Mr. Rubin Friedman (Director, Government Relations, B’nai Brith Canada): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I don’t know if I will even use up the full six minutes.

I think basically it comes down to establishing a new kind of balance, of the kind that was just outlined by the previous speaker, between how one approaches direct funding and how one uses the tax system.

Governments in Canada have been schizophrenic about this in the past. An example would be earlier programs to promote voluntarism in communities, which function through local grants. This, of course, had the result of destroying the voluntary activity, because who will do something voluntarily when you can get paid for it?

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More recently, we have been talking about putting a greater load on the voluntary sector by cutting direct support to various kinds of activities through the spending reviews the government has undertaken and through deficit reduction. Yet while the load increases on the voluntary sector, it is exactly the means that the voluntary sector uses to raise funds, increase donations and increase voluntary activity that is also under attack by other measures the government is contemplating.

By simultaneously tightening up rules on what is allowable as a charity and what is allowable as a tax deduction, and at the same time cutting back on direct support, the capacity of voluntary organizations to function gets more and more narrowly defined, gets put more and more into a straitjacket.

I think our main point would be that we have to come to grips with a coherent approach that would deal with a balance between the direct funding and support through the tax deduction system, not a complete elimination of both at the same time.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Friedman.

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Mr. Friedman: I’d like to pick up on the previous comments. When I talked about creating a new balance, I think that reflects very well what the previous speaker just talked about.

I’d also like to say that from the perspective of B’nai Brith, which operates on a membership basis, on the use of volunteers across the country for local and national community initiatives, fund-raising has become crucial and central to our continued ability to do what we’ve done in the past, at the same level.

Many of the issues people have talked about - the issue of attracting funds; the issue of a very competitive marketplace; the absolute requirement to have some type of incentive that can be used in making one self-sufficient to keep on carrying out what we have done in the past…. We have not relied on direct government grants in the past for our existence, and we don’t expect to have to do that in the future. Nevertheless, the ability to continue the full range of what we do is dependent on the capacity to raise funds. A number of people have talked about removing the barriers to raise those funds. I think they go squarely in the direction of what we would like to see as well.

The Chair: Thanks, Mr. Friedman.

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Mr. Friedman: I want to continue with what Arthur was talking about, that these differences exist even within Canada in terms of the rates at which people will give from one province to another. When one looks at the reasons for those different rates, they’re often linked to the role the provincial government has played in that particular region. So we have the evidence all around us that there is some kind of connection between the balance of what the state does directly and what kind of incentives work or don’t work for charitable giving.