To What Extent is the Canadian Charitable Sector a Politically Expressive Sector?

This thesis asks: to what extent is Canada’s nonprofit sector a politically expressive sector? To address this question, I propose three sub-questions, with each framing a study. These questions are addressed using data sets covering the provinces of Ontario and Alberta from 2003-2017. The combined results show that the charitable sector is indeed an outlet for aggregating and expressing collective identities, but that the degree to which this happens depends on the political context. In the first study, the question is: do private family foundations express these identities through their granting? Findings show that there are geographic differences in how politically aligned foundations grant and that politically aligned family foundations are much more likely to give to religious missionary charities while non-political foundations are much more likely to give to mainline Christian congregations, while both groups of foundations are less likely to give post-secondary institutions. When looking at charity revenue from government in the second study, the research question is: how does government funding for charities change when the party in power changes? Or, more specifically, when electoral district representatives and governments change, which nonprofits gain new funding and which nonprofits lose funding and to what extent do these changes reflect the interests of the new government? Ontario, which has a competitive and diverse political environment, experiences more of the effects suggested by the literature: changes in funding reflect partisan identity as governments and local representatives change. In Alberta—where the political culture is quite stable, less competitive, and where politics tends to be dominated by ideologically conservative within-party concerns rather than between-party competition—there is less change in funding to charities around elections and changes in government. In the third study the question is: are contributions to political parties and charities positively or negatively correlated expenditures? The results show they are positively correlated and that the factors associated with higher likelihoods of charitable donations also correlate with higher likelihoods of political contributions.