 Thank you for designing such a respectful welcome to us here. It got me the lump on the throat. Thank you. I'm proud to be here with all of you today. Thank you for including me. One thing about the opening ceremony that made me think about content of what I'm going to say is the way your smudge happened. A few years ago I organized a conference at my university. I'm a retired professor, by the way. I absolve myself a little bit. I organized a conference at a university where I was. And when I went to find out about having a smudge, I learned very quickly that it would have been better to just go ahead and do it. As the city fire marshals, the university fire marshals, and even some people with a guidebook about federal regulations got involved. We actually had to take it outside. And that's part of what I'm going to say here about regulatory formalism, like I'm going to use those words, versus informal relations. The second thing, before I segue into that though, is that I want to say that some of you here in the audience will probably say, that's not Gail Berford's idea that he's talking about, but that's my idea. Because what you see here is simply a co-construction of ideas that I've been fortunate enough to gather from other people around the world. All my thoughts are knitted together, the excitement and possibilities of what other people have shared with me, and the stories. So I see myself in some ways as a carrier. And I'm supposed to segue into what does this mean if we successfully decriminalize the criminal justice system, which is really a part of what we're talking about here, because restorative justice builds from analysis of what evidence we have now that we have so overloaded our statutory systems, our criminal justice systems, our professional systems with expectations that they can't do their jobs well. They're loaded up and we're always disappointed. One of my great excitements right now is that women's groups internationally seem to be stepping back from what was clearly well-channeled, one of the most highly organized and focused efforts to bring change to get acknowledgement that abusing a woman was a crime. The Ellen Pence in 1999 wrote, we've got to be careful getting too cozy with the justice system here because the justice system takes over processes and makes them their own. And we now see that in child protection, in youth justice, in all manner, in education. I'm consulting on a case right now for a parent whose child has been sexually assaulted at an American university and when the investigators first met with her child, they moved her child off to another dormitory and gave a special room, but the first message was, you can't talk to anybody. And that's one of the main points I want to bring you here about as we move out of criminal justice systems and start to find what are all the places and ways that we can infuse restorative and relational thinking and problem solving into our daily lives. One of the concerns I have is about reproducing those same inequalities in those same silos. If we say, well, we're going to have resilient workplaces and we're going to have universities that have restorative justice and we're going to have schools that have it, my question for people is, to what extent can people bring the people from their natural helping networks together to be part of their fronting up? One of the things I learned in New Zealand the first year I went there, I was able to accompany as part of the extended relations of a person who was applying for a very significant appointment in the university and he invited his final to go with him to the interview. And at that time, New Zealanders had kind of adjusted to that idea that traditional practice would never let a person stand by the docket in a court by themselves and be humiliated by a white English court, but it also was in the workplace and in daily life that you brought your relations with you so that you would be respected as a member of a valued and respected set of relations and not just this individual over here. So one of my concerns as we walk out into the world with restorative justice is that we continue to institutionalize it in places without letting this mother and her son come and be a part of designing a process of where's my son going to live on this campus if he lives here. Then it seems to me we risk continuing to criminalize the same institutions that we want and we end up with having band-aid solutions and then digging down to say what are the real causes of the causes here that we need to be getting at and they always invariably lead us back to misogyny, they lead us back to racial issues, they lead us back to inequality around economics and as we understand now in child protection and domestic violence that the people who are served best often are the ones who could call a lawyer and get them involved if they had to. So the question then becomes how do we realize our rhetoric, and it's been talked about for a long time, how do we really fully realize this rhetoric that the affected constituencies should be involved from the get-go in helping to define what's the problem, what's the design, what's the implementation and be involved in the evaluation of it. And just got to see two brilliant examples of that here in Nova Scotia having been invited along to the Friday meeting where these wonderful people who lived in that home were commissioned to design and supported to design and carry out this process and of course the other was happily being able to be on the international consultation group for the process that Jennifer and her colleagues led at the dentistry school. Those have been two such valuable educational processes to me. So I'm going to ask you to do something, truth questions. I'm going to ask you to think relationally and put a question to you. Who's not here today? Who are the first people in your lives? They're going to ask you what happened at that conference? How did it go? Who really care about you realizing your hopes and potentials for this conference and this effort? Those are, it seems to me, the ones outside our workplaces and systems that we first turned to. Mimi Kim, here's another stolen piece of intellectual property that I'm about to do here. Mimi Kim once recently fired off a statement at a conference in Toronto that said, you know, that the first responders, I'm paraphrasing here, Mimi, help me out here, the first responders to violence are friends, family, clergy, the people there. Why aren't we going out and helping them get educated, giving them the resources and the tools they need to help be a part of that? Why aren't families and child protection, why aren't we buffing up the image of child protection services by helping the people who are involved, the constituencies, be on the front end to help design child death inquiries, to be the first ones who we ask about how should we go about this? Second question is, I'm going to ask you to think about what ongoing processes in your places of work and in your communities that aren't very restorative or maybe think of a place where you used to work or go to school or shop that wasn't very restorative and you walk back there after being away for a while, this is the miracle question, of course somewhere you'll recognize it, what are the first things you'd notice about that place if they had transformed themselves into a restorative workplace, library, shopping mark or something, what are the first things you'd expect you might notice and what information could you give them that might get them started thinking differently about it right now and what are the processes in your own workplaces that you might say, what if we sat down and designed a restorative process who'd have to be involved and let's make good on this rhetoric? This is not a new idea to have workplaces that involve people in planning and designing the work. Restorative justice has the possibility of making that real in ways that we've never seen before. Thank you.