The Philanthropist is pleased to announce that Peter Broder, Corporate Counsel and Director, Regulatory Affairs at Imagine Canada, has joined the Editorial Board. Peter edited Industry Canada’s Primer for Directors of Not-for-Profit Corporations (2002) and has written extensively on policy and regulatory issues related to charities and nonprofit organizations. He holds an LL.B. from the…
Contents: Volume 19 (2004)
The quest for sustainability in voluntary sector organizations is a quest for sense in a rapidly changing funding world and a turbulent economic environment. Interest in the concept of sustainability by both funders and leaders of nonprofit organizations is mounting as the sector moves more deeply into what may be termed a funding crisis (Scott,…
Introduction Community service organizations are at risk—of failing their mandates, failing their communities, betraying the public trust, and fading away as viable organizations. We now have a significant body of Canadian research that documents the vulnerability of community social service organizations. New funding practices, widely adopted by governments and others in the early 1990s, have…
This article is adapted from a paper prepared for the 2nd National Symposium on Charity Law, held in Toronto, Ontario, on April 14, 2004. The issue of business activities undertaken by registered charities has become critical in Canada, as in other countries. As government funding to nonprofits has been significantly reduced, many organizations are turning to…
This article is adapted and updated from a presentation at the 2nd National Symposium on Charity Law in Toronto in April 2004. Parts of this article are modified from Jones, P. “Between God and You: Canada’s New Privacy Law,” published in The Philanthropist, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2003), with permission, and from a 2003 presentation by…
How To Change The World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas By David Bornstein Published by Oxford University Press, pp. 336, cloth, Cdn. $39.95 REVIEWED BY EDWARD J. WAITZER Chair, Stikeman Elliott LLP During the Roosevelt era, the standard method of naval fire employed a very heavy set of gears and a highly…
Several historical works have described 19th-century Ontario as lacking a conception of public welfare, where the poor were largely left to the benevolence of religious charities. Consider here Stephen Speisman’s claim that “prior to 1900, the very religious character of Toronto mitigated against the assumption of social welfare responsibilities by the city government.”1 This assumption,…
Introduction1 In June 2000, the federal government announced the Voluntary Sector Initiative (VSI), a joint endeavour undertaken with representatives from the voluntary sector that was intended to investigate and strengthen the relationship between government and the voluntary sector. With the experience of the United Kingdom as a backdrop,2 representatives from the Canadian government and the…
Introduction Canadians rely on their government to provide a wide range of goods and services. Sometimes governments provide such services directly, and in other instances, governments use Crown corporations to act as their agents. Many Crown corporations have been mandated to achieve important public policy aims in a commercial setting. As a result, Crown corporations…
Introduction This article examines the dark side of the contracting relationship between governments and the nonprofit sector that provides services on their behalf. It demonstrates how governments, as monopsonic purchasers or single buyers of these services, sometimes use their power to off-load the costs of care and risk management to service providers. It illustrates that…