Bruce Livesey’s “Moneybags” (July/August) is one of the worst rants I’ve read in a long time. He touches on any number of interesting issues, such as wealth disparity, the rise and decline of union power, and the types of causes supported by foundations, but instead of drilling down, he stirs them together in pursuit of his ultimate goal — some evasive point about philanthropy in the new Gilded Age. Perhaps his reliance on Rosemary Sexton, a gossip columnist, and Catherine Nugent, a socialite, for two of his key quotes speaks amply for the quality of his research into the subject of philanthropy.
Richard W. Ivey
Ivey Foundation
Toronto, Ontario
In a globalized world,” he writes, “. . . local concerns must now fight for philanthropy dollars with more visible developing-world crises such as hiv/aids, basic immunization shots, and so forth.” If local and international causes are really fighting each other for dollars, it is a fight the developing world is losing badly. In 2004 (the year from which the most recent data is available), only 4 percent of Canadian private philanthropy was directed to international issues. No Canadian government of any stripe has ever come close to reaching the target of 0.7 percent of gnp earmarked for foreign aid, and this year’s federal budget of $233 billion included $4 billion — less than 2 percent — for international co-operation.
Livesey laments that poverty in Zambia is “more compelling” than poverty at home. He is right. Zambia must grapple with an hiv/aids rate more than fifty times higher than ours on a per capita income sixty-five times smaller than Canada’s. As dire as the situation is in the North American urban centres Livesey cites, there is nothing as catastrophic as this.
Surveys constantly show that Canadians believe we are far more generous to the developing world than we actually are. It is a pity that, in an otherwise perceptive article, Bruce Livesey has tacitly endorsed that myth in a fashion that drives a wedge between those who are trying to make society better both in Canada and around the world.
David Morley
ceo, Save the Children Canada Toronto, Ontario
Charmed, I’m Sure
Surely the twentieth-century Canadian politician who best met Irvine Schiffer’s eight attributes of charisma was René Lévesque, not Pierre Trudeau, as Jeff Ryan suggests (“Charisma,” July/August). Trudeau’s playfulness was far from spontaneous, his fighting stance more petulant and arrogant than principled, his innovative lifestyle that of the affluent dilettante. Lévesque, on the other hand, was a natural. He held the tension between his playfulness and his combativeness, his physical imperfection and his sexual mystique, his position squarely in the middle of Quebec’s social spectrum and his touch of foreignness, and his personal lifestyle and his public calling, without resort to ruse. Canada is lucky that he needed more than charisma to accomplish his goals.
John Butcher
Ottawa, Ontario
