Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
First, there are a great many charities in Canada that provide exceptional service, above and beyond, to the Canadian public. I represent donors.
I work for a society with charitable status in Vancouver called SUCCESS. Our 400 dedicated employees will tell you that they are committed to the good of our community. We operate dozens of programs that are not-for-profit. As a senior manager with eight years of experience, I earn $60,000 a year—comfortable by many standards. For the most part, my colleagues and I work for SUCCESS because we like the work and the 180,327 clients we served in 14 languages in 2009.
At the airport on the way here, I ran into my ex-CEO, who had just retired two weeks ago, Tung Chan. He candidly told me he made $110,000 to manage our $40 million society. He said there is a trend to find experienced CEOs who have retired and who are willing to give something back to the community. He felt transparency was paramount and expected.
Transparency is needed with charities. The vast majority of charities fear nothing from openness around the percentage of contributions that go to administration. I prefer to give to charities that understand that as a middle-class person, my contributions represent a big deal to me. I want a charity that has a low administration percentage.
Corporations are obliged to give shareholders information. Why should executives of large charities have any special status? When we the people give them tax benefits, should we not get the same obligation on transparency?
A CEO friend of mine, Gordon Ross, a former adviser in President Clinton's White House committee on Internet security, told me that the general population has no idea what is going on around them because everything is filtered. In a digital age, we are told what people want us to know. I want to go back to the days when it was not filtered. I want disclosure.
As a social media networker with almost 100,000 followers, I put it out to my followers for their opinions on transparency. I have a word-of-mouth influential reach of just over 6.7 million, according to a website called “gripe”. In the space of an hour, I received just under 1,000 messages. The first messages were adamantly against my criticism of CEOs, mainly commenting that good mainstream people needed high compensation. Over 900 messages were against these salaries and wanted transparency.
I run a business blog, so when I switched to promoting this bill on my blog, I did not anticipate the results and fervour of my roughly 5,000 readers per month. While many bloggers with my numbers may expect three to four people to respond to their writings, on my first blog on “excessive charity salaries and transparency”, April 14, 2010, I received 129 comments. The numbers are roughly 50 to 60 times the usual average of responses. Nearly all support Bill C-470, transparency, and salary cap.
I insist that, as important as it is that there is a cap on the size of salaries, transparency is fundamental for me to make an informed determination whether I will contribute to make the world a better place through donations. However, it must be my choice.
Thank you.