Thank you, Chair.
Thank you all for appearing before us here this afternoon.
I want to go in another direction. We had a witness here last week, Dr. Paul Reed, who told the committee in his brief, and I quote:
One of the dominant reasons Canadians give for not contributing, or not contributing more, to charitable organizations is that they already support the provision of community and social services through already paying considerable, and rising taxes.
I'm curious. We've endeavoured, as a government, to partner up in areas like CIDA, when there was a need. I'm going to take this back to the community, but abroad, which is much of the charitable giving that all of your organizations are involved in, we have found it very popular, and when the government makes the request or gives the challenge, Canadians respond favourably. I would suspect—and I think you would all agree too—that taxes are levied and we really have no say. With charitable giving, now we have a choice about where we are going to put our money.
I wonder if maybe you, Mr. Bussey, could first tell the committee how important those types of endeavours are, and then maybe, if you've ever thought about how we could expand that to the community—say we do a lot of social housing and we could start to partner up, much as we do with NGOs in other countries.
I'll start with you, Mr. Bussey.