Mr. Chair, through you to the witness, thank you for attending today.
I think you see the ideological divide here. Some of us think there is a place for government to invest in crime prevention, but sometimes, and from my ideological view, most of the time, the good ideas are already out in the community, and all we have to do is push these good ideas in the right direction. Then there are others who feel that unless the government completely controls it, there really will not be the outcomes that we really want, so we need more people on the government side to do things.
Immediately I think of, and I think I've said at this committee—and I'm not sure who said it, but I believe it was Albert Einstein—that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and you expect better outcomes. You talked about Peacebuilders Canada,and you mentioned some of the positive outcomes that came of that, far better outcomes than, quite frankly, most government projects.
We heard from the previous witness of the corporations that hire specifically a percentage of their employees from the disadvantaged in our society: people on social assistance, people who come from a crime background, recently released prisoners, or people who may have gone through.... You talk about Peacebuilders Canada. I'm thinking of when I was leaving policing about 12 or so years ago, we were well into restorative justice. You talk about first nations. That comes from the Maori Indians from New Zealand, and the positive outcomes of, I think they call it positive shaming. It sounds really bad until you get into it and you find out that it really is good. I think that's the divide.
I wonder if you could give us some examples from your experience of how, with some government funding—and I'm talking about crime prevention funding or types of funding like that—working with agencies like yourself and other community groups, we were able to maximize taxpayer dollars in order to get good results. Can you advise us of some of those instances that you're aware of that had some positive outcomes so that we can look at them and see if we can't continue down that road?