I've just finished a book on the growth of social enterprise in this country. There is absolutely no shortage of innovation, creativity, and ingenuity in this country. As you've heard from our other colleagues in their presentations, there's no shortage of people who have found a way to prove that what they're doing works. The real challenge—and Bill Clinton said this himself—is to bring these solutions to scale. That's the challenge, as Vickie said.
If that is accepted as the challenge, then I would submit that we have to pay attention to the limitations of our existing welfare systems. Our federal welfare system and our provincial welfare systems are not enabling of that kind of creativity and ingenuity of the social enterprise sector or the non-profit sector generally, and they're not enabling of the so-called clients, the people who are the beneficiaries of these resources. This doesn't build resilience and the adaptive problem-solving capacity of people. We have a welfare system that was designed coming out of the Depression. That is party-line technology, not partisan—you understand what I mean. It's party-line technology, not even dial-up technology, and we are in a smartphone era.
I would invite you to think about social finance as a doorway into how we rethink how we take care of each other in Canada. Earlier, you mentioned the RDSP. When I met with Minister Flaherty around the concept, the first thing he asked me to do was to go and talk to all the other parties in Parliament, because he saw this as a non-partisan issue and as a way to reinvent how we take care of each other, for one small group of people. That, I think, is the magnificent opportunity that we have with social finance. All the other stuff.... Social impact bonds are great, but they're just tinkering. We need to rethink how we take care of each other.