Now that Halloween’s over, let’s think Christmas
November 3, 2025 7:05 PM
Charity is always a topic that comes up as we approach Christmas and the holiday season. For some reason, what has become the most materialistic part of the year is still also, paradoxically, a time when people try to reconnect with that impulse to extend the proverbial helping hand to the people around them.
This year the idea of charity seems even more relevant to me, somehow, for a number of interestingly unconnected reasons:
1. The Occupy Wall Street movement, with its focus on inequitable income distribution, reminds us that there is an all-too-sizeable section of society that does not make enough money to feed and house themselves, let alone have a budget for winter clothes or Christmas gifts. According to the Wall Street Journal app (yes, I know, the irony) “What Percent Are You?” the real top 1% makes more that $506,000 per year, and the bottom 1% makes less than $2000. The median? Around $43,000 – barely a living wage for a family of four.
2. The Republican presidential debates in the U.S., for all their ridiculous bluster about – let’s not lie, everything – remind us that part of the right-wing justification for lowering taxes for the rich is that the wealthiest people have (and in theory honour) a duty to donate to the charities and causes of their choice in a sort of grassroots income redistribution. Low levels of taxation for everyone, the argument goes, ensures that everyone pays a little bit for the privilege of living in America, and that the super-rich hang on to enough cash to attend the next charity gala at $10,000 a table.
3. The Canadian government has recently proposed reforms to federal grant procedures that would allocate government grant money not based on merit or need, but on performance, rating an organization based on how well they meet government targets. In theory, this would encourage charitable organizations to seek out private and corporate donations, as well as push them to be more effective and efficient at delivering services and aid. Right now, government grants account for about half of the revenue charities receive every year. Individual and corporate donations only account for around a quarter.
4. As need become more obvious and – seemingly – widespread, concerns about the reliability of charitable organizations to do what they say increase. In this world of instant global media, there is a new disaster every month, if not every week. While the desperation of people in famine- or earthquake-stricken regions is heartbreaking, it seems that the more remote the disaster, the less likely that donations will make it all the way to victims, instead of in the pockets of consultants, middlemen, corrupt officials or con artists.
5. In the last few months, even established charitable organizations, and NGOs have come under fire for a lack of transparency, or unwieldy administrative structures that eat away at donations, or practices that, to say the least, could be improved. The Canadian Cancer Foundation drew fire when CBC’s Marketplace revealed that the percentage of donations actually spent on cancer research dropped to 22% in 2011. 43% ended up paying for administration, and more fundraising.
The Globe and Mail has recently launched a series of articles and editorials seeking to investigate the changing nature of giving and philanthropy. It isn’t a small topic, and the issues at stake are ideologically loaded. Should we be taxed more, and let the government take care of the weak and vulnerable, or should we be able to put our money where our mouth is? Should we focus our attention on the needy in Canada, or the desperately poor in developing countries, or areas that have been hit by natural disasters?
On a personal level, it doesn’t get any easier. Do I, a student scraping by on loans and cheap food, have money to donate? Should I make giving a priority right now, or wait until I’m more successful (whatever that means) to start worrying about donating? If I try and “do the right thing” by making charitable donations in lieu of giving Christmas gifts, say, am I undervaluing my family and the sacrifices they make for me? Aren’t my traditions important, too?
Who should I give money to, anyway? The largest number of charitable donations goes to religious organizations, but I’m not particularly religious. I’ve done the Relay for Life for the last three years, but their administrative costs are sky-high, and I don’t really want to pay fundraisers and marketers.
But all my waffling rather obscures the point, doesn’t it? According to the Globe and Mail’s numbers from Statistics Canada, only 23% of Canadians donated anything in 2009, at least according to their tax returns. And Canadians younger than 35, despite comprising nearly 30% of tax filers, only account for 15% of charitable donations.
It seems to me that whether we donate money, and at least try to better the condition of other human beings, is more important than how it’s done. Whether we reach out to people down the street or around the world, or whether we give our money for food aid or shelter beds, medicine or art collections, what is important, and what is worth reminding ourselves of, is that we are not the only people in our lives.
We are, regardless of our politics, political animals. Whether our polis is Antigonish, or Canada, or the world, we have to live together within it.
With files from the Globe and Mail, the Wall Street Journal, and the CBC.
