| q0192837465 | 12-16-2009 02:19 PM |
Only 23% of British Columbian make donations
Quote:
Shame on us, in our Christmas comfort
In B.C., only about 23 per cent make donations
Ethan Baron
The Province
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
CREDIT: Gerry Kahrmann, The Province
Salvation Army kettle hangs neglected Tuesday in a busy Vancouver shopping mall.
You see them on city sidewalks, young men and women with binders in their hands, urging passersby to donate money to Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International. Now, with the season of giving upon us, a new report has revealed how tough a job these people have getting British Columbians to part with their money.
Though a trip to any jam-packed mall will show that we're not too bad at buying presents for our loved ones, just-released research by the conservative Fraser Institute reveals that the buck pretty much stops there.
Barely one in five residents of B.C. gives money to charity, the institute says, basing its conclusions on income-tax data from the Canada Revenue Agency. This prosperous province, where only about 23 per cent of tax filers document charitable contributions, even falls below the Canadian average of 24 per cent.
And British Columbians, with the rest of Canadians, lag behind Americans in giving to charity. About 27 per cent of our neighbours to the south give to charitable causes, the institute's analysis of U.S. Internal Revenue Service figures shows.
Most of us in B.C., and in the rest of the country, have it pretty good. We can buy healthy food, and plenty of it. We can walk into a medical clinic or hospital and get treated for virtually anything that ails us. We can turn on the tap and drink clean, treated water.
Not so for billions of the rest of the people with whom we share this planet, even though many live in countries where natural resources and labour are transformed into profit by Canadian companies, boosting our standard of living while leaving impoverished citizens with little or nothing.
Our cellphones, laptops and computer games contain coltan, a blood-mineral that drives war and epidemic rape in the country that produces the majority of the ore-- the Democratic Republic of Congo, where fighting and conflict-related famine and disease have killed five million people, nearly as many as the Holocaust.
We eat fruit grown on multinational companies' South American plantations, while peasant farmers scratch out a miserable living from tiny, infertile plots.
Our clothes, and our children's toys, come from sweatshops in India, Bangladesh and China. Our cars run on petroleum that propels war and suffering in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. And we all live on land that once produced livelihoods for native people, whom we have let fall into grotesque poverty.
Of course, we pay high taxes in Canada, and it can be tempting to hang on to the rest of our money because we're already giving a hefty share to government. But we still enjoy a remarkably high standard of living, derived in large part from the abysmal living standards of the world's poor, both afar and at home.
On Robson Street, I found Mia Internicola standing under a dripping awning, holding a Save the Children binder as dozens of shoppers passed by from one high-end shop to another. Internicola, 29, says she gets maybe four or five donations a day, but when someone does give, she's amazed at how much they care.
"There are a lot of good people out there, who are doing the best they can," she says.
Are you doing the best you can?
| It's sad. I know I haven't donated a dime in years. Maybe it's time to change. |
