Over the past year especially, we have witnessed the notion of a separate Canadian legal structure for social enterprise taking root.

The concept is included in one of the key recommendations of the Canadian Task Force on Social Finance, and an alternative legal structure in Ontario was indeed proposed in a SiG@MaRS white paper last year. International legal structures for social enterprise are highlighted as best practices in the Mowat Centre’s 2011 groundbreaking paper on strengthening the community-based sector, the provincial governments of British Columbia and Nova Scotia are exploring related possibilities, and just a few weeks ago, MaRS posted an exciting job opening for leadership in B Corporation business development.

Recently, in a project led by Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Sustainable Community Development, we at the BC Centre for Social Enterprise had the pleasure of supporting a Canada-wide poll of the social enterprise sector. The survey asked community-based social enterprise operators, and thought leaders on the topic, whether they perceived a need for a separate Canadian legal structure for social enterprise, and if so, what characteristics such a structure should contain.

Although many folks were approached, our final sample consisted of 20 social enterprise operators, and seven thought leaders. These low numbers were partly linked to perhaps our most significant discovery: that most social enterprise operators tend to be unaware of why their own structure was chosen in the first place... and what the benefits and potential barriers of that particular structure are. This flags a need for more education of the sector about what may seem to most ... a very ‘unsexy’ topic!

Despite the generally low levels of awareness of social enterprise legal structures that were encountered, we found that those who did participate in the survey were able to convincingly articulate both pro’s and con’s for the introduction of a new structure. Those responses naturally clustered around these themes:

    •    Definition
    •    Innovation
    •    Finance
    •    Government
    •    System abuse

Details of the findings, and recommendations for next steps are included in the full paper, entitled Social Enterprise Legal Structure: Options and Prospects for a ‘Made in Canada’ Solution (PDF).

Special thanks go to SFU’s Sean Markey, and the funder of the project: the Institute for Nonprofit Studies at Mount Royal University.

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