WE Scandal an Opportunity to Update Policy for Charities

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Read an excerpt of Susan Phillips’ article on the four lessons the government can learn from the WE controversy. 

A key lesson from the WE controversy is that government needs a more informed relationship with the charitable sector. Here are four possibilities.

  • Create a charitable-sector “cabinet” — a cross-sector roundtable that enables policy-makers to have candid conversations with sector leaders, as occur in other vital industries. If this had existed, the public service would have quickly learned that the CSSG was a balmy idea, and perhaps pushed back more vigorously.
  • Institutionalize a voice for the sector within government. This presence needs to be embedded across departments and have sufficient political clout so that others take it seriously.
  • Develop a policy framework for why and how government works with the sector, and give real attention to the sector in the throne speech. Perhaps dust off the accord that it signed with the sector in 2001?
  • Make better use of Imagine Canada’s Standards Program, one of the world’s most rigorous certification systems for charities and nonprofits. A ready means of due diligence would have been to check if any of the WE charities had been certified by the standards program (they had not, for the record). Many small charities may not have the capacity to go through the certification process, although many already have because it’s the right thing to do, but large organizations seeking major public funding could be expected to. The corporate sponsors that have fled WE might consider supporting the standards program.
At the very least, government must avoid making things worse for charities by imposing new heavy-handed rules on funding agreements. While the contribution agreement with the WE Charity Foundation seemed to have sailed through the approval process with few checks, a new morass of rules is not the answer. We learned this from the over-reaction to scandals in the early 2000s, which took years to untangle, with limited success. Rather, genuine funding reform is still needed, as the Special Senate Committee on the Charitable Sector recommended in its 2018 report.
 

Read the full article on The Star website