Heralding Charity

The Calgary Herald published an op-ed by yours truly on the subject of charitable giving. It concludes:

The next chapter in the future of Canadian civil society has yet to be written. Canadian society today thrives in large part because of the culture of giving and civic investment that is practised routinely by a small minority of the population who comprise Canada's civic core. If trends toward disengagement deepen and become entrenched, it will be much more difficult to reverse these patterns in the future. Strategic action is required now.

In case it hasn't become obvious to those who check this page regularly, the challenges facing our charitable sector are a present preoccupation for Cardus and we have various research and education initiatives in the pipe on this important theme.

Cardus Policy in Public Released Today

This morning an email went from my Cardus account to those on our Cardus Policy in Public list containing the following:

The people carrying the civic load in Canada—those giving to charity, volunteering, and voting—are getting tired, and are dwindling in number. In the next very few years, this is going to begin seriously affecting the organizations and institutions that form the backbone of our country.

In the Fall 2009 issue of Cardus Policy in Public —free, as always—we present excerpts from the recent Cardus report A Canadian Culture of Generosity. This paper asks the hard question: if we're living today off of the social capital cultivated by previous generations, how will we cope with the civic deficit facing the next generation? The policy paper makes nineteen recommendations for all spheres of society to bring attention to this problem.
Also in this issue:
1. David Stewart-Patterson, of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, responds to the Generosity paper by asking his own questions about Canada's overall demographic trend.
2. Peter Menzies reviews Brian Lee Crowley's new book Fearful Symmetry, and shows that the status quo in our work and family values is unsustainable.
3. We excerpt two essays from Cardus' recent collection Think Different, which wonders if urban religious communities are problem solvers or trouble makers.
4. Finally, this issue is closed out by our regular Think Tank Index. We include this to draw attention to the thoughtful and varied voices that constitute public discourse in Canada today.

Read the Fall 2009 Cardus Policy in Public now. As always, you're also invited to explore the breadth of Cardus at www.cardus.ca, www.cardus.ca/comment and www.cardus.ca/think.

My schedule includes a fairly hectic travel schedule over the next few weeks so keeping current on this page may or may not happen, as opportunity permits.

A Few things that amuse, confuse, and confound on a Saturday afternoon.....

- Stephane Dion's wife ends up being a bit too candid on Facebook, and it ends up as the lead item on National Newswatch. Is anyone really surprised that this is what she thinks?

- It seems that twitters cost several politicos (including MPs Dean delMastro, Michelle Simpson, and Stephen Carter, advisor to Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith)headaches this past week. It would seem that using twitters - which limit messages to 140 characters - end up being a temptation that ends up diminishing those who want to be taken seriously in politics. Its a medium whose risks outweigh its benefits, unless it is used simply as an information service (which admittedly is boring but effective - Politician X is entering Y building for a policy announcement today.)

- Ian MacDonald opines that Parliament will last for more than year; Thomas Walkom thinks that Mr. Harper is really changing things. Both provide additional arguments to those made on this page earlier in the week.

- This item is important enough to reprint entirely, and the implications of this ought to be carefully thought through by all Canadians.

The recession has kept Canadians from embracing their charitable side. Figures released by Statistics Canada this week reveal that charitable giving dropped 5.1% in 2008, from $8.65-billion to $8.19-billion -- the largest decline in 40 years. Manitobans were the most charitable Canadians -- 27% were donors -- followed by a three-way tie with Prince Edward Island, Ontario and Saskatchewan, with 26% donors. For the past three years, the national median donation has stayed the same at $240. Nunavut had the lowest percentage of donors (10%), but the highest median donation at $500. The median donor age was 53, unchanged from 2007. Of course, the numbers do not account for the hours of volunteer work donated to charities every year.

- I have been taking a fair bit of heat from friends (?) who suggest that the current performance of the Toronto Maple Leafs. I need to repost (before going to watch the Leafs find an ingenious way to lose again) my 2007 confession that some things in life are done out without rational explanation and that fan is shortform for fanatic.) When (if) they win in my lifetime, it will make the joys of victory sweet. Go Leafs Go.

Our Political Calling

Occasionally, I plan to make a few of my speeches / publications available on this site that are not readily accessible or well-known. This speech - "Irrigating in a Desert - Stewarding our Political Opportunities for Social Flourishing" -- was delivered in January at the "Living at the Crossroads" conference held at Redeemer College, celebrating the release of a book by that same title.

In the speech, I focussed on the "how" of day to day politics from a citizen, not neccesarily an activist, perspective. Realizing that many find politics unpleasant and distasteful, I tried to provide a positive perspective on what might be accomplished as well as a realistic description of the limits of politics. I used the metaphor of watering plants in a desert to make six basic points.

So what I have for you today is not a messianic “Yes we can!”, but a more basic “love we must”. It doesn’t reduce to 15 point action plan or a pithy sound bite; rather it’s simply some elementary political gardening advice.
So, prepare for the reality of the desert.
Learn to see the beauty in the cactus, including its prickles.
Keep watering, even when it seems insignificant.
Keep your eyes open, and water those plants on your path that are most in need.
Observe the big picture – look at the sun and sky and keep the shrubs in proper perspective.
Refresh yourself with the good water that is in your bucket.
And keep focused on the other side. Beyond the desert is a garden.

You can read / download the entire speech (or at least a cleaned-up version of my speaking notes) here.

A More Conservative Canada?

On Tuesday, I noted that there was a new political landscape that necessitated new tactics for all of the parties in the upcoming year. Yesterday, several items caught my attention which seemed consistent with that theme.

