Overview:
This is the first article of three exploring shifts in charitable giving in Canada.
For most of the postwar period, Canada was a country of relatively stable expectations, according to pollster David Coletto of Abacus Data.
“People believed that if they worked hard, saved responsibly, and made reasonably good decisions, things would unfold along a path that felt predictable,” Coletto wrote in his newsletter in May.
“But when you layer a pandemic on top of a housing crisis, on top of inflation, on top of climate disasters, on top of technological disruption, on top of demographic strain, and then add a U.S. president openly threatening your country with tariffs and annexation fantasies, something shifts in the public psyche,” he stated. “It is not just stress. It is erosion.”
Coletto called this the “precarity mindset,” a mindset focused on “not knowing whether the ground beneath you will hold.” Ninety per cent of Canadians feel this way, believing that instability and uncertainty “are the new normal.”
This sense of insecurity has implications for the economy, he stated.
“When people feel uncertain about the future, they begin pulling inward. They delay major life decisions. They spend more cautiously. They seek emotional safety over aspiration,” he said. “They defer. They hesitate. They seek reassurance before commitment.”
This sense of precarity plays out in various ways, such as cutting down on things like eating out, going to movies, upgrading furniture, taking vacations — and donating to charities.
It is that last thing that concerns those who work in Canada’s charitable sector. This includes Bruce MacDonald, president and CEO of Imagine Canada, an umbrella organization for Canadian charities.
The precarity mindset became apparent when Imagine Canada recently did focus groups with younger people about giving. Participants were asked what they would do if they came into a large amount of money. How many would give some of that unexpected windfall to charity?
“The percentage of respondents who said ‘yes, they would give some to charity,’ was zero,” MacDonald said. The reasons given for not donating included the need to pay down mortgages, to deal with household expenses or to pay off student debt.
“What we heard was their intention to use the money for everyday living,” he said.
Something similar is being heard by Chris Bosch and Lon Wong of Chisel Consulting, which works with leaders of charitable organizations to help them strategize for the future.
“The economy is doing the charitable sector no favours,” said Bosch, founder and principal of Chisel, about how many Canadians are curbing their giving.
Canadians still recognize the value of charities, added Wong, a lead consultant at Chisel. They are just more careful about how much they donate.
“People want to contribute, but they are matching requests for donations against their own needs, to see how they match up on a day-to-day basis,” he said.
While this means charities are facing challenges when it comes to raising money, this does not mean Canadians are not giving — they are just giving differently.
“Maybe I have rose-coloured glasses, but I don’t think Canadians are less generous,” said Bosch. “People are now giving to help out their children or other family members … the channels for generosity are changing.”
In addition to that, newcomers to Canada are sharing with family back in their home countries through remittances, he said. This is a form of generosity not captured in traditional measurements like claiming charitable donations on income taxes.
Mike Duerksen, CEO of Buildgood, an organization that helps charities raise funds, notes high living costs are affecting the “next generation of donors.”
“Younger people are being squeezed economically,” he said, noting it is hard to think of making a donation when people have to pay so much to fill up their cars with gas.
This time of precarity is only adding to the general decline in the number of people donating to charity, Duerksen added.
“The number of people who are giving is trending downwards, with fewer active donors,” he said.
The other two articles in this series can be found here and here.
From what I’m reading with a clear headed rational and with the an open mind silent witness and very much vocal advocate for the people who are being deliberately eliminated from the planet earth in order to meet the 2030 agenda for the depopulation of the world and Canada seems to be willing to sacrifice their souls for the elite braindead mindless uneducated arrogant useless people who are willing to kill off their own people regardless of race family history what they have given to this nation generation after generation in every way they were able to help without a thought. These people weren’t the wealthiest or the same as kind of human beings as this disgusting self centered ignorant by choice easily manipulated me me me generations of unrecognizable as the authentic realistic patient thoughtful and more humane Canadians who either died or are being sacrificed to a life they shouldn’t have to be forced to live after giving more of their lives to the nation than the people who are being prioritized over the people who are the only reason that this country has anything left to take care of the generation who are benefiting of the suffering misery and death of their own children who happen to be the same people who are responsible for creating this shit show to begin with and their children were always the ones who paid the price for the decisions their parents and a majority of the population were making with the mentality of Trump’s I come first I deserve to think about myself for a a change. Even though they were thinking about themselves in the same way since they were teenagers and didn’t think it was fair to sacrifice their freedom of living the life they dreamed of or what they wanted to do with their spare time and the most selfish delusional hypocritical generations were the ones born between the early fifties to late sixties who became the people who created the world we live in today alone with the same people who have always been a major part of the problems in the world for their own financial gains. The people who are being treated like the ones who are responsible for creating everything wrong with the country are actually the people who were raising their siblings because their parents were busy they were the ones who were the first to become faces on milk cartons the ones who were the ones who inspired the Amber Alert, stranger danger their the also the ones who know more about the realities and the people who are responsible for creating the unavoidable backlash and the justified reaction the people are being pushed into doing to defend themselves and their right to be treated like a human being instead of an unwanted pregnancy,unwanted member of their own communities by people who don’t have any respect for the people that are more informed about their environment and the problems it’s facing and what was needed to improve their hometowns. Because people from outside the imidiate areas moved in and took all the opportunities housing benefits and behaved like they were the superior people compared to the people who were being slowly eliminated from the city so a bunch of useless racist uneducated in the ways of the people who have been treated like the people who should be considered lucky to be given the opportunity to live in their own province in their hometown and kiss the ass of the people responsible for destroying the entire system and all it’s familiar businesses and communities so people who couldn’t find their new location of choice based solely on the corruption that’s always been here but in the matter of a decade and a half replaced the people who actually built not only the province the American minded assholes took over but they are also way older than the places these not considered Canadian by their own desires and dreams that they have to move into the States to achieve. But they would be somewhere in Europe if the province that’s being fucking wiped out and destroyed at a steady pace so selfish ungrateful useless people who are definitely supremacy minded reepd the rewards of the very same city and province provided when the current provinces that are doing great weren’t even built up enough to be able to become successful in the future and weren’t the reason that Canada exists today these provinces were the last to become apart of Canada because they wanted to be treated like royalty and they were possibly reptilian if those things are real but definitely not royalty they were the same old people who colonized North America back in the beginning and here they are descendents of those people so the people of the world who are the majority have nothing to lose by becoming revolutionaries and tearing down the part of the nation that’s destroying the rest of the nation so they don’t have to face reality or learn what the results usually are in times of the wrong people trying to force themselves into positions that they don’t deserve to be in just because they think Britain still owns the place and the people who are being held accountable for the shit those people who decided to join the original colonizers who were the ones that were the beginning but the people who are the descendents of the first immigrants to move to Canada are the ones who are being treated like shit by the most useless selfish delusional simple minded idiots that are the fucking problem along with the Canadian and American governments and the wealthy families who should be shot into space in one of Elon’s rocket ships and become colonizers of whatever they land on