Human Resources committee  I can go first, and then maybe Jamie and Professor Loxley can follow. Just very briefly, I agree with you. I think access to capital is an important consideration, and I think that's certainly to be promoted. That's something the government should be looking for, especially in f

Human Resources committee  That's an excellent point. Qualitative information forms an essential part of the arsenal of the governments as they make decisions. We can't and don't run cost-benefit and economic analyses for everything we do. Obviously, we are talking about social finance, and investors want

Human Resources committee  In the employment and training domain, I know that in the city of Toronto, for example, we have all three levels of government heavily involved in funding services. There's very little information about how that's working and what the coordination issues are. I think it's a perfe

Human Resources committee  I personally don't know that. I don't know if Jamie has information. We may not know anything about that.

Human Resources committee  I can give you three or four recommendations in that area. These are all the kinds of questions where it goes back to first principles. What is the federal government's objective in potentially considering the use of social finance? Is it to supplement existing federal funding o

Human Resources committee  I think first and foremost we have to recognize that we're talking about very difficult, entrenched social problems here. These aren't things that are easy to fix. If they were, we have a lot of smart people working in governments across the country and they would have fixed them

Human Resources committee  Unfortunately, I don't.

Human Resources committee  In terms of motivations, these intermediaries are often charged or mandated with that specific role, so they're kind of in place in the system to help organizations beef up their capacity. In the U.K. you have these “what works” centres, which tend to gather evidence and provide

Human Resources committee  I think they're usually government-sponsored and initiated things. Washington state has a similar initiative in the U.S. northwest. Sometimes they can be in more of an academic realm. Harvard has more of a technical assistance lab on SIBs that goes out and—

Human Resources committee  MaRS in Toronto fills a somewhat similar role. It's kind of a quasi-government, quasi-private sector entity.

Human Resources committee  Yes, I would definitely see the merits. If the federal government wants to move into this space, I think it's absolutely critical that it plays a role in providing that critical support of infrastructure in terms of a "what works" centre and technical assistance labs, so that we'

Human Resources committee  I think in health you've seen a large focus from the federal and provincial governments over the last 15 or 20 years—for longer than that, but particularly over the last 15 or 20 years—to improve outcomes. So we've seen more investment, evidence gathering, data quality at both th

Human Resources committee  In terms of a successful environment for these types of initiatives to take hold and prosper, which Professor Loxley has alluded to already, we're talking about impact investing and about governments wanting to invest in proven winners and scale those up. However, we need to know

Human Resources committee  Good afternoon. My name is Sunil Johal and I am the policy director at the Mowat Centre in the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto. Jamie Van Ymeren, a policy associate with Mowat's not-for-profit research hub, is with me. We'll be sharing our spea

Finance committee  That's a big question. We released a report back in February that looks into some of those issues. In the interest of time, I would say that report really contains most of our best advice there. One of the big pieces was certainly the federal government talking to the Ontario gov