Gareth KirkbyCommunication teacher, professional communication, strategy
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Thesis
    • Thesis Intro: Click
    • My Master’s Thesis: Uncharitable Chill
    • Media
  • Strategic Communications
  • Journalism
  • Photography
  • Resume

Thirty Years of Declining Influence by Civil Society

August 9, 2014 No comments Article
FacebookTwitterGoogle+TumblrRedditLinkedInEmailPrint

My Master’s the­sis found, among other things, that the cur­rent fed­eral gov­ern­ment has abused its power by treat­ing char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tions as ene­mies of Canada and of the gov­ern­ment and this threat­ens the vigor of our democracy.

But it didn’t start with the rhetoric and politi­cized audits now tar­get­ing char­i­ties. It didn’t even begin with this gov­ern­ment, though it has been esca­lated into a whole new cat­e­gory, both qual­i­ta­tively and quantitatively.

Here’s how we got here:

  • In the post-war years, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment began to acknowl­edge a role for civil-society orga­ni­za­tions to help develop new pol­icy ini­tia­tives and began ten­ta­tively to reach out;
  • In the 1970s, the Trudeau gov­ern­ment markedly expanded the process, reach­ing out for pol­icy input to orga­ni­za­tions that could claim to rep­re­sent groups of peo­ple with­out much power or influ­ence, includ­ing minor­ity groups. In par­tic­u­lar, the Trudeau gov­ern­ment wel­comed input from women’s orga­ni­za­tions, lin­guis­tic minori­ties (par­tic­u­larly Franco-Canadian), abo­rig­i­nals, and ethno-cultural groups. The gov­ern­ment con­tributed sub­stan­tial fund­ing to these orga­ni­za­tions and invited them to make direct input to social policy;
  • This input was rolled back to some extent in the lat­ter years of the Trudeau gov­ern­ment, as it chose to pare back social-justice pro­grams in a declin­ing econ­omy and shift its pol­icy focus;
  • In the 1980s, with groups oppos­ing mul­ti­ple pol­icy ini­tia­tives of the Mul­roney government—a neo-liberal shift, free trade, dereg­u­la­tion, reduced gov­ern­ment sup­port for social programs—core fund­ing was pared back, but project fund­ing con­tin­ued for groups. Groups were still viewed as rep­re­sen­ta­tive, but the idea was being challenged;
  • In the 1990s, the Chre­tien gov­ern­ment moved toward reduced recog­ni­tion of the role of civil-society in policy-making. Fund­ing of orga­ni­za­tions con­tin­ued to atro­phy in the Chre­tien years, but they were still often con­sulted, par­tic­u­larly at the final stage of pol­icy for­ma­tion rather than in the early stages as was more com­mon in the Trudeau years. The gov­ern­ment was influ­enced by the “new-right” Reform Party stance that civil soci­ety groups were “vested inter­ests” rather than rep­re­sen­ta­tive, a dis­tinc­tion it did not make for busi­nesses and their rep­re­sen­ta­tive orga­ni­za­tions. Polit­i­cal sci­en­tist David Lay­cock saw this as “the pol­i­tics of resentment”;
  • Unlike in the United States, national Cana­dian orga­ni­za­tions were not eas­ily retooled from a rep­re­sen­ta­tive policy-input func­tion to deliv­er­ing gov­ern­ment pro­grams at lower cost than could gov­ern­ment employ­ees. This has, how­ever, hap­pened much more at the provin­cial level;
  • When the cur­rent gov­ern­ment came to power in 2006, they quickly moved to shut down some orga­ni­za­tions, defund oth­ers, and make other changes that hurt rep­re­sen­ta­tive groups. A 2012 study of 26 national vol­un­tary orga­ni­za­tions by aca­d­e­mic Rachel Lafor­est found six had to shut down oper­a­tions com­pletely and 14 expe­ri­enced fed­eral fund­ing cuts. Some highly acclaimed orga­ni­za­tions were par­tic­u­larly hard-hit: The Cana­dian Coun­cil for Social Devel­op­ment (CCSD) lost all fund­ing despite its national lead­er­ship for 90 years on social pol­icy. The Cana­dian Coun­cil for Inter­na­tional Co-Operation lost 70 per­cent of fed­eral fund­ing despite a 40-year part­ner­ship with gov­ern­ment; it sur­vives as a shadow of its for­mer self;
