 It's something remarkable about having a panel of two law professors come and tell you it's all about principles. And I think we should dwell on that at some point. I'm here both laughing about maybe it's because we're only sort of fit at the law school, but increasingly so. So it's really exciting for me to have a chance to be part of this discussion and to be an initial part of a discussion that you will be having in your dialogue groups. And as we look to all that's before us and all the opportunities that you were talking about this morning and the challenges for restorative justice, I think one of those challenges is the question laid before us this morning by Mr. Paragot. There will be lots of people looking to ask us questions about what we do and to seek to understand and how do we make that understanding a deep and non-surface. So I literally was laughing this morning. I got in the taxi cab to come here and he said, So why don't you work there? I'm like, no. What are you doing today? I'm at the conference. What's the conference about? And here we go. It's about restorative justice and I swear to you, you said to me, so how do you define that? Funny you should ask, really. So that poor cab driver must be feeling bad for him at this point. But I do confess to him that I don't have an elevator pitch, really. And I think you know as a community that the elevator pitch on restorative justice has always been a challenge. I don't think it's just because I lived for a long time in Halifax and you may have noticed we don't have a lot of tall skyscrapers. So maybe my elevator is not long enough. I haven't even worked at the cab ride pitch yet and that's longer. And I think there's good reason that we shouldn't be really seeking to solve this marketing dilemma with an elevator pitch. It's just a reason to be wary, I think, of the elevator pitch. But there's also good reason to realize that what the elevator pitch is trying to do is to make it understandable, to make it recognizable. In the process, one of the risks, I think, is that we end up spinning RJ in terms that are familiar to the existing system. Why? Well, because we want to sell people something they want to buy or they could at least recognize enough to not get off the elevator. We want to meet their expectations of a justice. We want some kind of a hook. And yet we find ourselves with those expectations having to be created by systems that are quite fundamentally different. So you know these arguments we find up in, these initial like, it's not sir, so it's really painful. And then we're like, actually that's the best thing that we want to encourage. But then we get really scared by the process. Processes look like people think they could come to us to exact pain. Or we explain what it looks like in the hopes of that slide says sometimes it's easier to see than to say. So we try to describe what it looks like to help people grasp it. We say, well, it's about sitting in circles. Or we ask questions. We ask, we don't tell. We bring people together to talk. All these things are true. But they lead us a little bit, I think, to this picture that people have. And people within the restorative justice movement, but mostly, you know, that our restorative approach is really just a set of tools. It's about the practices. It's about the how to organize the furniture, what question parts to use, what posture to put on the wall, who gets invited, what's your checklist. It's one tool among many tools in terms of approaching what we do. So we do things differently, but we don't really address the issue that we actually are fundamentally doing something different, which is why we do it differently. We do use different tools and different practices and different processes. They are shown up in our systems, in this conference, but we do them for a reason. And it's not simply a practice. So if that fails, then we tell stories. So this camera even says, if they don't like a proposal, we'll show them a kitten. Everybody likes kittens. And I think human stories are our most powerful way of communicating, because they reach people in their head. There's no accident that things that go viral on every social media we have are often those stories about people and baby kittens, but the things that people can connect to on a range of levels, which is telling us something really important about the way that human beings learn and think and change. So I don't need to diminish those good news stories. I do mean to say, though, that if that's the only way that we have of trying to get people to understand that deeper impact about our restorative approach, that we do risk this risk of good news stories. We risk the fact that it is unbelievable for people that this happens. There is a translation problem. Even when they want to believe it, they think it's unique to that set of circumstances or for those special people are happened there but couldn't happen here. Or this is a special kumbaya thing that they are as suspicious of as they are of a cult, because it feels about as accessible to them. What do I have to drink in the Kool-Aid in order to put money in this as possible? So I think perhaps even more than ever we need to tackle this problem. We need to tackle it in a way that doesn't feed into these frustrations and have the caricatures of the restorative approach being about all talk, no action, everybody cutting in past the Kleenex. We want people to be able to see the difference that restorative justice makes. And we know that they do when they experience it. The Imperial evidence tells us that people's satisfaction, people's belief in this has actually changed if they have an experience of the process. Man, that is a slow way to change hearts' minds in public policy. And maybe it's that those ways of interacting, those ways of working need to show up more often than everything we do and not just inviting people to the conferences or the circle processes in the community or also doing it. So maybe it's gatherings like this, maybe it's disrupting other ways in which we work for public policy change so that people can experience that. But I think we also need some way to talk about it and help people process and understand what it is they're seeing. We don't want people to just take away the models, the ways of working, right? We want them to understand why we work in this way. We want them to be able to take away and think, why is what I'm seeing an experiencing injustice just as relevant to securing just relationships in schools and in workplaces? And the thing that's transferable is not the way we arrange the furniture. So we need I think more than ever at this point, at this juncture to be able to talk to one another about our work and also to be able to critically assess when we're being our best, where we can grow and where we can learn from one another in a way that does more than just share our practice models with one another and really gets behind that to what's underlying that. I think that fits the scope of encouraging us to do this morning. We're going to do that. We need to be clear about what this restorative approach to justice is. And I think it's fundamentally a different way of understanding justice first and foremost. And I know that some of you, even in your circles, begin to talk about this. You may be familiar with Simon Sinek. If you're not, he has a good TED talk and a book called Starting with Why and how about your other resource materials so you can Google them. In this case, I think he's helpful. He has this idea and he admits it's a simple idea, admits it's not actually his in terms of the importance of principle-oriented work, but he does make this interesting observation about our modern ways of doing things, explaining things, pitching things to people. And he says organizations and people tend to work from the outside of