Report shows Canadian generosity toward charities reaching new lows
By Justin Seward - Lethbridge Herald on December 30, 2022.
The Fraser Institute recently released their annual study with numbers that pertain to Canadians donating to charities being at the lowest point in 20 years.“This is a study that we’ve been doing basically every year for more than 20 years,” said Jake Fuss, senior policy analyst with the Fraser Institute. “I think we’ve been doing it since the 1990s. So before I even arrived at the Institute. Basically, the goal of the study is to track the generosity of Canadians over time and compare different jurisdictions and see trends in terms of charitable giving in Canada. Obviously the trend we’ve been seeing now for quite some time is the share of income donated by Canadians reaching the lowest since the year 2000.”
The numbers were based on Canadians donating to a charity on a percentage of tax filers in 2020.
In the 2022 Generosity Index, the study found that Manitoba had the highest percentage of tax filers that donated to charity in 2020 among the provinces at 20.6 per cent, while Newfoundland & Labrador came in at the lowest at 16 per cent.
Fuss was not surprised by Manitoba being the most generous.
“You know, Manitoba has significantly been the most generous province in Canada,” said Fuss. “And we also have the decline in generosity across Canada that has been occurring for a while, both in terms of the share of income donated and the percentage of tax values donating. Obviously, that’s certainly concerning when we have generosity reaching new lows. But it’s not necessarily surprising when we’ve seen these trends for now over a decade really across all provinces.”
The study does not look into particularly why one province is more generous over another.
“But what we do know, you know generosity is often sensitive to how much after tax income people have,” said Fuss. “So that could be a factor (in) play here into why different jurisdictions have a higher or lower charitable giving than others. But we don’t know the exact reasons why because it’s just not something that we examine exactly in the study.”
Alberta was the fifth most generous province at 17.7 per cent and in donating aggregate income to charity at 0.61 per cent.
“They do rank a little bit higher among provinces in terms of shared income donated; they are in the top three in terms of that shared income donated to charity,” said Fuss. “So those numbers are relatively good when you compare them to other provinces.”
The issue for Fuss, and it is not necessarily unique to Alberta, is the shared income donated in the province dropped 20 per cent since 2010 and the tax dollars donated to charity have seen a 27 per cent decrease in the last decade.
“And that’s the second biggest drop among all provinces,” said Fuss. “So we’ve really seen this market decline in Alberta probably even more than some other provinces. Alberta and Saskatchewan in particular are kind of seeing bigger drops in generosity over the last decade. So maybe some of that might have something to do with some of the troubles that were experienced in 2015 with the oil price drops and other things like that. Some of the recessions that Alberta had gone through recently in troubled times.”
Manitoba also led the way in donating aggregate income to charity among the provinces at 0.73 per cent while Quebec was the lowest with 0.24 per cent.
“The holiday season is a time to reflect on charitable giving, and the data shows Canadians are consistently less charitable every year, which means charities face greater challenges to secure resources to help those in need,” said Fuss in a news release.
The study also found the total donations by Canadians in the 2020 tax year were at 0.49 per cent of income and the lowest since 2000.
The country’s generosity peaked at 0.72 per cent in 2006 before seeing a decline in subsequent years.
A decline was also felt in the percentage of Canadian tax filers donating to a charity dropped from 2.5 per cent in 2000 to 19.1 per cent in 2020. 2
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