  • The women’s health and child-care move­ments have been par­tic­u­larly hard-hit by the government’s fund slash­ing and pol­icy shifts. The Mar­tin Lib­eral gov­ern­ment was in the process of imple­ment­ing a new national social pro­gram, a com­pre­hen­sive national child-care strat­egy, at the time that it called an elec­tion that the Con­ser­v­a­tives won. The new gov­ern­ment killed those plans and the move­ment pretty much shut­tered the shop in Ottawa, lay­ing of paid staff, and return­ing to grass­roots activism. The Mar­tin government’s Kelowna Accord, with provin­cial buy-in for a major step for­ward in address­ing First Nations self-government and social-justice, was also killed in 2006 by the Harper gov­ern­ment. One result of that is an increas­ingly alien­ated First Nations grass-roots, espe­cially among youth;
  • With sharp fund­ing reduc­tions to many national move­ment head­quar­ters, provin­cial and local orga­ni­za­tions have had to try to take up the slack, but they have lacked the resources. The result has been dev­as­tat­ing to some legit­i­mate and impor­tant issues and causes, while oth­ers have adapted and are shift­ing to a provin­cial focus with some suc­cess. Some aca­d­e­mics argue that the Harper gov­ern­ment is delib­er­ately sac­ri­fic­ing a half-century of increased federal-government involve­ment in social and health issues due to an ide­o­log­i­cal bent to leav­ing these issues to the provinces. Cer­tainly, our Con­sti­tu­tion des­ig­nates these as provin­cial jurisdiction;
  • With the elec­tion of the Harper gov­ern­ment, many organizations—including charities—that had a his­tory of being invited in to dis­cuss pub­lic pol­icy options found them­selves shut out. Invi­ta­tions vir­tu­ally stopped, requests for meet­ings got fewer responses, and phone calls were much less often returned;
  • My research found that, due to the above trend, some char­i­ties have aban­doned their lob­by­ing reg­is­tra­tions. Oth­ers have shifted their com­mu­ni­ca­tions away from tar­get­ing gov­ern­ment to moti­vat­ing mem­bers, sup­port­ers, and aver­age Cana­di­ans through web and social media. Some have shifted from try­ing to influ­ence fed­eral pol­icy to influ­enc­ing cor­po­rate actions. There are dis­turb­ing indi­ca­tions that this gov­ern­ment sees itself as the only essen­tial source of input on pol­icy devel­op­ment. It’s drink­ing its own bath­wa­ter rather than con­sult­ing widely and deeply about impor­tant pol­icy options;
  • Lafor­est and fel­low aca­d­e­mic Susan D Phillips argue that Canada’s fed­eral gov­ern­ment, along with most in the West­ern world, largely reject claims of “legit­i­macy” com­ing from the rep­re­sen­ta­tive nature of many civil-society orga­ni­za­tions. In par­al­lel with this, at least in Canada, many orga­ni­za­tions have inter­nal­ized the demo­c­ra­t­i­cally dan­ger­ous idea that “advo­cacy” on pub­lic pol­icy issues is no longer the val­ued thing it was in the 1960s to 1980s, but is some­how an unac­cept­able, indeed “wrong,” activ­ity. I see these shifts as a pro­found threat to the notion that gen­uine democ­racy requires an under­stand­ing that elected gov­ern­ments are NOT the only legit­i­mate par­tic­i­pants in demo­c­ra­tic decision-making (and I will write about this in more detail in an upcom­ing post);
  • We’re now at the stage where the gov­ern­ment is treat­ing those with dif­fer­ent pol­icy ideas than its own as ene­mies of the gov­ern­ment and of the nation. Wit­ness the shut­ting down of huge swaths of our sci­en­tific com­mu­nity. Wit­ness the rhetoric con­flat­ing char­i­ties and civil-society orga­ni­za­tions with money-launderers, crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tions, and ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions, and list­ing envi­ron­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions in our offi­cial ter­ror­ism plan as poten­tial threats to the nation’s secu­rity. Wit­ness the fun­nel they cre­ated to drive Canada Rev­enue Agency toward political-activity audits of orga­ni­za­tions that dif­fer with them on key policies.

My above analy­sis owes much to the wide and deep jour­nal and book research on civil soci­ety and vol­un­teer orga­ni­za­tions by pro­fes­sors Rachel Lafor­est and Susan D. Phillips, and other resources. I apol­o­gize to them for any over-generalizations and shifted nuances in inter­pre­ta­tions aris­ing from my adapt­ing their research to my research needs and par­tic­u­larly for this blog post­ing. For those inter­ested in more details on the his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship of rep­re­sen­ta­tive orga­ni­za­tions and gov­ern­ments regard­ing pol­icy for­ma­tion, I sug­gest a close read­ing of the works of pro­fes­sors Lafor­est and Phillips as did I.

