Canada – A nation of misers
Opinion
Miser = a person who hoards money or possessions, often living miserably
General Social Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating
?https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-652-x/89-652-x2015001-eng.htm
Generosity in Canada and the United States: The 2017 Generosity Index
by C. Lacombe
When a flood of articles started flashing through my inbox in late November early December about how miserly Canadians are becoming, I took note.
Farming Smarter became a registered Canadian charity in 2015. Since then, we’ve been looking for ways generate funds for the benefit of our cause. So far, we can’t seem to come up with a way to get people to think of us as a charity. Even when we promote the ATBCares donation button that adds 15% to every donation. That’s $1 from ATB for every $6.65 you donate to us!
Many of the articles quoted statistics from the Fraser Institute’s Generosity in Canada and the United States: The 2017 Generosity Index that makes Canadians look very bad compared to our southern neighbors.
But more troubling and relevant is that it also shows a trend of declining donations all over Canada and to every type of charity particularly when taken in conjunction with the General Social Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating survey by Stats Can.
Apparently, we’re not only giving less money, we’re also giving less time.
When it comes to volunteer time, it looks as though we’re developing a society where only the pre-career young and post-career elderly have time to volunteer. Today, every household needs two career incomes to make ends meet. If you really want to live the life promised by 1960s parents, you need two wage earners per household earning well above minimum wage.
We also started making high school kids volunteer as a requirement for graduation. This might be back-firing on us as they are not continuing the practice after they graduate. Maybe, MAKING someone do something isn’t the best way to foster life-long commitment to a cause.
We also seem to have a culture that disparages doing something without getting paid. The only growth in hours volunteered takes place in the senior citizen cohort. The people now over 65 come from a different culture than the people who are currently 35.
When it comes to giving money, the trend seems to be senior men giving large sums of money; which makes me think they’re looking for a legacy. (BTW, Farming Smarter would be an excellent legacy. Just saying). We had some glaring examples of this in southern Alberta. Did you hear of the $2 million donation to Olds College or the $5 million to Lethbridge post-secondary? That’s a number that will skew the statistics considering a typical Canadian donor average is around $2,581 annually!
The Stats Can survey shows that senior citizens tend to support religious, health and hospital charities; which probably reflects on life stage. According to the Stats Can report, 40% of donations in 2013 went to religious organizations. These trends make the big donors even more important when the top 10% of donors make 84% of all monetary donations.
I don’t like the thought that Canadians are becoming miserly and that it might be something in our culture that is accelerating the downward spiral to a nation of Scrooges. It seems to pile on a growing discomfort I have about Canada becoming a Me First society.
As someone that works in the non-profit sector, I’ve noticed increasingly that poorly funded organizations take on work that people expect SOMEONE does. Such as manage provincial water resources, do provincial agricultural research or educate our children. Most citizens figure that the proverbial, ill-defined They take care of these necessities without charity organizations. I mean really, when I say charity, what do you think of as charitable causes? Poverty, hunger, medical research and foreign aid, but not caring for our provincial environment or investigating best management practices for food production.
Here’s what I’ve seen over that past 20 years. More and more of the information Albertans need to take care of our environment, food production and social institutions falls into the lap of underfunded organizations that most people don’t know exist. Industry is all over the research and development of new products to meet challenges, but they are motivated by profit (as business must be).
Most non-profits begin as a small group of local people that see a need in their community and create a plan to address it. Often it is something that requires money to do, but nothing to sell. Some of these grow into larger organizations and some become charities. If Albertans (& Canadians) want someone conducting unbiased research without industry influence (read cash), they need to change something. The public either needs to accept higher taxes and lobby the government to do the necessary research or they need to start donating to organizations that look after water, food and social policy.
But if everyone is struggling to survive, that doesn’t bode well for charity or for that matter Canadians. According to Statistics Canada, for every dollar of income a Canadian earns, they have $1.68 in debt. Maybe we’re not miserly; we’re just poor!
I think another reason this decline in charitable giving struck a nerve for me is because it seems our society is becoming less kind over all. I fear Canada is becoming less kind, less generous and less polite and I don’t like it.
Y’all need to make me feel better by donating to Farming Smarter NOW.
Farming Smarter, Communication Director
6 年This morning I found an article that seems to offer some hope that Canadians still give. https://bit.ly/2GvzJXA
Owner at Grants Plants
6 年Way too much government at every level. I believe most charities are born of poor governance and there is a lack of efficiency in those charities. I have chosen my 2 charities and enjoy donating both time and money. I was raised on a farm where we were taught to help those that are willing to help themselves, avoiding those who are habitually needy.