McLeod Group Blog

Why are Canadian CSOs doing so little policy advocacy?

Why are Canadian CSOs doing so little policy advocacy?

McLeod Group guest blog by John Cameron, August 12, 2019

Just and sustainable global development requires legal and policy change in Canada and globally, and civil society organizations (CSOs) can play important roles in advocating for that change. Canadian policies on international development and humanitarian assistance, climate change mitigation, international trade and investment agreements, and the monitoring and regulation of Canadian corporations that operate overseas or that source inputs through global supply chains all have significant impacts on the well-being of people in the global South. They require strategic advocacy in Canada rather than charitable work overseas.

However, recently published data analysis in the Canadian Journal of Development Studies makes clear that CSOs in the international cooperation sector in Canada allocate very few resources to public policy advocacy – or at least that they report very little to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and the Lobbying Commissioner of Canada. In 2007–2016, the member organizations of the Canadian Council of International Co-operation (CCIC) collectively reported spending an average of 0.48% of their annual expenditures on what the CRA defined as “political activities”. Over the same time period, never more than 22 out of over 80 CCIC organizations submitted reports on lobbying activities to the Office of the Lobbying Commissioner, and never more than eight ever reported over 20 lobbying activities per year.

Data collected by the CCIC itself adds more to this picture: more than half of the 70 organizations that responded to a 2016 survey on public policy engagement indicated that they never or only irregularly engaged in efforts to influence government laws and policies, and fewer than 10 organizations indicated that they did so on a monthly basis.

Charity sector leaders have long argued that their capacity to engage in public policy advocacy was constrained by the CRA regulations that capped spending on “political activities” at 10% of annual revenue for which the charity issued income tax receipts. Under the Harper government (2006–2015), those regulations were enforced with particular vigour, creating what many charities referred to as a “chill effect” on advocacy (see McLeod Group blog).

However, in December 2018, the Trudeau government amended the Income Tax Act to eliminate the restrictions on non-partisan public policy advocacy by charities, as long as the activities related to organizations’ legally registered purposes (see McLeod Group blog). According to the new regulations, charities can devote up to 100% of their resources to what the CRA calls “Public Policy Development and Dialogue Activities” (PPDDAs). Such PPDDAs must not be in support of any particular party or candidate.

The changes to the Income Tax Act and the CRA regulations are very important, and represent a welcome change. But are they enough to enable or motivate Canadian charities to hold governments accountable or to try to shape government laws and policies? Alas, other constraints remain firmly in place.

An important impediment is the relatively high dependence of many Canadian CSOs on government funding and the subsequent unwillingness to “bite the hand that feeds them”. The Canadian charitable sector has a deeply engrained culture of risk aversion towards public policy engagement. This culture has been shaped by the legacies of more than a century of restrictive regulations, periodic political attacks on outspoken organizations, and a donor base that seems more interested in “doing good” through support for relief efforts and social services than in “preventing harm” by investing in public policy work.

However, even organizations that want to engage in public policy work often can’t find funding to support it. The staff members responsible for public policy advocacy in many CSOs have a hard time making the case for resources to support advocacy within their own organizations.

As a policy officer in one large CSO stated with frustration, advocacy work “is not funded”. Governments don’t support it, very few philanthropic foundations back it, and individual donors typically want their charitable contributions to go directly to poverty relief overseas, not to research and advocacy work in Canada. As another policy advocacy officer explained, “it’s really hard to make [advocacy] seem interesting and immediate to donors. Policy changes can take decades and most people won’t give money for hypothetical wins that are decades down the road”.

Bigger changes are still needed if Canadian charities are to play meaningful roles in holding governments accountable and to use their experience to inform public policy. The federal government should do more to reassure risk-averse charities that it will not bite back at organizations that publicly criticize its policy positions by cutting their funding. And both charities and the federal government need to do more to encourage the Canadian public to support public policy advocacy by Canadian CSOs by highlighting the value of the advocacy work they already do in all areas of public policy, from seat belt and anti-smoking laws to the advocacy campaign behind the creation of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise.

John Cameron is Associate Professor of International Development Studies, Dalhousie University.