The percentage of all tax-paying Canadians who donate to charity is at the lowest point in 20 years, finds a new study by the Fraser Institute.“The holiday season is a time to reflect on charitable giving, and the data shows Canadians are consistently less charitable every year, which means charities face greater challenges to secure resources to help those in need,” said Jake Fuss, director of Fiscal Studies at the Fraser Institute and co-author of Generosity in Canada: The 2024 Generosity Index.The study by the independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank finds that the percentage of Canadian tax filers donating to charity during the 2022 tax year is the lowest since at least 2002. Canadians’ generosity peaked at 25.4% of tax-filers donating in 2004, before declining in subsequent years to its current 17.1%Nationally, the total amount donated to charity by Canadian tax filers has also fallen from 0.61% of income in 2002 to 0.50% of income in 2022. The study finds that Manitoba had the highest percentage of tax filers that donated to charity among the provinces (19.3%) during the 2022 tax year while New Brunswick had the lowest (14.7%). Likewise, Manitoba also donated the highest percentage of its aggregate income to charity among the provinces (0.71%) while Quebec donated the lowest (0.26%).“A smaller proportion of Canadians are donating to registered charities than what we saw in previous decades, and those who are donating are donating less,” said Fuss.Grady Munro, policy analyst and co-author, added, “This decline in generosity in Canada undoubtedly limits the ability of Canadian charities to improve the quality of life in their communities and beyond."In 2021, Americans gave 1.22% of their aggregate income to charity (US IRS, 2024; Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2024). That rate was more than twice the percentage of aggregate income donated by Canadians during the same year (0.55%) (Statistics Canada, 2024). If Canadians had given the same percentage of their aggregate income to charity as Americans had, there would have been $14.4 billion more Canadian donations to charities (a potential total of $26.2 billion).Forty-one US states (including D.C.) gave a higher percentage of aggregate income to charity than any Canadian province or territory in the 2021 tax year. In Arkansas, 3.38% of aggregate income was donated to charity—the highest percentage among US states and Canadian subnational jurisdictions. Wyoming was second on this measure with 3.15% of aggregate income donated to charity.By contrast, the percentage of aggregate income donated to charity in Manitoba, Canada’s highest ranked province on this measure, was just 0.74%—less than one-quarter of the amount donated in Arkansas.
