Thank you very much for your question.
I could give you a specific answer with respect to Eva's, but I don't know whether it would answer your concern. Eva's print shop was set up by a charity whose mandate is to help homeless street youth. They created different programs, and as one of them they created the print shop to give all these young people direct experience in a print environment operated in a professional way. They created an advisory committee of people who run their own printing business. In a certain sense, Eva's provides a service to those print organizations, because they're training people who can then be absorbed into their businesses. They don't really see Eva's as a competitor; they see it as part of the farm league that's providing them with the talented people who are going to help their organizations grow.
So that example is not a good one to address the question—which is a general question, I know—whether people feel, if a business is set up by a charity or owned directly by a charity, that in some way the charity is inappropriately being subsidized or cross-subsidized to compete with a business. In the particular case of the model I'm proposing—to create a community interest company or a low-profit limited liability corporation—in actual fact the entities would be taxable, so the playing field would be level for them. But in most cases, if one of them were owned by a charity, it would be donating its profit back to the charity; it can donate up to 75% before it becomes liable for paying any taxes.
The question can also be looked at from another point of view. If we think that these organizations that have mandates to house the homeless or train marginalized people or take care of the vulnerable are doing a good job that nobody else is doing and that a gap is being created because the market isn't serving them, but they come up with an ingenious way to leverage market forces to help them do what they're doing, my sense is that society should be saying it's a really good thing for that innovation to happen. If it turns out that the innovation generated by that enterprising charity is such a good idea that it is picked up by the private sector, which copies and emulates it and carries it out successfully, that's even a better solution. That means that an idea that has been incubated in non-profits addressing community needs actually gets to go farther.