Mean­while, please check out my Master’s the­sis and feel free to for­ward and tweet it. And you can fol­low me on Twit­ter: @garethkirkby

 

I am a for­mer jour­nal­ist and media man­ager who recently com­pleted my Master’s the­sis for Royal Roads Uni­ver­sity and now work as a com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sional. I have been awarded the Jack Web­ster Award of Dis­tinc­tion, among oth­ers, for my report­ing and editing.

 

Fur­ther Resources

Lafor­est, R. (Ed.). (2009). The new fed­eral pol­icy agenda and the vol­un­tary sec­tor: On the cut­ting edge. Kingston, ON: School of Pol­icy Stud­ies, Queen’s University.

Lafor­est, R. (2011). Vol­un­tary sec­tor orga­ni­za­tions and the state: Build­ing new rela­tion­ships. Van­cou­ver, BC: UBC Press.

Lafor­est, R. (2012). Rerout­ing polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion: Is Canada’s social infra­struc­ture in cri­sis? British Jour­nal of Cana­dian Stud­ies, 25(2), 181–197. doi:10.3828/bjcs.2012.10

Lafor­est, R. (2013a). Shift­ing scales of gov­er­nance and civil soci­ety par­tic­i­pa­tion in Canada and the Euro­pean Union. Cana­dian Pub­lic Admin­is­tra­tion, 56(2), 235–251. doi:10.1111/capa.12016

Lafor­est, R. (2013b). Dig­ging wells or build­ing fences: Ana­lyz­ing fed­eral gov­ern­ment dynam­ics. The Phil­an­thropist, 25(1), 33–36. Retrieved from http://thephilanthropist.ca

Lafor­est, R., & Phillips, S. (2013). Input and out­put legit­i­macy in gov­er­nance regimes. Paper pre­sented at the Cana­dian Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Asso­ci­a­tion Con­fer­ence, Vic­to­ria, Canada. Retrieved from http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/past-conference.shtml

Lay­cock, D. (2002). The new right and democ­racy in Canada: Under­stand­ing Reform and the Cana­dian Alliance. Don Mills, ON: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press.

Phillips, S.D. (2010). Canada: Civic soci­ety under neglect. The Phil­an­thropist 23(1), 65–73. Retrieved from http://thephilanthropist.ca

Phillips, S.D. (2013). Shin­ing light on char­i­ties or look­ing in the wrong place? Regulation-by-transparency in Canada. Vol­un­tas, 24(3), 881–905. doi:10.1007/s11266-013‑9374-5

Phillips, S., Lafor­est, R., & Gra­ham, A. (2010). From shop­ping to social inno­va­tion: Get­ting pub­lic financ­ing right in Canada. Pol­icy and Soci­ety 29(3), 189–199. doi:10.1016/j.polsoc.2010.06.001

Pub­lic Safety Canada. (2013). Build­ing resilience against ter­ror­ism: Canada’s counter-terrorism strat­egy. Gov­ern­ment of Canada Queen’s Printer. Retrieved from http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/rslnc-gnst-trrrsm/index-eng.aspx

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: advocacy, core, enemies, funding, input, laforest, legitimacy, neo-liberal, phillips, policy, program, reform, representative, resentment, vested, voluntary

Will All Parties Support Probe Into Politicization of CRA Charity Audits?

July 19, 2014 No comments Article
FacebookTwitterGoogle+TumblrRedditLinkedInEmailPrint

Sorry for the inter­rup­tion in blog post­ings; I’ve been trav­el­ling these past two days, largely out of wifi range and not in con­trol of my sched­ule. Bad timing.

Before board­ing the plane, I got the news that a fed­eral party had asked ques­tions in Par­lia­ment directly related to the find­ings in my the­sis.

NDP rev­enue critic Mur­ray Rankin and envi­ron­ment critic Megan Leslie called for an inde­pen­dent probe into the Canada Rev­enue Agency’s audit­ing of char­i­ties for their polit­i­cal activities.

In a July 16 let­ter to gov­ern­ment Rev­enue Min­is­ter Kerry-Lynne Find­lay Rankin and Leslie write that they “fear that the evi­dence strongly sug­gests that the Con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment has been mis­us­ing the CRA to tar­get its polit­i­cal oppo­nents.” Cana­dian Press reports that Findlay’s office re-released a state­ment deny­ing any polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence with CRA.

