 First of all, it's an honor to spend some time with you and to do so on traditional land territory. It'll take long to see you, to see you, to see you, or to see you. This is a wonderful opportunity for us to come together. I've been sporadically part of this community for a long period of time. I recognize the wisdom that exists in this room already from a level of experience. I'm just blown away by the depth of knowledge and the understanding and the empathy that exists in the small group that I'm the blue-dark group that I'm a part of. I've been asked to do this strange thing that's a little different from other folks, I think, and I'm invited to connect for a story of justice to what else is happening in the wider world of public policy and perhaps politics and our personal lives. I have many friends here who I only get to see every so often, because I was a hardcore restorative justice person for a long period of time. And I, as Barbara said, was involved in the development of the Nova Scotia program. I went to Audubon as the point person in the establishment of the Human Justice Act or story of components of that. But I left all of that and I came back to Nova Scotia. And when I meet my friends in the halls here, they politely first ask, What are you doing? And that's really translated for us Maritimers who can see through their eyes to what's gotten into you? Or, you know, what are you smoking in the things that you've done? So I'd just like to share with you a few thoughts with the slides that are in front of us and we'll get loaded into any moment now. In 2002 I left my work in restorative justice, the passion of my life to become involved in politics. I did so because I had been reading about the challenges that my clients had when I was a defense lawyer. And so many people across Canada had in their daily lives. What I realized is that, with the exception of the North, those of my communities back in Atlanta, Canada, were the ones that were suffering most. And I cared a great deal about the future, but I had never in my life imagined that I'd get involved in politics. I'd never been involved in politics before. I'd never attended a political meeting in my life. And I thought I could come back and be the premier of another scholarship. So I left my family and I came back and I wish at the time that I had seen this slide beforehand. Because this is a slide that comes from Don Linehan's what I call, Rescuing Policy and Case for Public Engagement. And it shows in the United States and Canada the steady decline of public confidence in government across both sides of the board. And you'll see this precipitous decline has resulted in people having less faith in institutions generally and recognizing that governments have a limited ability to actually affect change. I was 30 days away from being the premier of the province. I became the leader of one political party here in Nova Scotia. We had a close election in 2003. But what I realized in the 30 days beforehand was that most of the things that I cared most deeply about I wasn't going to be able to do if I became the premier. So my imagination as somebody in the restorative justice world was so many of the challenges that we face are a product of other systems and other challenges that we need to fix and you can only fix them if you become the premier of a province. But I realized after being in politics for a short period of time that even being the premier of a province doesn't allow you to make the differences that you make. This is a slide that I created in relation to a report that I helped write in Nova Scotia that responded to something for Nova Scotians who recognized the notion of the Ivanan Report. I was one of the people who wrote the follow-up report to that call We Choose Now. And fundamentally what it's meant to represent is that the narrative that we hear about the challenges that we face economically and demographically are tied deeply to the work that happens around the social capital, the soil work that we need to involve ourselves in. So the things that mattered most to me if I was going to be premier of the province of democratic renewal and civic engagement and those sorts of things weren't even on the lips of Nova Scotians. And so I was asked again what he was smoking when I started to talk about those systemic changes that we need to come to to change the narrative of what we're doing here as a Nova Scotia. So this slide to consider the work in the soil represents the work that I've been doing for the last 10 years since I've been out of politics. I've been part of organizations that are looking to ignite a culture of civic engagement first with an organization called Envision Halifax and more recently with an organization called Engaged Nova Scotia. So Engaged Nova Scotia is a coalition of citizens that are working across sectors to sort of help try to make a difference. It's partly funded by government and it's partly funded by the private sector. We were buoyed recently when we did some research and you probably aren't able to read that especially if you're at the back of the room. We asked a thousand Nova Scotians who was the group considered most credible in leading change in Nova Scotia and we gave them all of these options. It included, of course, elected officials at 3%, non-profit groups at 4%, government departments at 4%, universities, the private sector at 9% is the second highest but by far, across all demographics in all regions, what Nova Scotians told us was that it was an association in which all of the sectors work together that we are most able that we're going to be most able to bring about this change. This was relevant to this discussion that Lisa McDowell brought up in our Blue Dot group this morning when she said, should we be proud of government and restorative justice or should we be independent of the middle ground? I believe that there is middle ground. I believe that there are many ways that we can begin to go about making the differences that we want. So, our aspiration at Engaged Nova Scotia is for more of us to see our challenges and our opportunities and the hurdles in front of us and for more of us to step up to improve our quality of life and if we're going to do that then we need to do so more collaboratively, more adaptively and more inclusively. We do dozens of things in the run of the year and I just want to share with you two of those things that may give you these thoughts. One, of course, if we're going to do this we need to begin with our first people and so in November of last year we brought together a conversation that we called a new partnership in collaboration with many others and most importantly, treaty education of the Big Mon which is a representative group of the Big Mon community and we had a conversation here at the Health Fact Central Library that included the National Chief and former Prime Minister Palmer in a conversation that was collaborative amongst the people who were present and we said, who are we as Nova Scotians together? What are our differences and what is our shared future? How can we move together as a whole? We're going to make differences in our justice system we need to invite more Nova Scotians into more Canadians into the conversations about who are we together? What is our shared narrative? And later today I will be lucky enough to be at Pier 21 where our organization these are just samples of the kinds of things that we're looking to do. We are hosting a supper occasion called Share Thanksgiving some of you from Nova Scotia would recognize it because it matches Nova Scotians with newcomers over a Thanksgiving meal we've set a new bar across Canada for the number of families that we matched but because the Syrian families that have come here this year numbered in the numbers of eight or nine we couldn't match them with people so we put out a call to those Syrian families we ended up this evening will be with 250 of them and we said, are you interested in still having the experience that other people, other newcomers had we want to find a way to bridge the gap of government relationship and we asked, Nova Scotians are you ready to be in relationship at supper tables with them and so 150 Nova Scotia host families are going to be sitting and breaking break with them this evening to have the same conversation to begin with how does it relate to restorative approaches how does it relate to restorative seems to me that through all of time we have been coming together around fires in Town Hall squares in church basements and in circles asking and answering the question of what does it mean to be your brother and sisters keeper what does it mean to love each other at no time in my life has it been more imperative for us to go deep on this question and to understand in a world that is more fractured than it's ever been in our generation answer the question of what does it mean to be in relationship with each other we are seeing fractures all over the world that threaten to take us apart it feels very much like a fork in the road and we will take the right fork in the road if we dig deep on the best of the human condition and we see in ourselves the possibility that the Syrians and with our first people and with the people who are incarcerated and so many others in this country in our communities we can find ways to build relationships that can be an example to the world and be the model for our children thanks very much