I want to recount an experience I had when I was on the government side in working with an organization that helped young people who suffer from mental illness and addiction escape a life of crime and enter a workforce.
The organization basically created an apprenticeship. They employed the young people to learn. Those young people were actually paid a wage to show up every day and master basic mathematics that would allow them to work as a teller or at a checkout line, to master basic literacy skills that would allow them to read an instruction manual, and to master basic computer skills that would allow them to function in a modern society.
The program went on for about 40 weeks and had an extremely high success rate. The young people had to show up on time and do their tasks. They would not be paid or recognized unless they did those things.
They found that the biggest problem in dealing with people who had serious drug problems was that these young people had a very difficult time focusing on staying engaged and remaining motivated. The best treatment, they found, was physical exercise.
The organization went out and bought a bunch of rusty old dumbbells and used exercise equipment and made a half-hour exercise program every single day mandatory for these young people. The department said that this expense was not eligible for funding because this was supposed to be a job training program. It's supposed to be about employment. Building biceps does not create jobs.
This got me thinking about how we fund these kinds of organizations. Basically, the departments pay for eligible expenses. They receive invoices for rent and photocopiers and personnel and other costs that are eligible, and they send a cheque to the organization. In so doing, we prescribe what works and what doesn't work. This organization found something unconventional that did work. It seems to me that we should be funding them based on the results they achieve, not based on the costs that we as bureaucrats and politicians in Ottawa prescribe.
This organization said, “Frankly, give us no operating budget; just give us a share of the money that the government saves, because these people are going to be working, and we will financially be better off if you fund us that way.”
I wonder if your organizations can comment on the possibility of moving towards results-based funding for organizations that help people, particularly in the area of moving previously unemployable people into long-term, secure employment and specifically doing so without prescribing how these organizations achieve these goals, but rather recognizing and funding them when they do achieve those goals.
Anybody can answer that.