It is. Part of it has to do with increasing the role and the instruments by which a social economy can be more active in addressing issues of poverty: social inclusion, social welfare, and so on.
I think what has happened in Canada, certainly in North America, is that traditionally the paradigm has been one where there's the state on the one hand, the private sector on the other, and those are the two legs on which our economy rests. Well, that's inaccurate. There is also a vast social economy that operates and not only cushions but provides the kinds of social and economic relationships that address a lot of these questions.
The problem has been the decline of government support and participation in economic development and service delivery, anything from health to housing. The strategy has been to offload these kinds of responsibilities or contract them out to the private sector, which has an entirely different logic in terms of how it operates and why it provides certain kinds of services.
The social economy is a sector that has a lot of the kinds of public and social values that ostensibly exist in the public sector as well. I think government needs to understand that in the social economy there is a potential partner in addressing some of the questions of costs, quality of social care, and access to a broad range of social services by simply understanding that social economy organizations have the mechanism and experience to do a lot of this but they don't have the resources to do it. I think a new kind of partnership needs to be established, recognizing the pivotal role that the social economy can play in addressing questions like social inclusion, training, job creation and so on, by re-evaluating the importance of the social economy in the overall structure of the Canadian economy.
That's just a roundabout way of saying that the social economy can be much more effective and powerful, and it can play a more equal role in terms of things like employment generation and service delivery, just as the state does on one hand and the private sector on the other but in a different way.