 It's good to be back again this year and to see everybody, to be among friends, old friends, new friends, some yet un-discovered friends. And to have the chance to engage with you over the next couple of days in terms of the moment in time that we have right now. And the introduction to our panel, or the question at the beginning of our panel in the next dialogue session is why is restorative justice so important right now? And I am going to reflect on the experiences we've had developing national principles and then the UN at the UN level as well. But when I answer that question for myself, I guess what I would say very quickly is that we do have a moment in time right now. And for those of us who've been around the restorative justice community for many years, there is a sense of renewed excitement and renewed opportunity to advance the work that we have toiled away at for many, many years. And I know for those who've been around a long time, there had become a period of fatigue, I would say, setting into their restorative justice community. And it's good to see that energy have returned to the community to be able to focus on the future. And having said that though, this is also a time where I think we have to invest ourselves in the heavy lifting of the next steps. And that heavy lifting is not just an exercise for elected officials and it's not just an exercise for senior government officials at the various levels. It's an exercise for the restorative justice community. This is our moment in time to translate all those lessons we've learned, all the work we've done and all the discussions we've had into something that can scale itself to a more broad spectrum, criminal justice approach that can benefit the lives of all Canadians and others. And that is a big challenge. But I believe we can rise to that occasion and that's why we've actually designed, that's why the conference organizers designed the format of the conference the way they did so that we can begin the process and continue the process of that heavy lifting here today together. So I would really encourage you to engage deeply in the conversations that we're going to have and to share your thoughts, to share your wisdom and to share your reflections. I also want to thank a number of people. I want to thank a lot of people for welcoming us here today and to be all there for the opening prayer this morning. As well as to the speakers before me, Minister Whale and Parliamentary Secretary Casey, Senator Sinclair and others. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. And I particularly before I forget I want to thank the people who planned this conference. They have planned two conferences this year, an international conference in the summer and then now this one. So by the end of tomorrow if they look a little tired, it's well deserved. So we've been extra kind to them, maybe even buy them a drink or whatever their preferences are. But thank you to Nova Scotia for being such a gracious host this year. We promise to leave you alone next year and give you a rest. You can come and be hosted by somebody else. So as you've heard, there has been some work going on at both the national and international level to renew the conversation around the principles of restorative justice. And that is a continuation of work that stems back to the early 2000s. Here in Canada and elsewhere. And at the time, and like now, the restorative justice community recognizes the importance of principles and sleeves a little bit into the next panel. But for as long as I've been around the restorative justice community, one of the almost heralding cries that you hear when you talk to people in restorative justice community is that it's all about principles. It's all about values. I'm surprised we haven't turned that into an anthem yet, but it ultimately is about values. And at our best, our values guide us. And they serve a number of benefits to us. First, they unite us. They bring us together and they give us language that allows us to be a shared community. That's what our principles do. They also explain us to people, which isn't always easy, as you all know, to bridge the gap between someone who's never heard of restorative justice and what we would like them to take away. And it's our values that people remember. And a good illustration of this is the many, many conversations I have had and you have had about accountability and what real meaningful accountability means and what it means to us in the restorative justice community. Especially when we are confronted with the perception that we're somehow soft on crime. And what real accountability needs to look like. I would say our principles also ground us. They help us remember why we do what we do and what we're trying to achieve. Because often, as we're out there doing the work, we too are like anybody else will fall into our patterns of just repeating the same process. The assembly line continues and we continue to do this work. But our values call us back. Our thought values give us a place to test ourselves and to make sure that we're hitting the right measure in terms of what we're trying to achieve. And I would say our principles also offer us a vision. And it's the fact that we have principles that allows us to extend restorative justice and the applications we currently have into brand new applications. And as being here in Nova Scotia, it's worth noting obviously the wonderful example of the events here at the dental school. And the leadership shown by this province to take restorative justice values and translate them into a context other than what would normally have happened in that circumstance. And so kudos to everyone involved in that. Our values offer us the ability to take what we do here in the criminal justice system and to extend it into all sorts of reaches. The downside of values, which often get pointed out to me when we start actually trying to write these down, is that they have the exact mirror impact as well. Our values sometimes end up dividing us and we have had some heated discussions around some of our values and how we frame them. And where the lines in restorative justice should be drawn. And we have people who talk about maximalist models and people who talk about all these different models. And we sometimes allow these to fracture our community versus pull us together. I would also say that sometimes our principles can obscure us. They make us difficult to understand sometimes. And the best example of this description of this is I heard was the fact that most of our values and principles are what they call aspirational principles. That is, they're who we hope to be someday at our best in our best moments. And that's wonderful to have that name. But they're necessarily always definitional because if you hold us to the test of our own principles sometimes you may not hold up all the time. And that's not to say that we shouldn't continue to have aspirational values, but it does sort of help create a bit of blurriness about who we are. And it takes boundaries, makes our boundaries hard to sometimes find. Sometimes our principles can leave us a little adrift as well in terms of they can be vague and big notions. And therefore we sometimes not quite sure what they mean and how to apply them. One example of this, which I think is an interesting discussion that came up recently again to me, is how willing we may or may not be to do restorative justice approaches with people under the age of 12. So people below the age of criminal responsibility. There are those among us who say absolutely not because we have the premise in Canada that there is a criminal responsibility age and therefore we shouldn't use restorative justice to expand the net. There are those who would argue though that restorative justice is about something bigger than that and bigger than community and are not our children part of our community and do they not deserve the best of our processes as well. So our principles don't always give us