Yes, I do believe that risk.... It's simple in one sense. We're funding services here where there's an extra layer that has to be realized back to the investor as profit. As I understand it, at least in some models, when social investment bonds are set up and money is put up to invest in these instruments, the investors are guaranteed recovery of their principal, or even recovery of some modest amount of interest, return on investment.

The question we ask ourselves at CASW is that if we're going to be setting up these instruments to attract funding and go through all these rather complex accountability mechanisms and transfer mechanisms, is it not better to take a public finance model to draw upon what we know from research, or maybe do additional research on approaches that work—I mentioned earlier the research that's ongoing on evidence-based approaches in mental health and addictions, and services for children and families—do the research and draw on existing research to invest in ways that we know are going to potentially be the most effective, and take the profit incentive out of it so that money goes to the people who need the services or need the support? I don't know what the answer to this question is.

I worry, too, that if we're setting up rather complex oversight mechanisms for social investment bonds, are there some fairly high administrative costs here? If we can find approaches that work in the public sector and that are potentially transferrable across all parts of the country, would we not be better to champion these approaches in ways that not-for-profits can just get in and do their work and not have to be paying anybody any returns on investments?

One example of this right now is that we have good evidence about the utility of the housing first model in mental health, and we've seen not-for-profits all across the country get onto that and develop local programs. Why do we need to introduce a profit motive to it?

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