Lawrence Martin's Globe column told a story of a "lost decade" for the Liberals and law and order, foreign policy, and free market sympathies that reflected a more Conservative Canada and an "imperilling" of the old Canadian consensus. In the National Post, Adam Daifallah wrote of "A record of Conservative achievement" in which he recounts a similar list, but notes Harper's most important achievement as "the way he changed official Canaidan discourse into one that is more politically conservative in nature."

Even the Liberals inadvertantly played to theme, releasing a list of 233 government appointees during the past year who were Conservative insiders, in most cases having donated to the Conservative party. The message clearly is that the broader machinery of government is being impacted by Conservatives. (I must note a certain irony in the Liberal release. Given the government makes about 3,000 appointments per year, finding only 233 with Conservative donor records actually makes the opposite point the Liberals headline in their release. Given that no allegations of incompetence were directed at any of the appointees, the implication is that simply donating to a political party disqualifies one from a political appointment.)

Not to beat a dead horse, but in our 2006 election analysis, Michael VanPelt and I noted that we were undergoing a period of significant change in Canada, a process that had started and would take a decade or so to sort through. I don't think the trends observed by Mr. Martin and Daifallah are indicative of any clear benchmark having been met -- in other words, this trend is still quite reversable and is hardly set in stone -- but it is an indication that Canada is continuing on a path that was in motion with the election of the Conservatives. I know that for many Conservatives, the journey is slow and causes them impatience. For some on the left, this is clearly a very worrisome trend that even elicits proposals that amount to "a radical subversion of democracy."

Interesting times indeed.,

Raising Thoughtful Questions....

Colin Jackson of Calgary has written various provocative pieces regarding the modern city. My attention was drawn today to a recent piece published in The Mark News in which, among other things, Jackson observes:

When the urge to create is supplanted by the drive to consume, we become toxic to ourselves, those around us, and to the planet. We need a new narrative of the good life based on the deep wisdoms that are our shared cultural inheritances. Human beings are meaning makers. Creating narratives, invention, taking joy in discovery, and being uplifted by the beautiful are in our DNA.

....

When the urge to create is supplanted by the drive to consume, we become toxic to ourselves, those around us, and to the planet. We need a new narrative of the good life based on the deep wisdoms that are our shared cultural inheritances. Human beings are meaning makers. Creating narratives, invention, taking joy in discovery, and being uplifted by the beautiful are in our DNA.

Not sure I would immediately sign onto everything Jackson implies in his article, but getting good answers requires asking good questions, and this article certainly does do that.

Charity and Its Fruits

(this blog is cross-posted at cardusafterhours - a blog that Cardus staff maintain for primarily internal purposes.) If you read it there, full links to the references are available. It uses different blogging software than this blog and I'm to lazy to look up all the links twice :).

My professional readings of late have immersed me in public policy documents regarding charity and how it contributes to society. In the context of Cardus’ recent release of A Canadian Culture of Generosity and our soon-to-be-publicly announced 29to42 campaign, I have been thinking about the next steps from a research perspective. There is lots of interesting work being done in the field. Linda Graff has done some fascinating work helping us understand the motives of volunteers, highlighting how mandating volunteer programs and utilizing volunteers simply for political ends up being another form of “genetic engineering.” Susan Phillips has done some interesting work on the nature of citizenship and the role of volunteers and volunteer organizations in public policy processes. In a recent publication entitled The Intersection of Governance and Citizenship in Canada: Not Quite the Third Way, she provocatively notes that the rhetoric and theory regarding citizen participation does not match the front-line reality, suggesting three reasons for this disconnect: a public policy focus on political accountability which has necessitated an emphasis on defined contractual relationships which limits collaboration; the fact that "Canada has not developed or remodeled the architecture that supports the capacity of voluntary organizations to collaborate effectively in governing"; and third, a perception of the voluntary sector as service providers with the consequence that it has not built its own policy capacity.

The focus of each of these works is very different and yet there are lots of threads that intersect and warrant an interdisciplinary conversation. In the Cardus work, we mused about the connection between the declining civic core as we measured it in the context of volunteering, giving, and belonging and the concern about declining voter turnout and the democratic deficit in the political sphere. Graff's work focuses our attention on understanding the motivation for volunteerism and not blindly thinking we can conscript their efforts for whatever political ends suit us and link closely with the "otherness" syndrome that we -- borrowing from the work of Paul Reed - identified in our report.

Musing as I have been on how what sort of picture was being created by these intersecting threads, I could not help but be reminded of a book on my shelf entitled Charity and Its Fruits - a collection of sermons preached on I Corinthians 13 back in 1738 by Jonathan Edwards. Obviously it has a very different tone than any of the reports I just cited, given that these sermons were preached in a setting of religious revival in a relatively homogeneous Massachusetts small town almost three centuries ago. Yet these sermons in characteristically Edwardsian fashion (for my take and appreciation of this, I refer you to my recent Comment piece), insist on both the supernatural aspect of religion but take great pains to highlight the daily practices that should flow from this. "All true Christian grace tends to practice."

Dealing with the fruits of charity (or our present fear of the decline in charitable fruits, in the Canadian case) is a matter of culture and practice. The benefits of a policy change such as our proposal to change the charitable tax rate from 29 to 42 percent will probably be as much the focus and conversation that is brought to the subject of giving and what it means to be a citizen and a neighbour, than the tangible impact that will be measured by charitable dollars receipted and claimed on tax returns. But rather than to be lamented, this is I think an opportunity to be embraced. It is a means of engaging a diverse society with a multiple of belief systems having to sort out what it means to live civilly alongside each other. Such conversations require us to engage such questions as "Who is my neighbour?" and what I ought to do to help him or her. The answers may range from the trivial through the superficial to the profound, but engaging the question and seeking to consistently live out our answers provide each of a challenge.