easy answers to these questions because we emphasize things in different ways in different places. And lastly I would simply say sometimes our values can hold us back and that is probably at sometimes a useful reticence or a useful hold back. But I think about for example the question of voluntary participation as a principle. Voluntary participation has been a very important component of what we've done here in Canada. It's a voluntary model and I would imagine most of you would stand up and champion that. But having said that, there are realities out there that even if we design a restorative justice system that we want to expand to a broader segment of things, we will have to wrestle with what voluntary means. Because people do not participate in the criminal justice system voluntarily. As you know our working conscience, I have very few people coming to me voluntarily. And the reality is we need to have a system robust enough to think through how we're going to offer a response to crime that encompasses those situations. That voluntary participation may not be there. So this can hold us back sometimes. And I believe that out there simply as a challenge and an odd as an answer obviously in terms of what we need to think about and I invite you in the conversations that come to think about these things. So as was said earlier, we have launched a consultation on a set of national principles. And this is not a brand new set of principles. These principles were actually crafted in 2003 under the leadership of David Daughey of Army and others who were fresh back from their experience at the UN. Where they had led the cause on behalf of Canada to create UN principles for restorative justice. And at the time, both of those conversations were fairly challenging conversations. At the UN level, most countries quite frankly didn't know what we were talking about. Restorative justice was a big US concept that we, you know, even here in Canada, the space of Africa 2000, most of us, if you went up to your neighborhood store and said something about restorative justice, you almost knew nobody was going to know what you were talking about. Today, thankfully that's not necessarily the case, but that was early back in 2000. And at the UN level, layered with all sorts of UN cheery, that was a difficult conversation. And most countries participated in that from their lenses. And so they were coming and trying to make sense of this new concept. And to everyone's credit, they worked through those issues and found a way to come up with a common set of principles. And since that time, lots of people have debated whether that was worth it or not. Because very few people probably didn't know there are any super restorative justice. And most of you probably don't regularly cross-reference them in terms of their activity, nor do people in other parts of the world. But what they have done is given the UN a capacity to take restorative justice out into the world. So they fund training and they do all sorts of other things to take the best of our restorative justice lesson and bring it to the world. In Canada, we had, I think, a much different conversation within the restorative justice community because at the time we were relatively still in our infancy as a community and debates about where the boundaries of restorative justice were difficult to establish. And so we ended up with a, I think, fairly good set of basic principles that Canada should be proud of. But again, I guess most of you don't regularly reference them. And that's understandable because it's a document that's meant to guide how the document has to dictate. And so one of the things the FBT committee did in my co-chair, Barbara Tomparowski, is here with me is we decided that 15 years later it's probably worth a bit of a refresh in terms of what those principles are. Not really right, but a refresh. And I have to say we launched this at last year's event and it was a good conversation but the biggest question I got in the corners then in private was, why are you doing this to us? Why are you starting these conversations over again? And in part it's because we need to make sure that we're grounded again in the principles and that the principles reflect who we are today. And so I want to invite you all to participate in that. So if you haven't already had a chance to do that, I would like you to seek out your FBT partners that are relevant to you, but also the National Reserve Justice Consortium is leading a consultation process so they're helping do some online consultation so there's lots of opportunity to participate in that. And the last experience I'll share with you is from our experience at the UN this year. So in May I was privileged to be with the Canadian team at the United Nations Prime Conference and Canada as part of its new leadership role in enthusiasm for restorative justice decided to take over resolution of restorative justice. Again, more as an update than a rewrite. So what we wanted to do is seek from the world a sense of where things had gone with restorative justice since those principles have come out. And what I'm extremely pleased to tell you is that everybody knew what restorative justice was. When we went around this time there was not a lack of understanding at all and there was no resistance to the premise of restorative justice itself. All the countries that were engaged in those discussions, everybody knew what it was and wanted to push the envelope further in terms of that's good news. It was still not an easy negotiation for one primary reason and that is Canada in this effort to continue to talk about what is just for all was fairly insistent that we had to acknowledge the impact on indigenous peoples around the country. And that is a much more challenging conversation at the international level and we spent many, many hours working through with different countries how that played out in their particular context and what we were looking to do. And without going to airing on the dirty laundry bowl of everybody that was participating that will simply let you know that we were successful. We were successful in drawing out the need to attend to the needs of Aboriginal peoples wherever they find themselves in the world. And as part of that process we are going to be, we are currently through the UN hosting a survey about what countries are doing with restorative justice and the goal is to have Canada lead an experts group from around the world including indigenous peoples to discuss the value of the principles and where we might go further with them. So the landscape has shifted in 15 years where we are on the map and in fact we are much higher on the map than we ever were before. And I come back to my earlier comments. Map means though for those of us who have toiled in this field those of us who love this work and believe in it the heavy lifting is close at the beginning. So if you're not feeling it, get ready. There'll be some stretching at the breaks, I'm sure. But we are thoroughly looking forward to having your thoughts, your wisdom and your guidance in helping us to find what we as a restorative justice community can truly offer. And I like those questions as a frame for which to start those conversations. And I guess what I would simply add to those questions is questions around our principles. So do we know what our principles are? Have we defined them well enough? What role do they play for us in terms of guiding our day to day work? How can we make sure that our principles as we write them retain the values that we intended when we wrote them? And then thirdly and probably for me most importantly how can we translate those principles into functional, scalable and reliable processes that provide a measure of consistency and confidence for Canadians who are affected by crime? If we can answer that final question, we will have done well. So thank you for your comments, thank you for the time we can spend together and I look forward to chatting with all of you.