Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here today.
It's interesting that today I had a delegation representing national charities in my office talking about our government's initiatives and policies as far as charities are concerned and trying to encourage them and make their job easier to raise funds, and to do their good work, and they did commend the Department of Finance and CRA for the great work you've done together with the group. So thank you for that.
The chair was quite right that politicians are going to look at the value of social finance. You are here to tell us how the framework will work in order to make it happen, and also to be able to regulate it to a certain extent. One of the things that the framework has to do is to talk a little bit about best practices, and the tax framework, and financial policy.
I would like to direct my first question to Mr. Jovanovic.
In business you have two types of income. You have active and passive income, and you're taxed at a different rate for those. Is there any possibility of having something like that for a social initiative even in a small business or a large business where you could look at the social impact and have a different level of taxation so that you wouldn't have, like you say, charities competing against businesses? A business could take advantage of it too if they wanted to hire disabled people and there was a certain way that we could evaluate that social value and it could be reflected on their income and how it's taxed.
I just throw that out there, because for me I'm having some challenge in looking at the value of social finance with regard to maybe replacing some of the services provided by government, and then there's the private sector. I'd like to see an opportunity for the private sector to take advantage of what I call social finance in what they do. This could be as partners. Could you share a little bit on whether or not that would be something that could even entertained?