Generosity in Canada: The 2023 Generosity Index is a new study that finds the percentage of Canadian tax filers donating to charity during the 2021 tax year—just 17.7 per cent—is the lowest proportion of Canadians donating since at least 2001, with Manitoba having had the highest percentage of tax filers that donated to charity among the provinces (19.7 per cent) during the 2021 tax year while New Brunswick had the lowest (15.4 per cent).
Helping the Poor: A Critical Analysis of Poverty Policy in Canada is the latest essay in the Institute’s Thinking About Poverty series by senior fellow Christopher A. Sarlo, professor emeritus at Nipissing University. It examines formal government policies and programs designed to help Canadians living in poverty, and assesses whether government help is really helping the poor.
Counting the Poor: The Empirical Evidence is the second part of the Thinking About Poverty series by Senior Fellow Christopher A. Sarlo. The new study finds that three different Statistics Canada models for measuring poverty are broadly consistent: Income poverty for households is in the five to seven per cent range; and for individuals, it is in the four to six per cent range. Critically, the study also measures consumption poverty, which measures what households consume rather than counting their income. This is important because many low-income households will draw on savings, charity, assistance from family, etc. that assists them but doesn’t appear in income statistics. Consumption poverty was less than three per cent of Canadians in 2019, which points to an all-time low for “basic needs” poverty in Canada.
Generosity in Canada: The 2022 Generosity Index finds that the total amount donated to registered charities by Canadians in 2020—just 0.49 per cent of their income—is the lowest amount since at least 2000. Moreover, the number of Canadians donating to charity—as a percentage of all tax filers—has fallen from 25.5 per cent to 19.1 per cent over the past two decades.
