Public Safety committee  That's a very interesting point. It depends on the nature of the crime you're trying to prevent, I think. One of the things that I think is key to one of the questions that was asked earlier is you're bringing together the community to help solve the problem. This is not something the government has to create the answer for.

Public Safety committee  On the third point, if I understand the question correctly, one of the models that I spoke to is the idea of catalytic capital. Catalytic capital works to essentially incentivize second or third investors into a capital stock to invest in an intervention. Someone needs to initiate it.

Public Safety committee  I would say it could. I don't know if Bill Young had a chance to talk about Inner City Renovations out of Winnipeg, but that is essentially a similar model. In that case it was Bill Young catalyzing that investment. That would be an example. To go back to the example of Habitat for Humanity, I actually know Habitat quite well.

Public Safety committee  It depends on how you define coordination. In Canada, there is no regulator for social finance and no national group that espouses to be the one main entity. We have pieces of that in other jurisdictions. The United Kingdom is probably the most developed social finance jurisdiction in the world.

Public Safety committee  What I would say is there are some types of interventions that have no return expectation whatsoever. The whole world of social finance is premised on the ability to create innovative products and services when someone is willing to pay for those products and services. You can imagine a scenario like food security.

Public Safety committee  I find that with the amount of need we have in our society, some of the responses we have are simply inadequate. If we can find a mechanism to be able to increase the number of actors and the amount of money in some of these programs.... I worry less about government pulling out and more about the amount of financing in total today just not being adequate.

Public Safety committee  I haven't seen people pulling out yet. I'll give you an example. I'm actually from the city of Toronto. In the city of Toronto, every year we build about 65,000 new units of housing. The size of the city is growing. Of those, I'd say less than 1,000 are affordable housing units.

Public Safety committee  I think there's a multi-dimensional answer for that question. There are a number of benefits back to the government. One of the benefits is that social finance provides a mechanism for creativity. There is so much innovation happening in the social finance ecosystem, and it's created by the people delivering the services.

Public Safety committee  Absolutely. The space I know the best is housing. That's one of the areas we focus on. I'll give you a quick example of something called the New York acquisition fund. This is, I think, one of the great examples of how three different groups have come together to place capital to create an impactful outcome.

Public Safety committee  One of the examples I can give you is not an example that my firm has been engaged in, but it is a fairly well-known example. It's actually out of Yonkers in the United States. It's called Greyston Bakery. Greyston Bakery has a partnership with the local jail in New York. When certain individuals come out of the jail system—and I don't know the exact particulars of how it works—they automatically get jobs within Greyston Bakery.

Public Safety committee  You get the same thing with social finance, so—

Public Safety committee  If you think about a grant as 100% loss, that is actually the higher cost. For an SIB as an example, you don't spend anything until the social outcome is achieved. The government spends nothing until you actually see the results. This money that the government spends is actually the savings to the government.

Public Safety committee  I don't think I actually said that. Private investors can place capital in these initiatives. Often, a lot of projects that we do as a firm are generated by philanthropic foundations, by private philanthropists, by other government agencies. We work with the City of London to develop a social housing initiative.

Public Safety committee  I can give you a quick example, if there's time. One of the projects that we're doing right now is a social housing project with the City of London. The City of London was the group that actually hired our firm to help them design what we're calling the resilient communities fund.

Public Safety committee  That's a multi-dimensional question. I think I'll tackle that in a couple of ways, if I can. One, on the culture shift question, the idea of social finance is trying to bring us back to a state where the full community is engaged in solving social problems. It's not just the responsibility of the government to directly finance certain interventions that will lead to the reduction of crime.