Opinion
Charity Campaigns vs. Charity Donations

Over the past few years, I’ve had canvassers coming to my home in Toronto on behalf of a wide range of non-profits – including hospitals and mental health and homeless support organizations. The fundraisers all “wear” a noticeable post secondary student vibe. That’s hardly news.
But curiously, no matter what they’re collecting for, every last one of them uses the exact same methodology. That is, they refuse to take a one-time donation, instead insisting I sign up for six (not seven, and definitely not five) monthly payments. They don’t want me donating online through the organization’s website (explaining that they wouldn’t get credit for that). They do expect me to enter my basic information on a high-end tablet they’re carrying. When that’s done, they’ll use their smartphones to make a call to a remote agent who would take my financial information.
I only completed the process once – for the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto. But that was mostly because, at the time, they were in the middle of quite literally saving my granddaughter’s life. I couldn’t very well say no.
Because of the paranoia that comes with my background in IT systems administration, I generally don’t participate, explaining that I never share financial information on a call I didn’t initiate. At the same time, these campaigns are not fraudulent and, with the possible exception of UNICEF, they all represent legitimate organizations. Nevertheless, they all come with the clear fingerprints of a third-party, for-profit company. Which makes me curious.
After a little digging, it became clear that a company called Globalfaces Direct was the most likely employer of the face-to-face (F2F) canvassers I’m seeing. It’s also obvious that those canvassers are paid at least partially through revenue-based commissions.
Estimating how much of your donations are actually used for charitable work can be difficult. For once thing, in the case of SickKids, it’s not even clear which organization the money is going to. There at least three related non-profit accounts registered with CRA: The Hospital for Sick Children, The Hospital for Sick Children Foundation, and the SickKids Charitable Giving Fund.
But even where there isn’t such ambiguity we have only limited visibility into an organization’s finances. Covenant House, for instance, issued receipts for $26 million in donations for 2024, but there’s no way to know how much of that came through Globalfaces Direct F2F campaigns. And there’s certainly no public record indicating how much of that $26 million was spent on commissions and overhead. CRA filings for Covenant House do report fundraising costs of $9.4 million in 2024, which was 22 percent of their total spending and 32 percent of all donations.
It’s likely that their $9.4 million in fundraising costs includes Globalfaces Direct’s canvasser commissions and overhead costs. But those are only some of the costs – which likely include events, direct mail, and other in-house efforts. In fact, it’s not unreasonable to assume that only 20-30 percent of each dollar raised through F2F canvassing is actually spent on charity work.
From the perspective of the non-profit, hiring F2F companies can generate new sources of stable, long-term income that would have been otherwise unattainable. Especially if the F2F agreement specifies withholding a percentage of what’s collected rather than charging a flat fee, then a non-profit has nothing to lose. Why wouldn’t SickKids or Covenant House sign up for that?
Of course, a lot of that will depend on how you think about the numbers. Taken as a whole, an organization that spends just 32 percent of their donations on fundraising activities is well within CRA guidelines: “Fundraising is acceptable unless it is a purpose of the charity (a collateral non-charitable purpose).” But if we just looked at the money raised through a F2F campaign, that percentage would likely be a lot higher.
Similarly, CRA also expects that: “Fundraising is acceptable unless it delivers a more than incidental private benefit.” In other words, if a private company like Globalfaces Direct were to realize financial gain that’s “more than incidental”, it might fail to meet CRA guidelines.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way for donors to assess the numbers on those terms. So regular people who prefer to direct as much of their donation as possible to the actual cause will generally be far better off donating through an institution’s website or, even better, through a single CRA-friendly aggregator like CanadaHelps.org.
But it would be nice if CRA reporting rules clearly broke those numbers down so we could judge for ourselves.
Daily Caller
‘Strange Confluence Of Variables’: Mike Benz Wants Transparency Task Force To Investigate What Happened in Butler, PA

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Former State Department official Mike Benz raised serious concerns on Fox News Monday about the events surrounding the shooting in Butler, Pa., asking whether federal law enforcement played a more significant role than originally reported.
It’s been a year since the shooting of President Donald Trump at his rally in Butler, and while investigations have shed light on the incident, several critical questions remain unanswered. During an appearance on “The Will Cain Show,” Benz said he believes the lack of transparency in the case has led to many critical questions remaining unanswered.
“So the question is, if Crooks was cultivated or if he was being monitored or potentially interacted with by federal law enforcement agents who put him onto that? And I think that the total lack of transparency, it’s sort of defying the laws of surveillance state physics,” Benz said. “I think most people believe that if federal law enforcement were to get ahold of their phone, that pretty much everything could be scraped from it. You don’t know if, for example, in this case, he was communicating with a foreign government.”
Benz then raised concerns that the investigation into the Butler shooting could extend beyond the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), suggesting that agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) might be involved in cracking encrypted communications.
WATCH:
“This, to me, may go beyond, you know, FBI, DHS. We know that the NSA is able to crack these sorts of things. And so it’s all very strange to me,” Benz said. “But, again, there’s another whistleblower report that I believe Josh Hawley’s whistleblower mentioned, which was that HSI [Homeland Security Investigation] agents kind of mysteriously replaced a fair number of Secret Service agents that day because Secret Service was said to be split between the NATO summit and Jill Biden being away.”
Benz referred to what he called a troubling series of events leading up to the Butler shooting.
“And that Secret Service had denied, I think, about 10 requests for additional security from the Trump campaign prior to the shooting. And so it is just a strange confluence of variables that just do not sit well for the American public,” Benz said. “And I think that there should be a sort of transparency task force so that these specific questions about HSI and the potential recruiting as an informant about the contents of the phone and the like can be answered.”
A report released Sept. 2024 uncovered whistleblower allegations about the Secret Service’s security failures during the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler. The office of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri published the whistleblower report and revealed previously undisclosed claims about the DHS and Secret Service committing multiple failures.
Whistleblowers allege that the agent in charge of the Butler rally failed a key examination during federal training and was considered “low-caliber.” The report also said that the Secret Service’s intelligence units were absent from the rally, which contributed to communication failures between law enforcement agencies.
Senior U.S. Secret Service officials were aware of a “classified threat” to Trump’s life 10 days before the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt but failed to inform the agents protecting him. A report from the Government Accountability Office said Sunday that the intelligence, presented to Secret Service leadership, never reached the field team due to a “siloed practice for sharing classified information.”
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News)
Business
Mark Carney’s Fiscal Fantasy Will Bankrupt Canada

