O Canada!

I’m in Moncton, New Brunswick this week for the annual Canadian Public Arts Funders conference.  I’ve been invited to speak about “emerging alternatives to the traditional non-profit model” for the arts.  I warned them that all of my meager knowledge on this subject is based on US laws and tax policy, but they assured me that wasn’t a problem.  Nonetheless, I thought it would be prudent to do a few minutes of research on the legal and fiscal landscape here, so that I could competently address any big differences with the way we do things down south.

To my surprise, it appears that the laws governing charities and charitable giving in Canada are extremely similar to what we’ve got in the US.  I say this surprised me because I know they’ve got a very different ratio of public support to private support than we have.  In the US, the vast majority of support for non-profit organizations comes from private sources (e.g. individuals and foundations).  In Canada, it’s much more balanced.  (In Europe, of course, almost all support comes from public sources.)

Since I’m one of those free-market-believes-in-the-power-of-incentives kind of guys, I was expecting that the discrepancy in funding source significance would be the result of some underlying difference in tax codes or giving incentives.  But if that’s the case, then the culprit is too subtle to be revealed by my superficial research.  That’s possible, of course, but more likely there are simply different factors at work.

Could this difference simply be cultural?  Is there more of a collectivist/socialist mentality in Canada that suggests that social needs can and should be fulfilled primarily by the government?  Or perhaps the fact that public funders are comparatively generous lets private supporters off the hook.

It’s a tricky question, and I don’t have anything approaching an answer.  Regardless, it’s clear that the US model of philanthropy is ascendant and the European model in decline.  This will dismay some of us in America who have spent decades salivating over the generosity of countries like Finland.  Still, it’s the way things are headed, so we who have always lived with a quasi-market-based approach to philanthropy should be prepared to counsel and coach our peers as they detach from the government teat.