Public Safety committee  It's certainly a balance of evidence. What we look at are cases where there tends to be a body of evidence—and ideally one that is growing—and an organization that has a culture of continuous performance improvement. However, that broader question around feasibility is something that we were actually very happy to address.

Public Safety committee  Part of that, certainly, is the public commissioning process. The social impact bond can't proceed without an agreement by a public commissioner to pay for outcomes. So there is that final check, at least, at some stage of accountability, in engaging the public sector. But I think it's equally important to think about these tools, the social finance space, as being oriented very broadly to the efficient allocation of social investment toward impact.

Public Safety committee  To briefly respond to that, what I would initially say is, when you think about that notion like a movement to a private space that is less inclusive, that ultimately that would likely result, in fact, in worse outcomes for at least some subset of the population, perhaps for those who didn't participate in this sort of programming.

Public Safety committee  Yes, I would just add that what we've encountered in previous examples of social impact bonds that have been implemented, and even those that we are engaged in the development of, is an understanding that within the delivery model what we focus on is very much driven by outcomes.

Public Safety committee  First of all, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony today. As an organization, we certainly deeply appreciate that. What I intend to provide as testimony today is a little bit of what we do as an organization, the landscape we're seeing in social finance as it applies to crime prevention, and some of the particular initiatives we're seeing in working within and across Canada.