Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate your being here. I've been listening so far and appreciated your comments.
There seems to some criticism from the other side of this idea of social financing, and they seem to be doing it from both directions. There seems to be this idea that somehow government would spend less money on crime prevention if it were to go this route, then, on the other hand, it might actually spend more because they're doing this and there's going to be profit for private industry, whatever their argument might be. I think they're missing the point.
There's actually a really interesting quote in the “Paying for outcomes” report that you commissioned by Tim Draimin, the executive director of Social Innovation Generation. I'm just going to read it because it's very brief, and I think it makes a really strong point:
The Social Impact Bond is really an amazing form of social finance: what it’s doing is that it’s basically letting government catalyze interventions on the preventions side, instead of being just trapped at the end of the pipeline. It takes risk off the shoulder of government:
And then he makes this key point:
if no positive benefit is generated, the government is not on the hook to pay any money.
So I think if you want to get to the heart of that comment, what he's saying is that this is something that ensures outcomes, and that's really the point of the social impact bond. The idea here is that the government is going to have partners that it's going to work with, and we're going to ensure that there are outcomes for taxpayers' money. That's the key point that I see here.
And I wonder if you could comment on that a bit. Would that be something you would see as well? Would you see that as a way of ensuring there is maximum value for taxpayers' money, and ensuring there are outcomes? Would you see it as way whereby everyone can benefit, not only government by ensuring there's value for the taxpayers' money, but a model in which everybody is winning?
Would you think that would be a fair characterization and why?