Finance committee  Thank you for that. Paul Reed worked with Cardus on our culture of generosity study, which you may have seen, and we are about to release a study with Paul on planned giving and the nature of planned giving, and we'll tackle some of those issues. I look forward to submitting tha

Finance committee  I guess the concern would be what institution would make those judgment calls? I'm imagining in this case you would think it would be the Government of Canada. That would be a fearful thing to me.

Finance committee  I would love to be able to help answer that question. It's interesting—this question came up in the discussions with HRSDC on their interest in increasingly leveraging the social service organizations that they're part of so that the percentages would be stronger, based on that

Finance committee  I would go back to your assumption that it doesn't incent. Where do you get that assumption, if I may respectfully challenge you, Mr. Chair, on the assumption that it doesn't incent? Every time we go out—

Finance committee  Our experience, as we talk to charities across the country, is that as the charitable tax credit goes up, people see they have more room in their disposable income to give, they're passionate about what they're going to give to, and they will. There is maybe a question of leakag

Finance committee  There's some caution that needs to be employed on the argument that an increase in the charitable tax credit won't increase giving. If one follows the logic of that argument too much, one might be tempted to say, let's remove the tax credit altogether. I'm rather curious what 80,

Finance committee  If you observe over the last 40 years a lot of the conversation about the problems we're facing or the challenges we're dealing with, we've defaulted to fewer and fewer institutions to solve the problems of those challenges. If you're on the right, you kind of default to the mark

Finance committee  The question you're getting at is the question of leverage. The Globe and Mail recently did some great research on this. I encourage you to look at it. They estimated that for all charities, except for your big universities—so taking out universities and hospitals, etc.—43% of th

Finance committee  This is fascinating. If you look at the tax expenditure lines from 2005 to 2011 as they're published by your government, and then jump onto David Foot's website and take a look, you'll see that David has a demographic bubble transition—this year, this year, this year, and this ye

Finance committee  That's correct.

Finance committee  Thank you. It's an extremely difficult question, and that's why, in our proposal, Cardus argues for change in the charitable tax credit. But along with that is a whole new debate about what it is to give and care for your neighbour, because the tax credit is really an interim m

Finance committee  I think there may be two things to assist you in this kind of consideration. Number one is the investigation of existing research to actually illustrate that a tax strategy is the best tool to attract new donors into the charitable world. At Cardus, we don't know of any solid o

Finance committee  The great issue of our day is whether we can order our world with flourishing institutions apart from governments and the markets. This is the very key question behind the very taxing issue facing this committee. The future of charitable giving and the vibrancy of the charitable

Finance committee  Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Michael Van Pelt, and I'm president of Cardus. I'm with my colleague, Ray Pennings, who is a Cardus senior fellow and director of our research. I appreciate the opportunity to appear in front of you today. Cardus is a Canadian think