 And thank you for the people who gave the opening ceremony because that is one of the key things about restorative justice practice. We start with a ceremony, we end with a ceremony. I'm going to, basically, I could use my ten minutes by just saying ditto to Jennifer and then sit down. Basically, she covered the whole landscape of what needs to be covered. But I'm going to try to do three things. I'm going to take us to the mountaintop three times. I'm going to take the mountaintop of just having a peek at what restorative justice means, I think, in my experience and from all the mentors I've had. Then I'm going to take us to the mountaintop just to look at what I think the fundamental lessons have been from the last 40 to 50 years of trying to build this sea change that's now happening. And that you all are pioneers in. And finally, I'm going to talk about the mountaintop of what I think the future is going to look like in terms of what restorative justice and when the sea change finally gets to high tide. So, what is restorative justice? You know, it's not a new idea. This is not a new idea. We're in all our ancestors and all our cultures live in small groups. When there were no disposable people, when essentially every voice was important, they were practicing consensus. They were practicing collaboration. They were sharing the responsibilities and doing the moral hard work of building a community. So, it's a really ancient idea whose time has come back again. And it's merged with, I think, the contemporary work that's been going on now for the last 50 years that I know of. And that is building consensus processes. Building processes where people don't have to go into a win-lose kind of situation. And building what is absolutely essential to deal with the complex problems we face today, and that is collaborative partnerships. So, for me, I really think that these are the processes that really shift responsibility in a large measure from experts and institutions that impose processes to communities to start doing the work that a community needs to do to identify itself as a community. So, I think that these principles and practices are applicable to flights over fences in the backyard and international borders. I think they're applicable to every single way in which we're trying to show up in a good way in our families, in our communities, in our workplace, and every small community that we are a part of in all of our lives. Because all of us live in one way or another, probably in a dozen different communities. These are practices that are not just for conflict. These are practices which you can use for joy. You know, I was reminded about that after using my stepchildren and getting them in circles because they were fooling around with that stuff that's about to be legal in school. And of course, the school was a no-tolerance policy and they were about to be booted out. So, we did a circle. And it was very emotional for the kids, very emotional for the teachers, very emotional for the parents. A couple of weeks later, I'm driving them to school and I say, gee, we're going to do a circle tonight. And they said to me, what did we do wrong? And I suddenly realized, no, we were going to circle about where we should go for our Christmas holidays, right? We have to think about circles as not an alternative process, but the first-order process to turn to. The courts ought to be the very, very last process that we do. When the communities can't handle it, then we turn to the courts as the alternative process. That, I think, is where we need to go. Let's just look to the mountain top and talk about some of the key lessons that I think we've learned. First of all, whatever the process is going to be, and I don't care what you call it, it has to be based on shared values. The first thing we need to do is find out what values we share personally. The good news is, whether I've been working in the Shantytowns in South Africa or in the boardrooms in Toronto or New York, or whether I'm working in this big city in Toronto or a small town in Old Crow, everybody, everybody has the same personal values of love and forgiveness, of compassion, of sharing, of humility, and of humor. Wonder if we can't design processes that encourage us to rely on our personal values. I don't think the courtroom encourages us to love and forgive and to share and to laugh. We need to do those kinds of things. The second thing I learned is that conflict is an incredible opportunity, and we ought not let the professionals steal it from us. There's a lot of energy in conflict, and that energy can be destructive or constructive. It depends on how we process that conflict, and that's the next thing I would say. The process is product. The process we use determines who participates, how they participate, what we're going to talk about, and most important, the process we choose is going to determine what the outcomes are. And the most important outcome is relationships. If we don't build, as we're dealing with differences in conflict, really strong relationships, and whatever we build is not going to last through the storms of change, what really makes the treaties in the north last is the fact that in the Yukon when we negotiated that, we built relationships. If you go through a divorce and you're not building a stronger and a different relationship, then the divorce is going to lead to a very different situation. If you're not building relationships