Whose burden?
Two decades of government cuts to social spending have paralyzed the charities that Canada’s poor depend on for survival. But there is hope on the horizon
Daniel Aldana Cohen
Photography by David Barker Maltby
So noble to give yet so degrading to receive, charity contradicts the core ideas of a just society. Justice means everyone is equal and entitled to basic rights—not at the whim of a given volunteer, but as the responsibility of society as a whole. Yet more than any other time since the Second World War, the fate of our social service charities and the fifth of our population that lives in—or on the brink of—poverty are completely intertwined. It’s barely an exaggeration to say that for millions of Canadians, the health of our charities is a matter of survival.
As defined by Statistics Canada, social service organizations make up about 10 percent of Canada’s 160,000 non-profits and do a wide range of work, like providing services to children, the handicapped and refugees, as well as supplying things like shelter, income support and emergency food. As poverty deepens and the gap between rich and poor grows, the sector is failing to meet impossible expectations. “Most agencies doing direct service work are coming to the end of their rope,” says Rob Howarth, the executive director of Toronto Neighbourhood Centres, an association of non-profits.
Toronto makes a good case study. It’s Canada’s biggest city and most frequent destination for immigrants, but it’s also been devastated by the impact of Mike Harris’s cuts to welfare and other social services in the 1990s. And the struggles of its social services sector reflect a number of national trends.
Throughout the country, charities have long served as a site of moral edification and vessel for the surplus energies of the well meaning—and this legacy continues to cause big problems. But as our welfare state has dissolved and the deep problems of the charity model become ever more apparent, many in the non-profit sector have worked to turn these organizations into something totally different: a site of struggle for justice and a vessel for the emancipation and empowerment of the poor and excluded—in effect taking the charity out of non-profit. By looking frankly at how governments and charities have failed us these past two decades, we can catch a glimpse of how we could turn this disaster into an opportunity.
Like so many depressing stories, this one begins with Brian Mulroney. His election in 1984 famously brought big business’s style and substance to government, with inspiration from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, neo-liberalism’s bold avatars. Mulroney chipped away at social spending, betting that a surge of local charities, closer to the action, more flexible than bureaucrats and riding a wave of virtuous voluntarism, would pick up the slack. The rhetoric of corny nostalgia masked a profound ideological shift. As then U.S. president Reagan put it in 1981, “We’ve let government take away many things we once considered were really ours to do voluntarily out of the goodness of our hearts and a sense of community pride and neighbourliness.”
Elected in 1993 on a left-of-centre platform, the Chrétien-Martin Liberals took on Mulroney’s mission, only more vigorously. They delivered the “coup de grâce to the Canadian welfare state,” in the words of social work professor Shereen Ismael, taking a scythe to social programs, asking charities to fill the ever-widening gap and cutting funds to them as well. The poor and marginalized bore the brunt. (The idea that corporations and philanthropists would step up and fund the unglamorous social services was always a fantasy. Governments still provide twothrids of the sector’s funding.)
After calling for its expansion in opposition, Paul Martin helped eliminate our national housing program. In Toronto alone, the wait-list for public housing now numbers 71,000 families. Welfare rates have also been savaged—they’re now lower, in constant dollars, than they were in 1985. In 1989, the House of Commons passed a unanimous resolution to end child poverty within 10 years. While the overall poverty rate remained the same, the number of people living in extreme poverty more than tripled during that time.
Underfunded charities struggled to cope—they weren’t so much taking on government’s tasks as doing more to compensate for the effect of government cuts, especially income supports and housing. The phenomenon of emergency food relief is a good example. In 1980, not a single year-round food bank operated in Canada; today, close to a million Canadians use food banks every month.
In 1995, the same year Martin cut federal program spending by 19 percent, Canada’s charitable sector started organizing, taking steps that would culminate in the 2000 launch of a Voluntary Sector Initiative between charities and government with the ultimate aim of redefining their relationship.
But while charities researched and organized, governments acted. They changed the way they funded charities, from supporting the organization as a whole to treating non-profits like little companies, borrowing the business practice of contracting out tightly prescribed services. They now “purchase” individual programs tied to numeric goals—as specific as buying 50 spots in a homeless drop-in centre. (The provinces, which administer most of the money, each have their own funding practices, but most follow the feds in this contract approach.)
