Canadians are not as generous as they used to be – MoneySense

The survey, released to highlight Giving Tuesday on December 2, also suggests a growing gap by income. Canadians earning $150,000 a year or more account for 49% of all donations, but increasing portions of the population are not giving at all. In the past twelve months, 31% indicated that they had not made any donations to charities. Two-thirds of respondents cited affordability as a reason they did not give.

“This year, we’re talking directly to the millions of Canadians who haven’t donated in a while – or perhaps never donated at all – and reminding them that their first gift can make a real difference,” said Duke Chang, president and CEO of CanadaHelps, in a press release. “Whether it’s $5 or $50, every donation starts something meaningful.”

Created 12 years ago, Giving Tuesday is a date – the Tuesday after American Thanksgiving – marked by charities around the world to encourage giving back. CanadaHelps works with 86,000 registered charities in Canada to streamline the donation process.

The results of the organization’s survey are consistent with Statistics Canada’s 2023 survey Research into giving, volunteering and participatingwhich was published last June, showing that the number of Canadians donating has fallen sharply over the past decade. The percentage of Canadians reporting charitable giving fell from 82% over the period to 54%. In absolute figures, the number of givers in Canada has decreased by 6.3 million.

Dollars donated fell more gradually, from $16.4 billion in 2013 to $13.4 billion in 2023, adjusted for inflation, indicating a smaller group of donors are digging deeper to give.

And you can’t just blame the economy or affordability for this shift. Fewer Canadians are volunteering for charities: 32% of the population in 2023, compared to 44% in 2013. Volunteer hours fell to 1.2 billion from 2 billion a decade earlier. The decline in volunteering was particularly striking during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among women, but has not shown a significant recovery since.

A study of the Fraser Institute The release from a year ago showed that the share of Canadian tax returns reporting donations to charity fell to 17.1% in 2022, down from 25.1% in 2002. Similarly, the share of all donated personal income fell to half of one per cent, compared to 0.61% two decades earlier. Unfortunately, as giving decreases, the need to respond to issues like food insecurity has increased.
Recent experiences have shown that Canadians are still generous when it comes to giving in response to certain crises, such as wildfires and flood relief, but the number of regular donations appears to be declining in the longer term.

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