this circle, which he calls the Golden Circle, in when explaining things. So we tell people what we do. We do restorative justice or conferencing or victim of any mediation. Sometimes we get to the next layer where we get to tell them how we do it. We ask questions. We facilitate dialogue. We bring people into encounter processes. But we almost never get, this is where the elevator gets too short, where people's intentions can't withstand the enthusiasm of which you are describing what you think to them. We also never tell people why or what we believe. What should you tell people to see the value in these processes or practices or programs? What could help them believe this is worth doing for my work? So Seneca's big one that he repeats is that people don't buy what you do. They buy why you're doing it. So he says all great inspirational leaders and companies work from the inside of that circle. So they start with the why. I don't think that we're selling. I don't think we should not try to sell or do it. But I do think that we want to transform people's thinking about justice so that we can work differently. And we have to stop telling them what we do or stop only telling them what we do to compel them or convince them but instead to explain to them why we see the need to do these things in different ways. And then we need to hold ourselves to account for why we do things as well. So what does this mean for restorative justice? Why don't I think we do it? I think we do it because we believe that justice is fundamentally about just relationships. I think that this belief is rooted in a concept of a world, of who we are, some beings, about what we need from one another, a fundamental commitment to this idea that we are relational, we can and through relationships with others, not just because that's how we organize the world but because, in fact, we couldn't do differently. That is how we exist. And it's a story told in every medical science to physics, to all of the major world for religions and traditions, and most profounded for us here in Canada and elsewhere by Indigenous peoples about their relationship with one another and with the land. And I mean by this significance of relationship not just that we are interpersonal relationships with one another, right? That this is about how we get along or we get along but that this we're relational all the way down and all the way up to our institutions and our systems and our structures and how they are interconnected in ways that fashion our lives. And I don't mean by this the hallmark greeting card version of justice is that relationships are good. I think that we're acutely and painfully aware and particularly in this time of space when we're tackling the challenge of reconciliation that our relationships can be profoundly harmful profoundly negative. It can be oppressive and violent and discriminatory. Those are ways of relating too. So it isn't that relationships are good, it's that they are. And if they are, we need to make that matter profoundly to what justice requires and how we do it. And from that basis of understanding what harms us in relationship I think we can describe our ambition for restored relationships and what justice requires in just relations. And they are relationships based on respect, concern, care, and dignity. So then this restorative approach, this foundational approach becomes an umbrella approach from which we can develop practices and processes and strategies and policies. So what do we need to do that? Well I think we need principles. I don't think we need recipes but this is my acknowledgement to you the bottom says, oh my god the salad's on fire. I don't think we need recipes to be good cooks. This is my confession, I know it's a good cook. I can actually follow a recipe to cook. But if something goes wrong, then I'm stuck. But then I have to call someone who really knows how to cook who can tell me what went wrong and why it doesn't work. But I think the basic principles of cooking and of food and science found here in a foundational book that says no written recipe can be 100% accurate. The judgment of the cook is still the most important factor. A cook's judgment is based on experience and understanding of the raw materials available, the basic cooking principles, and food science. So maybe a relational theory is food science and then we have to derive principles from it. So I want to suggest to you that we need principles for practice. We need principles to guide practice and we need those principles to be those with which we can talk about what we do and guide what we do. And these may not be the only list, but I think these are some fundamental principles I want to offer you for your consideration in terms of how we guide our work. And they look a bit different than the ones we typically see for restorative processes. To involve respect, which I think is both a fundamental ambition of just relations, but also respect and honesty and volunteerness. I think those are values that we need in order to make these principles work. They are often things we describe and can actually look how to make particular practices work. So I'll say even more about how I think they fit. Principles, and we can pull any one of them apart for any amount of time, but I think these principles then will bring true out of our relational theory. So if it is about a relational approach, what does that mean? How does that show up? I think restorative processes have to be comprehensive and holistic. They can't be just about the incident. Just tell me the facts, ma'am. I don't care what happened the day before the day after. We must care what happened the day before the day after and who else was impacted and involved. We must care about the context causes and circumstances if we are to understand the harms that are experienced, the reasons they happened, and what we do about it. We must see a relationship focus. Not on one particular party. This is not about flipping the tables or the system to a victim-centered one but paying attention to the connections. And if we focus on relationships, we must work in contextual and flexible ways. We can't have the cookie cutter or the ad-water and stir process. I think we're committed to subsidiaries. I say all the time to my friends that I'm a law professor. This is how our system of government is organized. But that just means the people closest to the issue, those who have the most knowledge about the issue, are involved directly in addressing the issue and having input. So that means we need to be inclusive. But we need to be inclusive. We need to think about who's affected in a much broader way. And then when we bring them in the room, it needs to make a difference that they're there. It can't be that we're inclusive in a way. Just to take one example, the duty to consult our regional peoples is inclusive. Which is we've ticked a box and we've heard you, but we made sure it could make no difference to our decision what you said. So we need to be participatory. We need to be inclusive in radical ways. And I think that's where those values of how people show up, honesty, respect, voluntariness in a less strict sense are helpful and important. And we need to be future focused. We do care about what happened in the past. But we care about what matters about that for what happens next. So I think it's these principles of working restoratively that are going to help us explain ourselves to one another. And I think it's particularly important because if we start talking about these grounded principles and the why they are rooted in, we can find our common cause and common space with others who think the same way about the need for change and justice. And so I very much look forward to hearing that tell us about those principles that we also need to think about to bring these approaches together.