My the­sis find­ings, which were widely pub­lished in Cana­dian media in two reports writ­ten by Cana­dian Press deputy-bureau chief Dean Beeby, found that the tar­get­ing by CRA has extended beyond envi­ron­men­tal char­i­ties to also include inter­na­tional development/human rights orga­ni­za­tions and char­i­ties receiv­ing sig­nif­i­cant funds from labour unions. Beeby’s own leg­work found that anti-poverty orga­ni­za­tions are also being caught up in the audits.

The audit­ing, in short, seems to tar­get char­i­ties of a “pro­gres­sive” nature that have dif­fer­ent ideas about the best pub­lic poli­cies for Canada than does the cur­rent fed­eral cabinet.

Pre­vi­ous researchers have warned that politi­ciza­tion of the CRA is under­way and that this is not in line with West­ern demo­c­ra­tic val­ues and will dam­age our inter­na­tional rep­u­ta­tion. My the­sis pointed to a “fun­nel” cre­ated by the gov­ern­ment that more or less pushes CRA toward audit­ing cer­tain charities.

That fun­nel includes increased fund­ing for audit­ing of char­i­ties’ “polit­i­cal activ­i­ties” (which, though seem­ingly almost uni­ver­sally below the 10% of a charity’s resources that the cur­rent reg­u­la­tions allowed, tend to be higher in some char­ity sec­tors than oth­ers), and the pres­ence of com­plaint let­ters from Eth­i­cal Oil in the CRA files of char­i­ties that are directly or indi­rectly involved in issues of cli­mate change, oil­sands expan­sion, pipelines, tankers, and ecosys­tem impacts of those indus­trial activities).

Also impor­tant is that Eth­i­cal Oil, an aggres­sive pri­vate activist orga­ni­za­tions, was founded by a staffer of min­is­ter Jason Ken­ney who left to set up the orga­ni­za­tion and then returned to serve the party in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Any gov­ern­ment has a vari­ety of state tools at its dis­posal that can, but should not, be used to short-circuit debate and cit­i­zen par­tic­i­pa­tion in order to force through its own pol­icy agenda. Those include the army, police, secu­rity appa­ra­tus, and tax author­ity. Even use of access to the media that gov­ern­ment min­is­ters enjoy to a level far above that of oth­ers should not be used to let loose with rhetoric that, for exam­ple, con­flates char­i­ties, money-laundering, crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tions and ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions as has hap­pened repeat­edly since 2012.

The audits and asso­ci­ated rhetoric on the part of the cur­rent fed­eral gov­ern­ment is hav­ing an impact on the abil­ity of char­i­ties to carry out their Mis­sions. It is affect­ing some organization’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion about issues that Cana­di­ans very much needs to dis­cuss widely and deeply, and so is nar­row­ing society’s con­ver­sa­tions. And in cre­at­ing the fun­nel and dis­tract­ing char­i­ties from their impor­tant social pur­pose as civil-society par­tic­i­pants, idea gen­er­a­tors, alter­na­tive voices, the government’s actions are reduc­ing the vigor of our democracy.

So, it’s good to see a polit­i­cal party weigh into the debate. It’s a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of democ­racy that politi­cians do not cor­rupt the neu­tral­ity of the admin­is­tra­tive func­tions and indi­vid­ual bureau­crats through politi­ciza­tion. I would think that all polit­i­cal par­ties have a long-term invest­ment in that, includ­ing the party now in power.

Mean­while, check out my Master’s the­sis and feel free to for­ward and tweet it.

I am a for­mer jour­nal­ist and media man­ager who recently com­pleted my Master’s the­sis for Royal Roads Uni­ver­sity and now work as a com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sional. I have earned a Web­ster Award of Dis­tinc­tion, among other awards, for my reporting.

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: agenda, audits, CRA, investigation, Leslie, misusing, muffling, NDP, opponents, policy, politicization, probe, Rankin, silencing, target, targeting

Archived Posts

  • November 2015
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014

Tags

abuse active citizens alternative energy audit audits BCCLA bullying carbon economy carbon taxes charitable charities civil society complaints confusion CRA democracy enemies energy regulations enforcement environmentalists ethical funnel greenwash Imagine Canada interpretation investigation muffling NDP oil partisan PEN petroleum pipeline opposition policy political activities politicization power public Rankin RCMP rhetoric silencing spying targeting voices

All contents by Gareth Kirkby | Theme by Theme in Progress | Proudly powered by WordPress

facebook twitter linkedin Rss