“We’re trying to apply market-based methods to what is not a business,” says Lynn Eakin, a Toronto researcher who last year released a study of nonprofits for social-policy think tank the Wellesley Institute called “We Can’t Afford to Do Business This Way.” Ironically, these business methods, invented to meet Bay Street’s desire for cuts to social programs, made it even harder for charities to play the role they were assigned.
Fostering innovation was one of the best reasons the state offered for deferring to smaller, more nimble organizations close to the communities they serve. But the charities have become so tightly controlled, their creativity is suffocated. Most government contracts are for one year only, with everchanging goals tied to passing fads; and not only do they fail to provide for the administration needed for research and development or fundraising—hollowing out the organizations—they typically underfund even their own projects by 15 percent.
Eakin’s study found that only three percent of grants permit agencies in Ontario to adjust programming and spending priorities to meet changing needs. So we get the worst of both worlds—the inflexibility of government bureaucracy paired with the inadequate funds of the hand-to-mouth non-profit.
Meanwhile, overzealous administrative requirements flowing from government accounting scandals divert vast amounts of resources from delivering services. It’s common for charities to have to produce data for reports to government that they don’t have any use for in their actual work.
Compounding this problem, charities are effectively gagged by a shortage of funds and draconian rules. Federal law has long limited registered charities to spending no more than 10 percent of their budget on advocacy. Plus, with so many charities competing for meagre funding, many are more reluctant to speak out than ever, meaning the necessary structural demands aren’t being made by the agencies close to the action and trusted by the public.
This says something about ideology, too, says Susan Carter, an Ottawa-based consultant and researcher who has worked extensively with Canadian non-profits. “As you have more offloading and downloading, government wants strong, effective organizations to deliver its services, but they can keep their mouth shut, thank you.”
This government incompetence is compounding some of the problems inherent in the charity model. Pat Capponi is a Toronto psychiatric survivor who’s been hospitalized for mental illness, been on welfare and been a client of various social services. She now works on the other side of the counter, mainly trying to erase it. She’s an author and facilitator with Voices from the Street, an organization that trains people who’ve been on the receiving end of social service organizations to actually help run them.
She laughs off many charities’ well-meaning mission statements, which she says have little bearing on reality. Highlighting a persistent class divide in the sector, she believes too many staff ignore constructive criticism while patting themselves on the back for doing good work. “Government policies have deepened poverty to the extent that workers truly don’t understand how poor people live now,” she says. “It’s more than not having money in your pocket. There are spiritual dimensions. When you’re trying to raise children—it just kind of destroys the individual from within. But the non-profits tend to use very narrow focuses. You have to divide a person into 17 segments and send them to 17 agencies to get help.
“I know there are good workers out there,” she adds, “but their voices tend to get drowned out. When you work in the sector, it’s just really hard to see the forest for the trees.”
Charity’s flaws also get in the way of strategy. While charities have done well at forming networks to study the problem and politely press for change, the sector has failed to unite behind any militant action. If non-profits provide services no matter what, I ask Eakin, aren’t they giving governments cover to keep slashing social spending—in effect, making poverty worse in the long run? She hesitates before answering, “It’s a terrible dilemma for people committed to helping others to consider not helping them.” She says there’s sometimes talk of a one-day strike, but even that modest action would be problematic, as it would require suspending vital services for that day.
In a sector heavily influenced by the charity mentality, collective and truly confrontational action just isn’t an option. The critical mass demanding change will have to come from outside the sector. (Heroic but miniscule groups of activists like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and Vancouver’s Anti- Poverty Committee are a good start, but remain too small to decisively move the debate.)
Ironically enough, if there’s hope in this bleak landscape, Liberals get much of the credit. Stéphane Dion’s ambitious targets for poverty reduction are eliciting cautious optimism. Same goes for Ontario’s Liberal government, which has begun a process to identify targets for reducing poverty and figuring out how to meet them. “We’ve all been so depressed and then it’s like somebody poured Prozac into our coffee,” says Capponi.
