Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail recently featured this article on social enterprise, titled “Marry business and charity, Martin says”. Apparently, after 12 years of inaction in this area as finance minister, our former Prime Minister – the Rt. Honourable Paul Martin – is finally sold on the promise of social enterprise. The article falls in the typical traps of recent media coverage on the subject: it extols the potential of social enterprise and explains how public policy could better support hybrid organizations, but rarely questions whether ‘marrying business and charity’ itself is necessarily a good thing…

Martin’s speech, titled “Unleashing the Power of Social Enterprise”, is taking place, as I type, at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Event details are here, if any of you readers from the 416 area are interested.