with the kids we're dealing with in our courts in a way to reconnect them to their family and their community, they are going to be easy pickings for the gangs that we have in our society today, because they need connection. Those connections are broken. The next thing I would learn is that no matter what you do, relationship is the key thing. That has to be the most important thing. There are a couple of key concepts also that are important to start a restorative justice process and sustain it. The first one is you need to talk about how you're going to talk. Don't go to the substantive issues right away. Put them off the side. Take some time to talk to each other about what would make a safe place for us to get together and have a very difficult conversation. Because when you're doing that, you're starting to build relationships. The second concept is self-design. You can't take what works in downtown Toronto and transfer it to Oprah or vice versa. People have to sit down and have that difficult conversation with each other to design a process that fits their particular needs and circumstances. The next thing that I've learned that makes it work is that you have to engage the totality of the conflict. In the court, all we do is deal with the rational aspect of the conflict. We think we can think our way through these things. No, there's an emotional dimension that has to be respected and engaged. There's a physical dimension that has to be respected and engaged. And there's a spiritual dimension that has to be engaged. If we leave any one of those four out, we're not going to come to the fullness of what we could come to in being innovative and constructive and moving forward in a very different way. So let me go to the last mountain top. What do I see in the future? Well, I see, and I say this with some respect to all the lawyers and judges in this room, we're going to be of secondary importance. The primary importance is going to be people who understand process and are going to be design facilitators. They're going to sit down with people who are having differences or planning something important or making an important decision and help them design that process that's going to fit. The next change I see is this notion that we teach in professional schools that you need to be objective and keep your humanity at home or in the parking lot is going to be dead. We need to engage our humanity in what we're doing and particularly to honor the conflicts by bringing our humanity in the middle of it. The justice system is as hard on the people who run it as it is on the people who run through it. And we don't recognize that and give the space for humanity we're not going anywhere with any new process. This is what it's about sharing stories. So this is one of the ways I got started. I was a judge and we used to live in the Yukon and I would have an army with me and I'd go into a small community and I'd kick the community door open and I'd say, okay, we're here to solve all your problems. No, we don't live here and we don't know anything about you but we're here to solve your problems. I began to understand that I wanted to engage the community so here's how stupid I was. I got a group of elders and I taught them all the sentencing laws under the criminal code. This I thought would allow us to divert cases to them to sentence. The first case that they took, we diverted four kids into their circle, said that was smart, was I'm not going to say anything. I'm going to be there, I'll be there, but I'm not going to say anything. So the biggest problem they had, the four kids walked in together and they didn't remember any training about whether they were going to deal with each case separately or all four at the same time. We forgot to teach that. I sat there and watched. They weren't getting anywhere and they spent about an hour because I wouldn't say anything. And finally, going no and turned to one of the four kids and said, you know, we really love you. We really love you. And went on a bit about that and one of the kids turned up and said, no you don't. You don't love us. You never pick us up when we're hitchhiking to town. You never take us out in the bush. You talk all about us behind our back. You don't love us. For the rest of the two and a half hours to midnight all they talked about was how we could remake the connection that they had lost between each other when the youth and the elders had a strong connection. So at midnight, they called and finished. They walked out and they turned to me and said how did it go and we started talking about it a bit and then one of the elders said, oh jeez, we forgot to sentence them. Bring them back. No, I don't think we're bringing them back at this hour. I had another hour and a half drive home. I don't think we're going to bring them back. Let's just see what happens and this is what happens. Kids got picked up. Kids got taken to the bush. Anonymously, the elders suddenly had their sidewalks shoveled. They had fresh meat brought and put in their porches. They had wood in there. That happened without anything. And now we bring the story up to the present time. I'm still working for my community in the north of Taggers Clinkets. We have a new chief. Andy was one of those four boys. He was the other part. He was the other part. Now one of those four boys ever got in trouble, ever again with the criminal justice system. That, folks, is a miracle. That's recorded justice.