Charities are also banding together to lobby yet again, but this time prospects look better. In Toronto, a Community Social Services Campaign has forged a promising and novel partnership with unions. And Capponi sees in 25 in 5: Network for Poverty Reduction a coalition of non-profits and individuals that is finally ready to reach across class lines.
Meanwhile, if non-profits can’t eliminate poverty themselves, some have taken the knowledge gained in the past two decades to find ways to innovate in their communities, giving us a glimpse of what the sector could do if governments actually funded income supports and housing adequately.
Toronto’s The Stop Community Food Centre is an example of a small non-profit that’s broken out of the straitjacket. Though it still runs a form of food-bank service because need in the community is just so high, in the past decade it has expanded to do much, much more. At The Stop, members and staff work and strategize together on meeting community needs in creative ways. The Stop has started buying locally produced, seasonal and pesticide-free food, connecting solving hunger with broader issues of social justice. The centre also supplements what it buys thanks to donations with what it grows in its 8,000-square-foot community garden through its urban agriculture program. Communal cooking groups prepare food in the centre, which is helping form action and advocacy groups around issues like income security to help the community’s excluded members get organized and speak on their own behalf.
“If you deliver the service, you’ve got to connect the dots and ask the larger questions: it’s got to be politicized,” says Nick Saul, the organization’s executive director. “Stop is a site of struggle, it’s where you can do community organizing.”
The Stop is also opening a “Green Barn” that will house a greenhouse and education centre as part of a larger urban revitalization project in midtown Toronto, connecting people in the Christie and St. Clair area with a wide range of related food issues— for instance, demonstrating the links between local, sustainable agriculture and food security in Toronto. One reason it can innovate in this way is its reliance on an unusually high proportion of dedicated private financial supporters, from individuals to foundations. Saul recognizes that without broader changes to government funding practices—from “growing the pie” to loosening the strings—it won’t be easy for the bulk of social-service organizations to put their own ingenuity to work.
On a larger scale, St. Christopher House is another Toronto organization doing widely respected community work in a broad range of areas, from direct service programs such as Meals on Wheels to advocacy work on social policy. Its best money comes from United Way, which has adopted a funding model far better than the governments’—twoyear contracts with wide flexibility and funding for a project’s full cost. But United Way still contributes a fraction of what governments do. No private organization is anywhere near big enough to form the spine of a just society.
Indeed, compelling strategies to drastically reduce poverty, like those recently produced by Campaign 2000 or the National Council on Welfare, focus on the need for governments to boost spending on income security and housing. Yes, they need to be more efficient and creative than they were in the past. But the bottom line is that the state—not non-profits—needs to take responsibility for eliminating poverty by spending to address its root causes. “If income security programs and supports such as affordable housing were adequate and wellcoordinated,” says Maureen Fair, executive director of St. Christopher House, “our work could go back to supporting people through life transitions and doing community development work.”
As we’ve already seen, however, charities by their nature can’t bring about such structural change. It will have to be a broader group of citizens who demand and fight for a new approach, pushing political parties to make the decisions that will affect millions of Canadians.
This doesn’t leave non-profits out in the cold. There are countless ways for non-profits to exist within society and there is no iron law forcing governments to outsource their responsibilities onto voluntary organizations, or compelling non-profits to cling to the charitable legacy of the old poorhouses or Christian missionaries. Already, many cities and provinces are looking at improving relationships with charities, though without renewed spending on income and housing, little can change.
We don’t have to look farther than Quebec to glimpse an imperfect but distinct alternative. There, the government funds advocacy directly and speaks of mobilization and citizen engagement, where in most of Canada we speak of voluntarism. In Quebec, the Ministry of Employment and Social Solidarity works in relative partnership with the province’s NGOs, on which it depends for its own legitimacy. Of course, Quebec has its share of paternalistic and creepy organizations. But once we realize that how we use our institutions to translate our values into action is up for grabs, we can begin to take big, bold steps.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Brazil’s extraordinary minister of strategic affairs, has written, “It is not enough to rebel against the lack of justice, we should also rebel against the lack of imagination.” Liberated from the impossible task of being the government’s substitute teacher, social service organizations have the potential to play a vital, innovative role in our communities. To turn this crisis into an opportunity will be as rewarding as it will be challenging.
