Public Safety Committee on June 12th, 2014

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

That's a really interesting question, because I think that sometimes more attention gets given to some than others. Certainly in the U.K.—and I'm sorry if I go back, but that's where I come from—the British put a huge amount of money into closed-circuit television. It's the most observed society that we have. I think that now they feel it wasn't necessarily such a good investment in lots of ways, but what that covered up was the fact that they were also putting a lot of money into the development of social programs in early intervention and into community-based programs.

In Canada, I think that certainly the kinds of crime prevention models around what cities can do have that balance. You're right. There is no hierarchy between these, but if you want to deal with the problems you have in Abbotsford, in Victoria, or wherever else you are, you need to have done an analysis of what the issues are and what new things are coming up, and then you have to look at the ways in which you can respond to those.

You can choose from this range of approaches, so you might want to have some situational stuff. You might want to have some cameras, but you might also want to do work on early intervention work with young single mothers or on some of these other approaches.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Thank you.

What I think I heard from you is something that we've heard from others, and it is of course something that we've also said, which is that social finance is interesting but very new. In some ways, it's too new to have solid research on its effectiveness.

From what we've seen, is there one of these four approaches or any of these four approaches where it might be more or less appropriate to be exploring social finance? In other words, is it inherently connected to or distanced from one of these four?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

I think the big issue for social finance has to do with what effects you can show, so I would agree that it is very important to be showing that you have a drop in crime or in recruitment. I also think it's useful to ask people what they think about things too. I've always believed in doing both, but....

I'm sorry, I've diverted myself slightly.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

I was asking if, along with the four approaches, social finance was equally applicable.

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

The issue is how you measure an impact. It's much more difficult to show a big drop in crime if you're improving the safety and security of women in an area of a city. You don't expect to see a drop in crime as a result of that, but you may have an improvement in how safe people feel, so that's one issue.

The other problem is that if you're working with a small study, with a small number of children, you're not going to be able to show very well statistically that you have a major impact if you don't have a large pool of kids. So you have to be working on a project where you have sufficient numbers of people. I think the Peterborough project is working with groups of 1,000 men, which is a pretty reasonable number so you can be sure statistically that you are seeing an effect in terms of a drop in reconvictions.

This is one of the issues. I think many of the models that have been developed deal with youth at risk, youth already involved with the justice system. I think these are very valuable projects to work with, and I think some of the prison reintegration programs are as well. I think it would be more difficult to.... Well, perhaps you could produce some social finance for situational prevention, but I don't see that there's such a gain for the social finance approach in quite the same way.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Okay.

When you were talking about some of the issues, you talked about implementation failure and you talked about trying to replicate already successful programs, so I guess this is an experience you've seen not just in the case of social finance but with all kinds of crime prevention.

Could you talk a little bit more about how and why that happens?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

I think there is a big problem. When you start a new program, everybody is very invested in it. They're excited about it. Maybe the participants are involved in it as well. They may feel they are part of a new venture, and this causes an effect that lifts the program. It used to be referred to as the Hawthorne effect after a factory experiment years ago, but it is a problem with pilot studies. You can do a pilot study and you may well get good results—a big drop in reconviction, improvements in jobs, people going back to school, people in work—so you've made changes beyond just the drop in crime. You have social changes. You have women going back to work and dealing with problems in the family, and the children now not having difficulty in school.

All of those are very valuable, but if you try to scale up a project, you may lose some of that excitement, and it becomes more routine, so this is a big problem, I think, for many projects.

What's happening in Britain now is that the model of the Peterborough, following people through prison and then afterwards, with five organizations working with them.... They're stopping the third year, in a sense, and financing it differently, because the government has a new plan for rehabilitation. Transforming reintegration it's called, so now everybody is going to get a year's support and follow-up, and they're sort of doing what the experiment was doing in a way.

Whether they will get the same results will be interesting to see, but they may not be as good. There is one academic called Aos, who has done a lot of work on cost-benefits and cost effectiveness in crime prevention, and he says you have to discount 25% of the effect of a pilot program, which is quite a lot.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you very much, Dr. Shaw.