By Gwyn Morgan
Mark Carney was supposed to be the adult in the room. After nearly a decade of runaway spending under Justin Trudeau, the former central banker was presented to Canadians as a steady hand – someone who could responsibly manage the economy and restore fiscal discipline.
Instead, Carney has taken Trudeau’s recklessness and dialled it up. His government’s recently released spending plan shows an increase of 8.5 percent this fiscal year to $437.8 billion. Add in “non-budgetary spending” such as EI payouts, plus at least $49 billion just to service the burgeoning national debt and total spending in Carney’s first year in office will hit $554.5 billion.
Even if tax revenues were to remain level with last year – and they almost certainly won’t given the tariff wars ravaging Canadian industry – we are hurtling toward a deficit that could easily exceed 3 percent of GDP, and thus dwarf our meagre annual economic growth. It will only get worse. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates debt interest alone will consume $70 billion annually by 2029. Fitch Ratings recently warned of Canada’s “rapid and steep fiscal deterioration”, noting that if the Liberal program is implemented total federal, provincial and local debt would rise to 90 percent of GDP.
This was already a fiscal powder keg. But then Carney casually tossed in a lit match. At June’s NATO summit, he pledged to raise defence spending to 2 percent of GDP this fiscal year – to roughly $62 billion. Days later, he stunned even his own caucus by promising to match NATO’s new 5 percent target. If he and his Liberal colleagues follow through, Canada’s defence spending will balloon to the current annual equivalent of $155 billion per year. There is no plan to pay for this. It will all go on the national credit card.
This is not “responsible government.” It is economic madness.
And it’s happening amid broader economic decline. Business investment per worker – a key driver of productivity and living standards – has been shrinking since 2015. The C.D. Howe Institute warns that Canadian workers are increasingly “underequipped compared to their peers abroad,” making us less competitive and less prosperous.
The problem isn’t a lack of money; it’s a lack of discipline and vision. We’ve created a business climate that punishes investment: high taxes, sluggish regulatory processes, and politically motivated uncertainty. Carney has done nothing to reverse this. If anything, he’s making the situation worse.
Recall the 2008 global financial meltdown. Carney loves to highlight his role as Bank of Canada Governor during that time but the true credit for steering the country through the crisis belongs to then-prime minister Stephen Harper and his finance minister, Jim Flaherty. Facing the pressures of a minority Parliament, they made the tough decisions that safeguarded Canada’s fiscal foundation. Their disciplined governance is something Carney would do well to emulate.
Instead, he’s tearing down that legacy. His recent $4.3 billion aid pledge to Ukraine, made without parliamentary approval, exemplifies his careless approach. And his self-proclaimed image as the experienced technocrat who could go eyeball-to-eyeball against Trump is starting to crack. Instead of respecting Carney, Trump is almost toying with him, announcing in June, for example that the U.S. would pull out of the much-ballyhooed bilateral trade talks launched at the G7 Summit less than two weeks earlier.
Ordinary Canadians will foot the bill for Carney’s fiscal mess. The dollar has weakened. Young Canadians – already priced out of the housing market – will inherit a mountain of debt. This is not stewardship. It’s generational theft.
Some still believe Carney will pivot – that he will eventually govern sensibly. But nothing in his actions supports that hope. A leader serious about economic renewal would cancel wasteful Trudeau-era programs, streamline approvals for energy and resource projects, and offer incentives for capital investment. Instead, we’re getting more borrowing and ideological showmanship.
It’s no longer credible to say Carney is better than Trudeau. He’s worse. Trudeau at least pretended deficits were temporary. Carney has made them permanent – and more dangerous.
This is a betrayal of the fiscal stability Canadians were promised. If we care about our credit rating, our standard of living, or the future we are leaving our children, we must change course.
That begins by removing a government unwilling – or unable – to do the job.
Canada once set an economic example for others. Those days are gone. The warning signs – soaring debt, declining productivity, and diminished global standing – are everywhere. Carney’s defenders may still hope he can grow into the job. Canada cannot afford to wait and find out.
The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
-
Fraser Institute1 day ago
Before Trudeau average annual immigration was 617,800. Under Trudeau number skyrocketted to 1.4 million annually
-
MAiD2 days ago
Canada’s euthanasia regime is already killing the disabled. It’s about to get worse
-
Frontier Centre for Public Policy1 day ago
New Book Warns The Decline In Marriage Comes At A High Cost
-
Business2 days ago
Prime minister can make good on campaign promise by reforming Canada Health Act
-
Addictions1 day ago
‘Over and over until they die’: Drug crisis pushes first responders to the brink
-
International2 days ago
Chicago suburb purchases childhood home of Pope Leo XIV
-
Daily Caller1 day ago
USAID Quietly Sent Thousands Of Viruses To Chinese Military-Linked Biolab
-
Energy1 day ago
LNG Export Marks Beginning Of Canadian Energy Independence