Thank you. It's nice to see you, Richard. Welcome to another Okanaganite.
Those are great questions. A couple of examples....
How have governments stepped up to help? The federal government has a social innovation and social finance strategy. There's a $900-million strategy supporting this. The government recently rolled out a program called the investment readiness program, which has specific support for social purpose organizations to improve and increase their investment readiness.
There are some great examples. We work here with a charitable day care with multiple sites—about seven or eight sites—here in Kelowna. Through some coaching through the first round of the investment readiness program, they slowly got their confidence to take on investment and they purchased the farm where they were operating a day care. Now they've secured their economic future. They took out a big loan, secured a place to operate for as long as they want, and kids are accessing day care on a farm. It's pretty cool. There's a good example of a positive story.
On the other side of the coin, social purpose organizations, most being non-profits, are left out of organizations like BDC. BDC serves businesses, so all the innovation financing that's going into the Canadian economy is basically leaving SPOs out of the equation.
That would be a place or an example, but the examples continue. The SR and ED program is not applicable. The small business financing program is not applicable for SPOs. There are major gaps in policy for supporting social innovation.