We will now go to Mr. Payne please.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Dr. Shaw, for coming. You made some interesting comments. With this innovation that we talked about—and we've heard from many witnesses—I find it actually quite exciting that people are looking forward. You made those comments not necessarily looking backwards all the time but looking forward in terms of opportunities and what we can do as governments or a society to help prevent crime, or reduce crime. That's a really positive thing that you talked about.

I think you also said something about the ICPC, that it was part of their process to also have public involvement in this. I think what we're seeing is that there are more opportunities for private investors. Why do you think private investors would want to participate in these kinds of programs? Depending on how you answer that, do you see the government being involved in that process and how would the government protect the taxpayers throughout this whole process?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

That's quite a big question. There is a report—and I can leave this with you—that was produced by the World Bank and ICPC in 2011, which is on public-private partnerships and community safety. It is in French, English, and Spanish. It deals with the issue of public-private partnerships.

I mean there's a kind of continuum. You may well have heard this, and I apologize if I'm repeating what others have told you, but you can be a private sector investor in crime prevention by giving baseball caps to the kids involved in the project, and advertising their football match. Or you can go in person and play football with them. Or you can give money to the project itself in quite a large way. Or you can say to the project, “What would you really dream of doing if you had enough money?”

So there's a whole range of ways, at that level, private sector partners can be involved in crime prevention, and I think have done for many years. I mean many of the banks do this kind of work here in Canada. There's the Regent Park housing in Toronto, which I think is a very good example of social finance. There's a lot of that kind of investment.

There are two things. One is that they're mostly doing it because it makes them feel better, and it feels that they're giving something to their community. So Canadian Tire, and Tim Hortons, and all of these organizations, Bata Shoes, have done this for many years because they feel it's part of their corporate social responsibility.

So I think there's the altruistic aspect of it, and I think it is tremendously important to encourage people with money to spare to invest in that kind of way. Then at the far end you have the social impact bond, as I understand it, where you're actually getting a return, and the pay-for-results models where you're getting a return on your money. In that case I think they would do it if they're interested in the social problems. Many of the models seem to be of the Vancity model in B.C., and certainly some of the projects in Britain are funded by foundations. They're not so much venture capitalists. They're mostly people who have a sense of social commitment in some sense.

For me social finance is in very large part about that aspect. The extent to which you can see it as something you do in order to make money, I'm not sure to what extent that is the major issue for many people who do it right now.

In terms of protecting taxpayers from misspent money, I think that's one of the issues. You can fund something, but if they're beating the kids to make sure that they don't run away, then this is not protecting the rights and the human rights of those kids. So the government has a responsibility to make sure of what's happening, in the sense that they know and have some sense of the integrity of programs. That goes back to the notion of doing something that you know has, theoretically, a good chance of having some impact.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

So the government would have to have some sort of guidelines and then a mechanism to follow up to make sure those things are happening. You did point out an interesting thing in Tim Hortons, one of my favourite places to go for coffee. They have a camp every year, and to me that's a really big method whereby they can help kids and make sure they stay on the right path. It's an opportunity to learn and make friends. I think that's really quite outstanding from that standpoint.

You talked a little about implementation and delivery. What would you see as steps needed to be taken to make sure you could have a successful...and let's use social financing for an impact bond or something of that nature? Is there some area you think the Government of Canada should look at as a potential pilot project?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

Certainly most of the discussion has been around having firm contracts among all the partners involved. You need to have some ground rules. There needs to be some kind of assessment of the likelihood of getting good results. You need to detail what the outcomes are going to be, and that needs to be not just a reduction in crime in my view, but getting into school, getting into work, getting other things, social and economic benefits beyond that. Those are measurable in addition to the views that people have about whether they liked the project or not, which are important, and how they feel about it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you very much, Mr. Payne. Your time is up.

Now we'll go to Mr. Easter, please.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Dr. Shaw.

