Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The crisis unfolding in Pakistan is a humanitarian catastrophe. GlobalMedic has teams on the ground installing water purification systems in villages, providing essential medicines to field hospitals to treat patients, distributing food rations, and providing thousands of families with family emergency kits that include a point-of-use water purification unit to ensure those families have access to clean drinking water.
Unfortunately, the Government of Canada has implemented a policy that actually hurts the humanitarian sector and, by default, it hurts the very people we as a sector are trying to help. The government has a policy of matching funds raised by humanitarian charities. The idea is to encourage Canadians to give by doubling their impact. Historically, the policy matched the funds raised by all responding agencies and created a pool of those funds, which the government then programmed.
A few years ago, the government changed course and started appointing only one charity to be the matched partner. Matching funds given to only one entity actually come at the expense of the other charities in the sector. We know this because we receive calls and emails from donors who do not donate to us when they hear that the funds will not be matched. These are individuals who have previously donated to us and our organization, and because of this policy we lose their support.
The crisis in Pakistan is so large that we need a widespread approach. The policy hurts the broader sector that is responding and trying to help, and thereby hurts the very people who have been affected by the floods. This policy needs to be changed. It also leads to a few questions that should be answered.
First, to a charity, a donor is like a customer. In this scenario, the government is using the force of its power to incentivize donors to give to certain charities at the expense of others. Would the government ever provide a free matching airline ticket to customers buying on Air Canada but not WestJet? Would they provide a free cellphone to someone who bought a cellphone from Bell but not Telus or Rogers? Of course not. The policy actually creates an uneven playing field. The government's job is not to create monopolies.
Second, it's a very difficult time for the charitable sector, and a policy like this hurts smaller charities. Thus far, only three entities have been given the matched funding: the Red Cross, UNICEF and the Humanitarian Coalition. To be clear, I am not disparaging the agencies. I'm calling out a bad policy.
These entities are all large and have lobbyists. The public needs to understand if lobbying occurred to make this policy change. If it did, was the lobbying done fairly and appropriately? Was it declared? Was there broader sector consultation? You should know that $157 million of funding has moved towards these three agencies in the past five years because of this policy. Now listen, if no lobbying occurred and the government chose to make an arbitrary decision, why was this done? Where was the broader sector consultation?
Third, members of the Humanitarian Coalition make a contribution annually so the coalition can operate. The members tend to be larger agencies, and the current requirement sets the bar at $10 million. It's hard to imagine that our government would allow a program to exist whereby a charity would have to pay to join a group in order to access government funds. Pay-for-access programs are not appropriate.
The last point I want to raise is that I've spoken to other members in the charitable sector—other leaders—and they share the concerns I'm bringing to you, but they are hesitant to speak out because they are afraid of losing government funding and of how this actually may impact their professional careers. This is not a good sign for a democratic country. The Canada we live in should not have the fear of speaking truth to power and calling out a bad policy.
By incentivizing Canadians to give only to the Humanitarian Coalition, our government—the Canadian government—has hindered the ability of other agencies to help Pakistanis in their desperate moment of need. If you had kept the old policy, dozens of humanitarian agencies would be working to rally their donors and create a larger movement of help.
I want to be clear before I close: I'm not disparaging the work of other agencies. I'm not even requesting government funding. I'm requesting that this government stop taking funds away from smaller charities with this policy. As members of this committee, you have something that we as humanitarians don't: You have the power to stop this bad policy.
Thank you.