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Bill 202

April 22, 2008 - Alberta Volunteer Service Medal Act

Ms Blakeman: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Welcome to my fabulous constituency of Edmonton-Centre.

Well, I’m in agreement with the sponsoring member of this bill. I think we are blessed in Alberta. Certainly, we’re darn lucky, those of us that were born here, or darn smart, those that decided to come here, to a place where the oil and gas literally shoot out of the ground. That nonrenewable resource revenue has certainly made us very fortunate people. It really is a blessing.

What I find unfortunate is that we can’t use that money to actually support our volunteers. That’s not to say that the idea of the member, of giving medals to volunteers, isn’t a nice one, but I think that if we really, really did value volunteers, we’d also value the work that they do in the organizations they work for. So if we wanted to help that volunteer charitable sector, that NGO sector, I think there are a number of other things that the government could certainly be doing or which could be recommended by private members to be done.

For example, building capacity in the NGO sector. We have absolutely hollowed out our not-for-profit agencies in Alberta. Over a significant period of time we’ve taken away their capacity to deal with anything going wrong. The budget amounts that they have, that they are granted either through contract or through a grant scheme from this government, have left them with no ability to recover. For example, if their basement floods and some of their records are ruined or it affects some other way of how they provide business, if they lose a key staff member, they’re hooped; their whole service delivery is truly affected in a traumatic way. So it’s the health of the organization. When we talk about capacity in any organization, we’re partly talking about that organization’s ability to recover from a setback, from a tragedy, from lost money, from acts of God, weather, or any number of other things. What we see in Alberta is that the capacity of our NGO voluntary charitable sector is not there anymore. It has been hollowed out.

One of the other issues that is really significant is some kind of program to retain our executive directors and CEOs of the not-forprofit/ charitable/NGO sector. There are a number of stats that are out there, and you’re certainly welcome to consult Grant MacEwan, which is in my fabulous constituency of Edmonton-Centre. They have a wonderful voluntary-sector program there, and I think it’s from them that we see some statistics that say that in the next five years – and I think we’re already one year into those five years, so it could be in the next four years – we’re going to lose 80 per cent of our top management in the NGO sector, 80 per cent. Just imagine if we lost, let’s say, 80 per cent of the deputy ministers in this government. Imagine how much it would affect how you are able to do your business and services provided to Albertans if you lost 80 per cent of your deputy ministers, who went off to other things. You’d be getting a retention program in place mighty quick, I’ll betcha, because it’s a significant factor in what’s happening in our NGO/voluntary/charitable sector right now.

One of the issues that has been brought up in this House a number of times: again, if you really wanted to help volunteers and recognize volunteers and the agencies that they love and volunteer for, why don’t we look at paying equal salaries for workers that are doing the same work as government workers? The obvious example there is, say, social workers. We have social workers on the government payroll and people who are social workers that are contracted by the government through an NGO to do work, and they get paid significantly less money. If we really were interested in this, we could look at some of those very concrete suggestions that have been made by me before in this House and certainly by the NGO sector quite a bit.

Another suggestion is to make the contracts that the government issues or signs onto with the NGO/charitable/voluntary sector high enough to include those direct and indirect costs of providing the service. What the government tends to do is give a line item grant or a line item contract, so when they look at how much it was costing the government to actually do this and they look down and it says $50,000, that’s what the contract is for. But what’s not included in that is the cost of the extra telephone line, the telephone, the desk, the additional photocopying, wear and tear on the photocopier, extra paper, extra office space possibly. Some NGOs have to move to a bigger space in order to be able to provide. None of those costs are included.

We now have a very interesting situation in Alberta where the volunteers and staff are raising money to subsidize the cost of providing that contracted government program. Isn’t that interesting? We have volunteers fundraising to subsidize what used to be a government program and that the government has now contracted out with an NGO to provide. People are having to raise money through volunteer efforts, through bake sales and stair climbs and runs and all kinds of other things. So if you really wanted to help the volunteers in Alberta, I have a few other suggestions.

The same thing with grants. I mean, if you’re really serious about this, look at the grants that you’re providing to the NGO sector and look at increasing the base funding in the sports, recreational, heritage, museum, cultural, multicultural organizations. Again, what’s happened over the last couple of years is that the grants that they are eligible to apply for have been reduced because the government brought in a rule that said: “Double-dipping, doubledipping. Terror, terror. Don’t let those NGOs apply for any more than one grant.” Well, the reason we got more than one grant was because we had to find other ways to try and get that money to the NGOs. A number of the base funding programs got augmented by other programs, so you’d get a special project grant to do something extra. Now the government comes back and goes: “You can’t have those two. You can’t have base funding and a special project grant. Pick one.” Well, the whole point was to be augmenting what was going on, and that’s just been completely reversed.

Now, I look at some of the steps forward that the government has taken recently, and there are new matching grants proposals in place. Again, the donation grant program is all about organizations raising more money to be matched by the government. Well, great, but we just talked about the organizations being incredibly stressed and under-resourced to start with, and we’re now going to pull staff and volunteer time and effort away from the actual service delivery of what they do to go out and try and raise more money so that they can get it matched by government. There’s now an additional step in there of what these volunteers are being asked to do.

I’m not sure how big a leap forward this was under this new scheme from the government because that’s what people are doing. We’ve now got volunteers that are trying to raise money so that they can get a bit more money from the government so they can actually offer the service they used to be able to offer under a base grant funding. They’re not spending time creating or delivering a program; they’re spending time trying to raise more money. As it was told to me by a very well-known Tory who donated a lot of money and ran a big organization that gave away a lot money, he said to me: “Laurie, you’ve gotta understand. The NGO sector and the corporate sector look to the government for leadership, and if the government is not putting money into these, what does it tell us? It tells us it’s not valued by government. We’re not going to get any brownie points for putting money into it, so don’t bother.” I still see that happening. I still see a lack of leadership from this government actually investing money in programs that they say are important to them.

We’ve also got an enhanced charitable tax credit. Now, this does work because we know that there’s a direct correlation between individuals donating money if they think they’re going to get more of a tax credit. You really see that for the organizations who either are not established enough or have been turned down in application through Revenue Canada to get charitable status. It does make a lot of difference in how much money they’re able to raise from individuals because people want something back for it.

When I looked at the actual bill – and the member is right. There are a number of volunteer appreciation programs already operating on the provincial – Wild Rose, for example – and on the municipal levels. But I have to say that I’m really, really cynical about having yet another committee that is appointed by members of cabinet. That’s what the Lieutenant Governor in Council is. It’s members of cabinet appointing the people that go onto these committees. Do I actually see people that are truly representative of our diverse community here, like maybe a few Liberals, maybe a few NDs, ever on these committees? Actually, no, I don’t. Isn’t that interesting?

So, I mean, that’s what we’re going to get. I can almost guarantee you that a very well-known Tory who heads up Volunteer Alberta is going to end up on this committee. I’d just bet you money. But the person that’s not a Tory that heads up one of the municipal ones: betcha they don’t get appointed. What do you think? Pardon my cynicism, but I’ve been here long enough to earn it fair and square because, frankly, you guys don’t have follow-through. You say this is for everybody, but you’ve already been criticized by a number of sources for the way you appoint people to boards that aren’t qualified to be there.

When you talk about appointments to the committee in section 3 inside this bill, I don’t have a lot of faith that we’re going to see a good representation from Albertans. This will be about Tories being appointed.

Thank you very much.