Finance committee  Yes. First of all, my understanding is that right now our main donors, private foundations and other significant donors, cannot make low-interest, below-market loans to organizations; they're prohibited. They would like to explore things like interest-free loans to organizations.

Finance committee  Yes, I'd be pleased to. Yes, certainly we'd welcome that expression.

Finance committee  First of all, we very much appreciate your interest in that area. The charitable tax donation credit is one of the recommendations we brought to the committee. I think 22 million Canadians take advantage of that credit. Basically everybody gives to charity, adults; it's extraordinary.

Finance committee  I'll respond very quickly. I see the chair noting the time constraints. We're huge fans of the community foundation movement and organization. They supported our brief here today, and we work closely with them. They've done an extraordinary job in making Canada a leader worldwide in providing a community-based foundation where donors can give and enjoy a more strategic approach to the community's needs.

Finance committee  Well, I'm not really suggesting that. I'm saying that many charities have financial needs to address a very significant need in the community—say, a large economic disaster—for which they want to raise large amounts of capital. By being restricted to donations, to amounts people are willing to give out of their back pocket, they are limited in their access to capital.

Finance committee  Yes. What we're really suggesting is that while there are many measures now in place to support donations and giving, we think our society is now sophisticated enough to support more varied investment instruments in charities—debt instruments, equity instruments....

Finance committee  We work very much on behalf of the charitable and volunteer sector. We focus on the objectives of investors, donors, and recipient organizations—

Finance committee  We do. Exactly right. There is a lot being done, both within Imagine Canada and in Volunteer Canada. We feel that the volunteer hours—and I have the numbers and will follow up with you more specifically—are a close-to-1%-of-GDP contribution. Are you asking specifically whether we support tax measures?

Finance committee  Yes, we do. We can show you as a percentage of GDP that it adds up—

Finance committee  Yes, we have some data on that.

Finance committee  Thank you. Canada's charities and not-for-profit corporations feel increasingly concerned that the federal government doesn't necessarily see the charitable sector as being within its scope or as necessarily federal jurisdiction or high on its policy agenda. I do want to remind the committee members that charities are creatures of the federal government.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Imagine Canada looks into and out for Canada's charities and not-for-profit corporations. We're pleased to bring forward four recommendations to this committee. They've been developed in collaboration with, and formally endorsed by, some of Canada's best-loved national charities, known to all the committee members and to Canadians more broadly: the United Way of Canada and Centraide Canada; YMCA Canada and YWCA Canada; the Salvation Army; the Sport Matters Group, which was here earlier today; the Canadian Conference of the Arts; the Canadian Council for International Cooperation; Community Foundations of Canada; the Inuit Women of Canada; and the national charities and not-for-profit law section of l'Association du Barreau canadien and the Canadian Bar Association.

Human Resources committee  Thank you for raising that. It is something our sector asked for, and we are very pleased to see the measure included in budget 2006. We have some hope and some expectation that the measure may be extended in budget 2007, so it would apply to gifts of other types of assets besides publicly traded shares and might apply to gifts to private charities as well as public charities.

Human Resources committee  Those are very fair comments, Ms. Brown. We spend a lot of time thinking about what positions to bring forward here. There's no doubt about it; there's a lot of upset in the sector about these public policy and funding changes. On the other hand, I think all of us who are engaged in our communities—and I think everyone around the table is, from hockey to libraries, and so on—have to focus on how best to move forward and what our ways of serving this community are in order to make sure it remains viable, because it is vulnerable.

Human Resources committee  We need to lay off about 35% of our workforce who were engaged in programs that the federal government had initiated and financed. They are divided into three broad categories. One is something called the Knowledge Development Centre, which was a national initiative to help charities become more knowledgeable about federal regulations, such as under the Lobbyists Registration Act, charity law, and the taxation of charities.