Christmas just two weeks away, charities are in overdrive. From burly firefighters lined up at street corners holding out pails for loose change, to office colleagues organizing food and toy drives, everyone knows this is prime time for charitable giving.
Quebecers like the personal touch when they’re asked to give their money away. The firefighters’ buckets fill up fast and toy drives never fail to deliver presents to every child.
What Quebecers don’t like to do – at least in comparison with other Canadians – is give generously as a matter of course, as a way of helping those in need throughout the year, without being asked on the spur of the moment at Christmas, a time when they’re almost guaranteed to have some cash on them.
In a nice piece of coincidence, Christmas is not only the traditional time of giving in Canada, it is also when Statistics Canada releases annual figures on charitable donations across the country. Whatever warm and fuzzy feelings Quebecers may have about slipping the firefighters a $5 bill tend to evaporate once the StatsCan list comes out.
We are always rock bottom on this list. Always, without fail. This ought to be a matter of embarrassment for us, but it doesn’t seem to be. We certainly don’t react to our perpetual poor showing by giving more generously the following year.
Here’s a quick look at last year’s charitable donations: although the number of Quebecers who gave a donation increased by 2.3 per cent over 2009, to 1,326,070, and the median donation also jumped – by 6.9 per cent, to $130 – that wasn’t enough to push the province out of last place.
Without wanting to dwell on just how cheap we are, let’s just say we trail well behind even the have-not Atlantic provinces: Newfoundland and Labrador’s mean donation was $340 last year. New Brunswickers gave $300. And tiny Prince Edward Island’s mean was $390.
The traditional explanation for Quebecers’ apparent lack of generosity is their reliance on the Roman Catholic Church to look after those in need within the community. But it has been two generations since Quebecers attended church in any numbers, so as an explanation this has lost plausibility. (In the event, even practicing Catholics are not known as generous givers. In the United States, Catholics gave 1.5 per cent of their income, according to a 2000 study, compared to 2.3 per cent for Jews, 3.4 per cent for Pentecostal Protestants and 5.2 per cent for Mormons.)
There’s another rationale that has been gaining currency in the past few years in Quebec. This one holds that because Quebecers are the highest-taxed citizens in Canada, the less fortunate among them should be able to rely on the generously funded state, not handouts from their taxed-to-the-max compatriots.
The Quebec government has helped foster this illusion through tax measures such as the 2010 Solidarity Tax Credit. This gloriously Cuban-sounding measure makes it seem like we’ve all pitched in to make life easier for those at the bottom of the income scale. But in fact the solidarity tax has taken existing tax credits and refunds – the QST credit, the property-tax refund and the Northern villages tax credit – and called them something new.
It’s Christmas, time to stop hiding behind church and state. Giving is supposed to be personal – and done with an open hand. Pick a charity you like and trust, give generously, and let’s hope we edge up a little higher on next year’s list.