The federal government is leaving investment dollars on the table—but it can fix that in the budget
At the recent Victoria Forum, community and philanthropic leaders outlined creative community finance and impact investment ideas that could mobilize big pools of private capital to invest in local businesses, social purpose organizations and community infrastructure. However, as SCP CEO Matthew Mendelsohn writes, despite the growing maturity of the social finance community, Canada still lacks the social and community financing infrastructure and policies to make this happen. With some important fixes to fragmented financing and outdated regulatory frameworks, the coming Budget could make it easier for social finance investments to properly scale and deliver the kind of outsized impact Canada needs at this time.