Thank you, Mr. Rajotte and committee members, for the invitation to contribute to your deliberations.
I am going to offer you a summary of a summary of a summary, and I may end up being cryptic, but there is a lot of material in my brief. In the next several minutes I'd like to hit some high points, some main items that I'd like to encourage you to consider.
At first glance, looking at tax credits for charitable donations may have the appearance of a routine administrative matter, but beneath it lie some profound issues, such as how to encourage Canadians to be aware of and contribute directly to the collective good, and what should be the nature and size of the government's role in fostering that contribution.
While there may appear to be a considerable volume of information in my brief to the committee, I now want to speak in support of only three or four straightforward points.
Before addressing the tax credit issue, it's important to recognize that long-term trends indicate that charitable giving in Canada is changing in a number of ways. I'm not going to cover the same ground that Professor Laforest did, but there are some very important developments there that I believe have to be taken into account.
Principal among them is a softening and possibly a weakening of charitable giving. Second, the evolving patterns and flows of charitable giving may be resulting in increasing financial support going to a limited number of large charitable organizations and a diminishing, disproportionately smaller volume of financial support going to the many thousands of smaller, often local, community-oriented ones, an important consequence of changes in the charitable domain.
Increasingly, we hear references to the charity industry because it is becoming increasingly rational, seeking ever more efficiency and successful techniques of fundraising. A response to that is a growing sign of donor fatigue in reaction to aggressive fundraising.
Charitable donations to religious entities, such as churches and synagogues and related organizations, once accounting for well more than half of all charitable donations, are now less than half and in ongoing long-term decline.
Charitable giving is not a single, homogeneous, uniform phenomenon. It takes a number of forms that are quite different. Incidental and occasional or sporadic giving are the most common forms, in contrast, for example, to proactive planned giving, which is practised by a minority of Canadians but accounts for the lion's share of charitable giving every year.
Some forms of charitable giving are not likely to be responsive to increased tax credits, and analysis of Canadians' behaviour and views regarding tax credits shows this incentive to have modest effects at best. There are some hard numbers in my brief supporting that.
Yet another point is that a good portion of charitable giving—and I really want to underline this point—is strongly driven by particular values and ideals. It doesn't surprise us, but it needs underlining. This fact merits closer scrutiny in any consideration of how to strengthen charitable giving.
My final point is that encouraging and increasing charitable giving may benefit from considering other approaches in addition to changing Canada's charitable donation tax credit regime.
Thank you.