tipping point, hovering at the edge of a paradigm shift that could dramatically improve the way we approach Canada's toughest challenges.
Governments around the world are harnessing this energy and investing in social innovation and social finance. We encourage the Government of Canada to join them and implement the recommendations of the co-creation steering group to enable dynamic local creativity and cross-sector partnerships that will unleash an army of problem solvers.
I'll pass the floor to my colleague Ryan Gibson, CCEDNet's past board president and Libro professor in regional economic development at the University of Guelph. He will give a few examples.