‘Tis the season for giving, but for Canadians that increasingly entails foregoing gifts to charities.
The share of tax-filers in Canada who reported that they donated to charity sat at just 16.8 per cent in 2023, according to the latest numbers from Statistics Canada, down from nearly 22 per cent a decade earlier.
It’s a phenomenon that has unfolded across all provinces.
This is traditionally the biggest time of the year for Canadian charities to fundraise. That’s partly because of holiday sentiment, but also because companies that pay bonuses to employees typically do so now.
But charities have been struggling in recent years amid declines in both the number of donors and the amounts being given. A new report from the Fraser Institute that analyzed tax data found that from 2013 to 2023 the share of aggregate income donated to charity fell in every province except Alberta.
Rising living costs are part of the reason for Canadians’ collective stinginess, but some people have also shifted their altruism from traditional charities to social-media driven crowdfunding efforts.
It’s worth noting that between 2013 and 2023 the national net worth of households soared by 50 per cent after adjusting for inflation, owing to real estate and stock market gains, according to an analysis of Statscan’s balance sheet data. National net worth has climbed another 10 per cent since then in real terms.
As the Fraser Institute’s Jake Fuss and Grady Munro wrote in a note accompanying their report, to put the decline in charitable giving in perspective, there would have been 1.5 million more Canadians who donated in 2023 if donation rates stayed the same as in 2013.
That would have equated to $755.5-million more in gifts.
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