Finance committee  Thank you. We're working very closely with RBC. They have announced the funds, but they are still working on the details. As I mentioned, we've also launched a Centre for Impact Investing. One way I could make it clear is if we think about this 3.5% disbursement quota from fo

Finance committee  Absolutely, there has been leadership in the U.K. They did hold a social finance task force about 10 years prior to Canada. Australia has just launched theirs. We see lots of new dollars being mobilized. We also see reports from groups like J.P. Morgan and other mainstream fina

Finance committee  I think lots of folks are figuring it out. Again, I think the U.K. is ahead, but there is lots we can learn from other people. We're actually well positioned to be leaders in this space in Canada through some of the social finance task force and other groups we're working on. W

Finance committee  I think you have absolutely picked up on the fact that the lines are blurring all over the place. There are more for-profit entities that are actually set up to do social good and also to make money. It used to be that those were contradictory terms. But in fact we're seeing that

Finance committee  Thank you. I was referring to the recommendations put out by the Canadian Task Force on Social Finance, and I believe we've brought those recommendations forward to this committee in a different form in previous years. Really, what we're saying is if we are going to look at tax

Finance committee  There is a huge movement to social entrepreneurs, and instead of focusing on a single bottom line of profit, they're focused on a double bottom line, to create social impact at the same time. Just to blow your mind a bit more, there are also triple-bottom-line folks, who are look

Finance committee  Thank you very much. Yes, I would absolutely like to support that. When we look at what's happening for the three main sources of support for charities, you'll see government grants and donations are generally declining or, in some cases if we're lucky, staying the same. Social

Finance committee  Thank you so much for the opportunity to address the committee. I'm particularly grateful for you giving me the opportunity to speak from Toronto. My name is Allyson Hewitt and I work at a program called SIG at MaRS. MaRS is an innovation centre in downtown Toronto, and SIG is a

Finance committee  It really is. It's about impact. So if they're doing a great job.... My job, writ large, is about social innovation, so if we looked at this group and said that they're really doing great work, they've figured it out, and they've got it, we would want to expand that.

Finance committee  Yes. I really used to be a little bit pie in the sky, but I actually want them to have access to a variety of forms of capital. If charitable dollars are available and people want to bring them in, that's fine, but they should also have the opportunity to get access to capital to

Finance committee  Yes. That's one of the areas.

Finance committee  If you look at it who's being “employed” by Eva's Phoenix, they are marginalized homeless youth. We either keep them in a shelter system and they go on to prisons, go on to be a drain on the system, or we give them real skills. The print shop down the street is not going to hir

Finance committee  I talked about the spectrum. I could offer them the other end of it, which is that if they are a for-profit business I want to set up systems that would encourage them to hire those youths so they're mainstreaming them. Competitive business has to be prepared to take on these mar

Finance committee  Ultimately, if you look at the spectrum, you'll see that charities historically didn't generate any income, and then you had for-profits that didn't give anything back to the community. We're putting pressure on both sides of that, so now you have things such as corporate social

Finance committee  We're putting pressure on them because we think it's the right thing to do, from a sustainability point of view, both economically and for the environment, and for social issues and to encourage innovation. If we can get people to use the brain power that's currently in the priva