There's some caution that needs to be employed on the argument that an increase in the charitable tax credit won't increase giving. If one follows the logic of that argument too much, one might be tempted to say, let's remove the tax credit altogether. I'm rather curious what 80,000 charities would say to that.
There is the matter of the law of diminishing returns, which happens with charitable giving. I do not know of any research out there that illustrates that we are at the peak of the law of diminishing returns, but let's understand why we're doing the charitable tax credit increase.
We are not doing it because we want to find a whole bunch of other people to be able to give. Remember, for those who give already, there's a lot of room to give. The amount that Canadians give is not a huge amount. There's lots of potential to give more. The strategy—and it's a different strategy than the stretch credit—is to shore up this civic core, which is so critical to our community, allowing us some time to answer the bigger questions.
My suspicion is that the government's tax expenditure numbers are going to increasingly go down, not up, even with a benefit.