I'm going to highlight a few things that are in the presentation that was handed out to everybody.
I want to clarify that this is information from tax filer data. We have information on the person who reported the donation, who is not necessarily the person who made the donation, because families can pool their donations. In addition, individuals may keep their donations up to five years to pool and maximize the tax advantage.
If you want to follow along, slide 2 shows the key findings in 2010. One in five tax filers reported making charitable donations on their tax return--almost six million individuals--for a total of $8.3 billion. The median donation for Canadians was $260. I realize we're from Statistics Canada and we have to describe the statistics a bit, so the median is a number halfway through the distribution, meaning that 50% of the population have numbers lower than that median and 50% have numbers that are higher. For things like income-related tax donations, it's important to look at the median, because the average is often skewed by very high donations that are fairly infrequent.
Slide 4 shows that the total charitable donations in constant dollars since 1990 has almost doubled in the last 20 years. The figures have been adjusted so they're comparable over time. Total donations peaked in 2006-07 at about $9 billion. They decreased in 2008-09, coinciding with the recession, but we did see an increase in total donations in 2010.
Next is slide 5. It's not surprising that the proportion of donors is increasing as donors get older. Looking at this graph, you can see that 5% of tax filers under 25 reported charitable donations, but when you look at older tax filers between 55 and 64, approximately 31% reported donations. As well, as income goes up, so does the percentage of donors: just 4% of individual tax filers with incomes under $20,000 reported donations, versus 57% of filers with incomes of more than $80,000.
Looking at the picture of total donations on slide 7, we see that 80% of total donations are given by donors 45 years of age and older. We've given you a bar chart showing that 3% of donors are under 25 and account for about 1% of all total donations. It's still approximately $68 million. However, the 24% of donors who are 65 and older account for 33% of total donations, or about $2.7 billion.
Moving to slide 8, you can see that half of the total donations are given by donors with incomes over $80,000 a year. Again we're looking at individual information. Donors with incomes of less than $20,000 make up 6% of donors and 3% of total donations. While those donors with incomes of $80,000 or more make up 25% of donors, they make over 50% of all donations.
I also want to highlight the data on donations at the provincial-territorial level. The median donation varies quite a bit by province. I'm looking at slide 9, which is the last presentation in the deck. You'll notice that the median donation for Quebec is markedly lower than for the other provinces and territories. This is a trend that has been observed over time. As mentioned earlier, median donation for Canada in 2010 was $260. Nunavut had the highest median donation at $470, followed by Alberta at $390. Those are median donations by individuals in those provinces and territories. Quebec filers had a median donation of $130.
That was a brief highlight of some of the statistics in the presentation.
That ends our presentation. Thank you very much.