Financing Community Associations
by
John E. Trent
Oct. 27, 2004
Minority language community associations have much to be grateful for with
regard to federal Government funding – and much to be worried about. This report
is about the perceptions of our Regional Association of West Quebecers. I will
leave it to others to decide to what degree they can be generalized.
Last year, thanks to the efforts of Stéphane Dion and the team from Intergovernmental Relations and Heritage Canada we received the $751 million Action Plan for Official Languages for the five years 2003 – 2008. Much of the money is to go to education and language and health. Already, we are most appreciative of the funding that has come through to create a new Health and Social Services Network Partnership, something we have desired for 20 years.
We also have to be grateful for our working relationships with very dedicated public servants in Canadian Heritage and the fact that official language minority associations are the only ones to still receive programme funding from the federal government and not just project funding.
So indeed we have much for which to be grateful and if I am now going to make some critical comments I want them to be construed as constructive criticisms aimed at the fundamental improvement of the style of Canadian democracy and not just concerns about money. There are six problems to be underlined.
First, to some degree, money and democracy do go hand in hand. There was very little funding, if any, in the Action Plan for development of our network of English-speaking community associations. This is like building a car without wheels. It is our associations, after all, that permit the policies and programmes to exist. The federal Government’s Cabinet would not be very effective without a public service to put its policies into operation. Our associations are the heart of our activity. Their staffs are the core of our mobilization of volunteer efforts.
Second, our funding is too little too late. We have received the same amount of money for some years without variation despite our plans, needs or efforts. Nor is there any transparency in the amount of funding being allocated. Also, ever since we have been funded our cheques have arrived late which means we cannot pay our staff for weeks on end and have to waste money on late-payment charges. Would the government pay its employees late? One can accept this happening once or twice, but as a regular diet it’s a strange was to run a country.
All this we learn to live with because some might say we are lucky to receive funding at all. It is not the amount of money that is worrisome but the process by which it is being awarded under the code words of “due diligence” and “results-based” management. Of course, as tax-paying citizens we want to see our government according attention to diligent budget controls and obtaining value for money. But, as a third problem, it is hard for us to see what value there is in two government departments funding two secretariats to run two competing English-speaking networks, when one would do just fine.
As a fourth process problem, bureaucratization has taken over and is now running wild. It’s a double whammy. We have no additional resources and yet our staff has to devote much of its time and expertise to filling out reports rather than getting on with the job of managing and expanding our activities. Our executive director spends endless hours filling out complex, formulistic application forms and letters of intent to obtain money and then a myriad of interim reports and final reports to explain its use. Now there is a ten percent hold back of our (late) funds until reports are approved. Then the government sends in its auditors.
A fifth process problem is the stultifying lack of incentive. Our staff feels obliged to manage our formal contracts with the government without having the flexibility to continuously prospect for new ways to meet the needs of our community. This straight jacket makes us conform rather than perform. There are no inducements to expand membership and funding so as to reduce dependence on government.
And finally we come to the sixth problem and the real nub of the issue I wish to raise. It is the issue of control versus creativity. In the 1970s, Prime Minister Trudeau came up with the seminal idea that, in a thinly populated country covering vast expanses, it is the government’s duty to help communities to mobilize their resources so they can participate in what we now call ‘civil society’. He was way ahead of his time. Since then it seems as though succeeding governments have tried to put the jumping jack back in its box because, in reality, civil society often challenges government. Ministers don’t like ugly surprises from the very associations they are funding. All this is very understandable but it gets us into the stultifying problems I have been describing, which use bureaucratic techniques to control and submerge the creative expression of organized society.
So the problems I am raising are not just ones of feathering our own nest. Rather, we are concerned about the relationships between government and civil society in Canada. I have just returned from an international conference on global governance in Athens. The nexus of its proposals dealt with the question of getting government, business and civil society to work together for the betterment of the world. Relationships between governments and non-governmental organizations (civil society) are a cornerstone of flourishing democracies. We have to concentrate on getting this relationship right. Might I suggest that it is worth the government’s while to establish a ‘Representative Experts Commission’ to study improvements to government’s relationships with community associations and report to next year’s consultation on the Action Plan? Its implications would go far beyond minority language communities. They would be pertinent to the whole of Canadian democracy.