Thank you very much. Good evening. On behalf of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, or AFP, I want to thank the Standing Committee on Finance for allowing us to speak today during the pre-budget consultations and follow up our submission of August 15. We want to thank the committee as well for its support of the elimination of capital gains tax on gifts of securities to charity and for extending that charitable-giving incentive to private foundations in the 2008 budget. We're grateful for that leadership.
Just to give you some quick background, AFP is the largest community of fundraisers in the world, representing more than 29,000 individuals internationally and nearly 3,000 across Canada, with a network of 16 active chapters. Our sector represents education, health care training, social services--everything that really strengthens our society and creates a favourable environment for business in fact. The non-profit sector comprises more than 160,000 organizations, of which approximately 80,000 are registered charities with more than $100 billion in annual revenue.
These organizations are devoted to strengthening factors such as workforce infrastructure and cultural initiatives, on which our country's economic future is based and which make our communities healthy and vibrant for all. Proposals that increase the capacity of charities to provide these programs are critical, and gifts of stock to charity are now completely exempt from the capital gains tax, but stock is just one of the two most common ways Canadians have and accumulate wealth. The other is land and real estate.
I should say that I'm here with my volunteer hat on, which is as chair of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Canadian government relations committee, but it's from my day job as vice-president, development, at York University Foundation in Toronto that I can speak from personal experience. The impact of the change on capital gains tax for securities has been significant. We have seen more than a doubling in a year of our gifts of securities to York University. Many other organizations are seeing this same growth, not only in number but across all levels, from $2,000 up to $2 million, quite literally, in a year.
We also have donors, though, asking about gifts of land and wanting to explore that opportunity. In some cases, it's related to research that could take place at York, and therefore it would be land that York would hold onto, but in other cases, it's simply that donors wish to consider a gift from assets rather than income.
So the very same kinds of principles and incentives involved in gifts of securities apply to gifts of land and real estate, and unfortunately, the same kinds of barriers and obstacles that used to apply to gifts of securities still apply to gifts of land and real estate. Given the evidence from our experience with gifts of securities, AFP does not believe that any trial period is needed for eliminating the capital gains tax on gifts of land and real estate to charitable organizations. The ecological gifts program, under which gifts of ecologically sensitive land are donated to the government or a charity and are exempt from capital gains tax, provides a model that could be expanded to any land given to any type of charity, subject of course to proper valuation.
Really, that is our key recommendation, and we welcome comments and questions.