I am going to start.
I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you.
I'm Sylvie Michaud. I'm the director general of the education, labour, and income statistics branch within Statistics Canada. With me I have Alison Hale, the director of the income statistics division. She'll go through a few of the highlights in the presentation.
I just want to give you a bit of background or a caveat on the information we'll provide. The statistics that we have on charitable donations and that are being presented today are based on tax filer data from the Canada Revenue Agency. The most recent data available are for 2010 and were released in December 2011.
The statistics are based on a preliminary file containing approximately 96% of all tax filers. We receive the file at the end of August and we use it to produce our statistics each year.
While Canadians contribute in many ways to charitable organizations, we cover just what is reported on the tax file in terms of charitable donations.
To have a more complete picture of charitable donations at all, we have a survey called the “Canadian Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating”. That survey will be released in the spring. If you're interested at that time, it provides extra information on charitable donations, such as who's giving and to what kinds of organizations and that kind of information. That's not part of the deck today; however, Alison will go over a few of the highlights from what we released in 2011.