Hi. I'm sorry, but I'm having technical difficulties here. My computer has a glitch, so I will have to do my opening comments from scratch.
My name is Kate Bahen. I'm a managing director at Charity Intelligence. I did the updates on WE Charity's report in August of 2019 and more recently in this July of 2020. I'm happy to take your questions about that.
I would like to use these moments to talk to you about what is going on in the charity sector. One of the greatest concerns is how charities are so negatively impacted by COVID-19. Imagine Canada estimates that individual giving to charities will be down by between $4 billion to $6 billion. For context, in 2019, individual giving was about $17 billion.
On top of this, we have the WE situation that is in the headlines every day and is really shaking donor confidence in giving to charities. The impact of this, we won't know.
I appreciate that part of the Canada summer students grant initiative was to help charities and that students would be volunteering and giving their time to help front-line charities at this time. For many charities, volunteers are an incredibly important part of program delivery, but what charities really need now is cash. We're in August, and so far there has been so little response to the needs of Canadian charities.
There is one simple thing that we at Charity Intelligence believe could significantly help Canadian charities, and that's called the disbursement quota. The disbursement quota is a little-known factor about how much foundations, community foundations and endowments are required to give of their assets to charities each year.
Currently, Canada's disbursement quota is 3.5%. Canada has the lowest disbursement quota in the world. In the U.S., the disbursement quota is 5% and there are calls right now in the U.S. for raising that disbursement quota to 10% for the COVID pandemic.
If Canadian foundations, endowments and community foundations were to increase the disbursement quota from 3.5% to 5%, we estimate that there would be an additional $700 million going to charities this year. It is completely at our finance minister's discretion. It is written within the CRA regulations that the finance minister can change the disbursement quota by the stroke of his pen, and I ask all of you, from all parties, to go back to caucus and talk to your parties about what we can do to help Canadian charities for the COVID pandemic. I ask you to seriously consider raising Canada's disbursement quota to 5%—at least—for the COVID pandemic.
Thank you.