This group of parents of autistic children tends to be rather well off. They said, “We want to be able to run some programs for our youth specifically, and we've looked at this as a model.” They talked about forming a society or community contribution company.
They see this as a way of taking responsibility in terms of being able to deal with and work with their children. We've operated from the belief that parents of special-needs children are the best at making decisions around them as long as they fit within best practices models. We've been working with them to do that.
When I was the Minister of Children and Family Development, we created CLBC, Community Living B.C., which was to move at arm's length from government so they could actually be more flexible. This was an idea that came to me from a number of parents of developmentally disabled children. They really wanted to have the flexibility to be able to invest in the marketplace, to have the marketplace come to them. So we created an arm's-length board that is now responsible. They're wholly funded by the state, but they're also going out and trying to use entrepreneurial skills in terms of doing that.
We're finding that those organizations that have greater flexibility and are closer to the issues have a better ability to respond quickly, and with less overhead, to the issues they are dealing with. I suspect that the parents of autistic children, for example, will have an overhead that's negligible, if anything, whereas the state's overhead can be up to 14%. Many of the non-profit societies we go to have.... With some of them, we really push down in terms of contracts, but the range can be from 7% to 14% in terms of doing this.
Government's overhead can be significantly larger than that in terms of the delivery of models. It's questionable as to whether we're doing better. In fact, in some instances I think we've spent far more money and we haven't changed the needle at all. That's why I'm so optimistic and believe that we should be trying something new and different. These are, again, the first ideas that have come into this space that give us an opportunity to look at things from a new perspective.