Fewer Canadians are giving to charity. A majority of their donations are coming from fewer and older people. There is a 10-year runway before giving in Canada could plunge off a cliff.
Those are some of the key findings from a new report by Imagine Canada, an umbrella organization for almost 300 Canadian charitable organizations.
Titled “A tipping balance? Trends in charitable donations 1997-2022,” the report details how charitable giving has changed in Canada over the past 25 years.
One thing the report reveals is a drop in the number of people claiming an income tax deduction for charitable giving — from 26 per cent in 1997 to 17 per cent in 2022.
This has been an “unbroken trend,” the report says.
Despite fewer tax filers claiming donations, the amount given increased every year until 2021. That year, charitable giving peaked at $11.8 billion, possibly due to the effects of the pandemic.
But then it fell for the first time, to $11.4 billion in 2022.
The report also found a growing dependence in the charitable sector on a small number of donors, with 71 per cent of donations coming from the nine per cent of donors who gave $5,000 or more.
“The degree to which giving is reliant on them represents a structural vulnerability for a sector that depends on charitable giving for a significant fraction of its funding,” the report says.
Worryingly, those larger donors also tend to be older. In 1997, 42 per cent of donations came from people 60 years of age and older. In 2022, it was 60 per cent.
“It is clear that the importance of older, higher income donors has increased significantly since 1997,” the report states.
Imagine Canada’s CEO and president Bruce MacDonald suggests it is time for governments and charitable organizations to acknowledge a precarious future ahead for the sector.
“We have about a 10-year runway before the older and most generous generation is gone,” he said.
These older donors are not being replaced by younger generations, MacDonald says. He attributes this change to various factors, such as how younger Canadians are struggling to make ends meet and have less disposable income.
But it is also due to a drop in attendance at religious services.
“Older people routinely say they learned to be generous at Sunday school and church,” MacDonald said. He noted that religious services not only include opportunities for giving, but also teach people about the importance of giving. They remind attendees about the needs of others — at home and abroad — in their sermons, music and prayers.
Membership in service clubs is also declining, and members are aging, he says — a trend similar to what is happening in many churches.
At the same time, people are becoming more insular. “Many Canadians report feeling lonely, isolated, disconnected,” MacDonald says. “This is a problem for groups that serve communities, since many depend on a sense of belonging.”
Social fabric
For MacDonald, the question is: “What can we do to create a society like the one that created that generous generation?”
“[A]s Canadians, we can’t take giving for granted,” MacDonald said. “If we are going to make sure the sector thrives, we will have to counter trends that are pulling people inward. We will need to swim against the current that is taking people away from community participation.”
If solutions cannot be found, governments at all levels and society itself — which has come to depend on charities to assist the most vulnerable and marginal in Canada today — will be in trouble. Some charitable organizations will be forced to close due to a lack of donations.
MacDonald suggests governments can help by doing things that enable charities to do their work more efficiently and easily.
This includes providing stable, multi-year grants so organizations do not have to spend time and money writing annual applications.
It means providing funding for charities to help them keep pace with digital technology, cyber security, data privacy and AI — funding that government already provides to many businesses.
And it could entail creating a special department within the federal government to support the charitable sector.
“The charitable sector is as important to the social fabric of Canada as the private and government sectors,” MacDonald said.
“We need to ensure the sector has stable funding,” he says. “Making communities better is everyone’s business.”
It is not just charitable donations that suffer as society becomes increasingly pagan, but law and order and cost of policing! The group of people who attend church services weekly is far far less likely to commit crimes than those who do not fear God and His judgement day!
It would have been nice to see The Salvation Army truck in tge photo with Canadian address not New York