Thanks, Kathy.
The Government of Canada funds and supports initiatives devoted to addressing some of Canada's most pressing social and economic challenges. These initiatives are continuously challenged by the breadth, scale, complexity, and interconnectedness of the issues they're designed to address. Decades of government interventions demonstrate that sustainable solutions to social issues cannot be undertaken by single sectors or individual organizations. As such, these issues need to be approached in ways that utilize the competencies, capabilities, and resources of multiple collaborating partners across various sectors.
Social innovation is an increasingly popular term used to described new, innovative strategies applied to current and intractable social problems that have not been resolved successfully using traditional means. Social innovation, therefore, encourages the public, private, and community sectors to work together to mobilize or strengthen social partnerships and to leverage new ideas and sources of capital for public good with the view of generating sustainable economic and social value for Canadians.
Governments are already implementing various interventions to prevent offending and recidivism among at-risk groups of the population. However, as in the case in the health domain, most government resources are currently spent on the curative and reactive rather than preventative and proactive approaches. Leveraging new partnerships and new sources of funding can go far in advancing effective crime prevention in Canada. For instance, a crime prevention program that has been funded by Public Safety and has proven to be successful could potentially be implemented more broadly across the country if new funding partners are secured or new networks may be created providing opportunities to expand the reach of their intervention.
Social innovation calls for a different role for government and for alternative ways of thinking about how social change occurs and how social good can be achieved. Given that much government funding is time limited, the issue of moving from pilot interventions to self-sustaining programs quickly becomes central.
Governments do not have the level of financial resources required to fund these programs in a long-term, sustainable way. Leveraging new partnerships that can sustain successful projects once government time-limited funding ends is key to ensuring the public safety needs of the communities we serve. Our aim is to implement effective and efficient social innovation programs that can become sustainable. For instance, social enterprises that are provided seed money by government and private sector investors would eventually become sustainable as the business thrives and revenue is reinvested in the enterprise. Our vision is that, once programs are sustainable, governments would be engaged in the role of facilitator and public educator, while providing complementary programming to promising and truly successful initiatives.
So what are our roles when applying a new concept like social innovation to our work? Let me be clear that, when getting something new off the ground, a partnership approach is needed. The government cannot do this alone, and others need to be involved. That is why I'm happy that there is such interest from the not-for-profit sector and the private sector in working together to address social issues.
To encourage the development of government community partnerships, Public Safety Canada is interested in fostering crime prevention projects that employ social innovation models to sustain and expand the important work that is already being done, that are attractive to potential investors, and that have demonstrated social benefit. These are the types of projects that we should aim to replicate more systematically across the country, ultimately enabling more local communities to tackle local challenges through leveraged resources with government and private or not-for-profit partners.
The government's role in this area is to encourage and facilitate synergies and work across all levels—federal, provincial, municipal, not-for-profit organizations, and the private sector—to develop best practices. It is encouraging to see the growing interest of the private sector in financing approaches that create positive social outcomes.
Social innovation recognizes that the government's role needs to move from doer to facilitator and that new partners must be involved in finding solutions to social problems. The government needs to support the development and implementation of social innovation and social finance tools. We need to be innovative and proactive for social finance to flourish in Canada.
That's all of our formal presentation. There are a number of annexes as well in this deck, particularly annex 1, which will give you a sense of an offending pathway. This is a life-course analysis that was done within our department. We affectionately call it Tyler. It's a fictional character that is based on some of the prototypical offending trajectories that we see in the work that we do. Basically, what this page presents for you are four different scenarios.
The red scenario is the scenario if there is no intervention for this individual, and this individual becomes involved with the law. Essentially, this individual between the ages of zero and 30 will cost the system $1.53 million. That is the cumulative cost of police, the courts, incarceration, and programming.
We can look, then, if interventions occur, at points in this individual's life and the impact those interventions can have. For instance, looking at the yellow part of this chart, if an intervention is made when this individual is 15 years old, the cost of that intervention being $4,500, the impact would be to reduce the cost of that individual to the system by $500,000. We have used, in this analysis, only those interventions that have proven evidence-based outcomes, such that we have a fair degree of certainty that we understand what these impacts would be.
If you look through, then, as we move down through the colours, the green is an intervention made for this individual at six years old. The intervention, again, costs $5,800, but the impact in getting to this child early, and avoiding a life course of association with crime, would reduce the cost of that individual to the system by $1 million.
These are the kinds of impacts that the crime prevention program—and the kinds of investments we make in that program—can have with respect to youth who have at-risk factors in their lives. I think that's a really important thing, because it gives you a sense of the dollars and the mechanisms we have. It gives you, as well, I think, a little bit of a sense of where the savings land. Obviously, this gives you a sense of the national picture as far as the cost of policing and delivery of the criminal justice system goes, where costs are associated with provincial and territorial governments. So it's a cumulative impact that benefits both the federal and provincial and territorial governments.
I think, Mr. Chair, that would be the end of our formal presentation. We're now available for questions.