Brief to the House of Commons Finance Committee on Canada's Charitable Sector
Posted January 7th, 2012 by Gena Rotstein
in
In the fall, I posted a brief for the House of Commons Finance Committee on social enterprise and social finance policy development. The final version, along with others that were submitted can be found here.
The Finance Committee is expanding their work and is now looking at charitable tax incentives. The crowdsourcing of the last brief proved to be quite successful so I would like to try it again.
Attached is a draft of the submission for the Finance Committee. I will be sending in the final version on January 14th. Please share your thoughts and comments on this blog post. If you would like your name added to the reference list of this paper please let me know so that I can ensure that appropirate credit is made.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Briefing to the House of Commons Finance Committee on Charitable Giving in Canada - Draft.pdf | 839.43 KB |
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Comments
High Level Rec 3. this
High Level Rec
3. this sentece feels unfinished
Issue - well described
Recommendations
3. this is the big one for me - we can't continue reducing accountability to accounting. Our audit culture gets what it measures ~ balanced financial statements that don't necessarily indicate community benefit
4,5,6 All well stated and would change the landscape while reducing government financial/oversight role in social issues. You know I believe that less government would strengthen community.
Great work Gena.
Feedback
Thanks Bob!
Do you think that our government, and for that matter, charities as a whole, are ready for this type of change?
Can you forsee what some of the pushback might be? Perhaps this is something that can be discussed in a web-forum?
Proofing
Hi, Gena,
Brain's a little fried, so I'm not sure how much substantive value I can provide. What I can do in my sleep, though, is proofread, so:
- Point 3 in High Level Recommendations should read "WHOSE mandate is..."
- Verb conjugation is inconsistent across the High Level Recommendations. They should all be either imperative verbs (Review charity application process...) or passive nouns (Review of charity application process)
- Similar issue with the list of research findings. Some are structured as full sentences with active verbs (Online giving represents...), and some are passive sentence fragments (Globalization of social issues). The two styles do not work together in one list. It's jarring and illogical.
- On page 4, not sure why "in the coming years" is bolded
- Page 4, paragraph 3: "Tax incentives ARE"
- List of recommendations on page 5: same issue as previous lists. You are either giving commands (Establish a thing.), or recommending something (Establishment of a thing.) Grammatical structure should match across all items in the same list.
- Throughout: the difference between using double quotation marks and single ones is the difference between quoting people and using figurative terms. Rule of thumb: if you could qualify the term by saying that it's "the so-called (term)", meaning that the term may not be completely accurate but it's often used, then single quotes are appropriate. However, if you are using quotes because the term is literally something people correctly say, or if you're directly quoting someone, then double quotes are appropriate.
Hope all that nitpicking is appropriate. My fuzzy brain thinks it also agrees with the content.
Nadine
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