Thank you, Ms. Harty and Mr. McMurren, for being here. I'm particularly excited about this study. I was one of the proponents for this. We need to find out more about what is going on. We need to find out more about what the department is doing to support these kinds of things across the country.
I think we're all familiar in our individual ridings of some wonderful projects that are being done that we are particularly proud of. I was delighted to hear you mention the homelessness partnering strategy, because prior to getting elected to Parliament, in my previous life I was the president of the Greater Toronto Apartment Association. Our organization played a major role in the success of that program in the city of Toronto, particularly through the streets to homes program. We were actually able to see some marvellous results without a huge bureaucracy and Statistics Canada giving us the results. We actually saw the direct results on the ground. I'm particularly pleased. I think that's an excellent example of how social enterprise and social finance can work in a city that's dealing with homelessness as a tremendous issue. I'm delighted to hear that's one of the poster children of success for this kind of project that we are looking at as a committee.
I want to talk a bit about financing. I served on the special committee that looked at cooperatives in Canada. One of the issues that we dealt with as an all-party committee was the general misunderstanding of how cooperatives worked and therefore how they were able to access financing and funding. I realize social enterprise is a little bit different from co-ops, but is that one of our major challenges in convincing lending organizations, financing organizations, groups on the ground that want to put the partnership together to create social finance, that people just don't understand exactly how these things work?
Can you talk about that a little bit? How do we do a better job of talking about the benefits of social finance and making sure that the financing authorities, the Business Development Bank of Canada, perhaps, EDC, and some other government authorities as well as traditional financing, our banks, trust companies, and credit unions might play a role and better understand what social finance is?