In the beginning, I was wondering where the vested interest question was going. But listening to your introduction and your response to questions, I can hear it in your voice and see it in your depth of experience, the vested interest in a lifetime in crime prevention. That experience shows through.

This may be something that we need to ask our analyst to do, Mr. Chair. It's the first time I've heard that the third year of the Peterborough model isn't going to be funded.

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

It's going to have different financing.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I think one of our concerns in some cases is that public funds leverage other moneys for whatever. I think the Peterborough example has been held up in a number of ways, and if the analyst could find out the latest on where the Peterborough model is at because if the third year of funding is to be dropped by the government then it does have an impact, and it could affect other similar models going forward.

One of my concerns...and we need to look at all models in a positive light, all alternatives, whether it's social finance, national crime prevention strategy, whatever it might be, and anything they could do. LaVar's question, and one of your responses is that there are quite a number of foundations—Tim Hortons is an example—and organizations with money that do good work for the social cause of preventing crime, or assisting lower-income groups, whatever. The social bond in my view is an entirely different approach.

It's an approach whereby people with money can be assured of a return if there are results, and it does turn the thing on its head. I'm not against it, but I want to know if there's any way we can find out what the implications are. Will it reduce funding in other areas for social causes? Is there a risk there? Your model is entirely different. The government is saying you'll get a 10% return if it's this result, or a higher return if it's a better result; you get no return if.... It's a completely different concept from what we're used to. What are your thoughts?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

I agree. I think it is a different context, and some of the discussion I've seen about it in the U.K. is that you're asking people to make money out of people's lives. There's a suggestion that it's not actually a very good thing to do to make money out of their sort of distress. This is the way people react to this kind of approach. I think there really isn't enough information to know to what extent it's going to be sustainable. I think that's one of the problems for me.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

One of the arguments, though, by those strongly in favour of it is that it creates more sustainability. There's a profit there, money rolling in as a result, so it will continue to be financed and may lessen the amount of funding that the governments have to do. That's one of the arguments we're hearing coming forward. One of the concerns I have is that, look, you know there's always pressure on financial areas, and there are always more areas to put money than governments have money. I worry that it will provoke some withdrawal from governments in terms of funding of national programs, and as a result we could get, in this country, a patchwork quilt of programs across the country, where if you live in a rural area you're not near a bigger city where there are a lot of investors.

Is there a risk there that you could get different programming?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

I think there is certainly evidence on the basis of public-private partnerships, not the social bond. In terms of the kinds of projects that people like to invest in, there's been quite a bit of work done on the use of these kinds of approaches in Latin America and the Caribbean. Certainly in Brazil, what you would find is that many private investors like to put money into young kids who haven't got into trouble, into communities, and into the police. They don't want to touch kids coming out of institutions, and they don't want to touch adult prisoners. So it's a bit like the cuddly animal that sells the cellphone. There are certain things that people are more likely to want to invest in than others.

The examples that I can see that are being funded in Massachusetts and in the States and in the U.K. are quite traditional projects. They're doing the kinds of things people have done forever: supporting kids, giving them resources, supporting people coming out of prison.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I don't think there's any question that we'll be going the social bond route, certainly for some areas in terms of crime prevention. I don't even know how to phrase my question, but what do you need to do in terms of government policy—based on your experience—to ensure that there's relatively fair programming across the country?

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Just be brief, please.

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

That's quite a question. I think there's absolutely room for trying out this approach in one or two areas, but I don't think you can see it as something that means the government doesn't have to think about and develop and fund programs, because it will only be certain areas. Most of the programs tend to be local, so you're going to need other programs developed in other areas.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Doré Lefebvre, go ahead.

[Rosane Doré Lefebvre, NDP, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, Dr. Shaw, for being with us today.

Your comments have been extremely informative.

Ms. Shaw, I read in your bio that you've studied imprisonment and women's safety. In your presentation, you said it was hard to quantify women's safety. You talked about how they could be made to feel safer through better street lighting, the use of video surveillance and things of that nature.

Could you kindly elaborate on that? Is there anything else you've observed during your career?

[Dr. Margaret Shaw]

May I answer in English?