I agree with the general idea there, that social innovation and social enterprises are not necessarily a bad thing, and I certainly wouldn't want my remarks to be misunderstood in that respect.
As I said, our focus is quite narrowly on the social service area, and I think part of what my talk would indicate is that we should be placing some pretty firm limits around what it is we are talking about, and what it is we are not talking about, because at the end of the day, when there is this kind of broad speculation going on, it impacts these grassroots organizations. The number one thing, I would say, is to keep an eye out as to how this affects not-for-profits, which now have to figure out how they are going to play in this new regulatory regime and how they can get up to speed.
One thing I would definitely advise—and this is something that comes out of the U.K. as well—is to make sure this sort of thing isn't understood to be mandatory, that you have to use some sort of social financing mechanism if you are going to receive the coupled government funds. That would be one of the big points I would make, because that truly undermines not-for-profits.
I have spoken with people in Alberta who have worked in the not-for-profit sector their entire careers as social workers, consultants, and so on. They are very much concerned that this kind of model changes the focus of not-for-profits from one that is, as I said, less bureaucratic and actually based on serving community needs, to one where all of a sudden you have not-for-profits that are concerned about delivering a profit to for-profit organizations that are involved in these arrangements in one form or another. That changes the fundamental mission.
I would say, again, look at the history of not-for-profits in Alberta. It's a unique one. It's not built around this idea of “let's see how big we can build the state” and all these sorts of things. In some ways, we've had a really interesting mutual back-and-forth between the government and these organizations that created a unique history in Canada. That is one of the ways we can justify saying that we focused almost exclusively on Alberta, because Alberta has a unique history in terms of delivering social services or preventative social services through groups like these. Our concern is very much Alberta-based. Whether there are implications elsewhere....
The last thing I would say in terms of the welfare state is that I just don't see governments doing a good enough job of securing the revenues needed to actually support these sorts of programs. The sky has been falling in Alberta for a long time. Why? It is because the case for proper taxation policies that would be able to deliver on the promises that are made to everyday Albertans has not been made. I think the current government change is an example of that, where the NDP was able to make a case for why increasing the corporate taxes could be beneficial to the average Albertan.