Tuesday, January 2, 2001
ANDRÉ PICARD
There is a popular adage in community groups that if you want something done, ask someone busy.
A new study lends credence to that saying, showing that a dedicated "civic core" accounts for a staggering percentage of all charitable giving, volunteering and civic participation in Canada.
It also shatters the idealized notion of Canadians as caring and active in their communities, demonstrating that for the vast majority of the population, civic participation is incidental or non-existent.
According to Statistics Canada, a mere 8 per cent of adults contribute half of all donations and volunteer hours.
This primary core of social leaders is backed up by a dedicated secondary core -- another 20 per cent of Canadians -- and, between them, they account for 83 per cent of all volunteer hours, 77 per cent of charitable donations and 69 per cent of civic participation.
"There is clearly a small proportion of Canadians, a civic core, who are active in all three spheres of civil society and are responsible for the lion's share of effort in all three areas," Paul Reed and Kevin Selbee write in the study Patterns of Civic Participation and the Civic Core in Canada.
"The civic core, although small, is clearly a pillar of enormous significance in maintaining a just and mutually caring society; we would speculate that it may also have a central role in supporting democratic governance as well," the researchers write.
Mr. Reed and Mr. Selbee argue that learning more about this civic core of people is essential to understanding Canada's social structure. The researchers write that they don't know whether these highly engaged citizens have a "distinctive ethos" but, in their study, they did identify a number of common traits.
People in the civic core tend to be older, religious, well-educated, work in higher-income occupations, have children between the ages of 6 and 17 living at home and live in communities outside major metropolitan centres. They also tend to watch far less television than the average Canadian. There are also important regional variations that shed light on some traditional patterns of giving and volunteering.
For example, it has long been established that Quebec has the lowest rates of charitable giving ($122 per person annually) and volunteerism (just 22 per cent). At the other end of the spectrum is Saskatchewan, with $308 donated per capita and 47 per cent of adults volunteering.
The new research reveals that Quebec's primary civic core consists of just 5.2 per cent of citizens, compared with 13.4 per cent in Saskatchewan. Adding the secondary tier of donors and volunteers brings the civic core up to 24 per cent in Quebec and 39 per cent in Saskatchewan.
Further, the core group in Quebec shows a preference for donating and an aversion to civic participation, while the core group in Saskatchewan prefers to volunteer rather than donate money.
The analysis by Mr. Reed and Mr. Selbee, who are social scientists at Statistics Canada and professors at Carleton University in Ottawa, uses information from the 1997 National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating, which was conducted by Statistics Canada.