Ottawa residents donate their $200 rebate cheques to charity

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When Premier Doug Ford and the Ontario government announced a $200 rebate to taxpayers in October, Anne-Marie Normandeau decided the money would never see her bank account.

A volunteer with the Parkdale Food Centre in Hintonburg, Normandeau is one of hundreds who donated their rebate cheques to charitable causes. Normandeau gave hers to her neighbourhood food bank, which started a campaign in February that has since raised more than $37,000.

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“It’s not money that I thought I would have, so rather than putting it in the bank, I gave it right away so that it would be like no loss,” she said. “I’m just seeing it as a transfer of money from Mr. Ford to the Parkdale (Food) Centre.”

Normandeau said that many charities and non-profits have been struggling since the Canada Post strike delayed many donations this winter. She said she felt a call to action when the provincial government announced it was spending $3 billion on pre-election rebate cheques that otherwise could have been invested in social services.

“Whenever there’s a tax cut, it always translates to a cut in services,” she said. “The neighbours that we have at Parkdale, most of them would be frontline suffering of those services cut.”

Spencer Tittley, Parkdale Food Centre’s communications and fundraising consultant, said the food bank’s campaign was inspired when they saw a group of Ontarians form an organization called 200dollars.ca, advocating for people to donate their cheques to charity.

“We saw that and we were like, ‘Oh, this seems like a good idea, a good opportunity,’ so we just kind of jumped on it and set kind of an arbitrary goal ($40,000),” Tittley said. “We didn’t really know how people would respond, but the responses to that have been very, very positive.”

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Parkdale Food Centre operates youth and advocacy programming, with its community kitchen and grocery program in Hintonburg being its two most costly services to operate.

The food bank has seen its user base increase from 900 monthly food bank visits in 2019 to 1,652 visits in September. Tittley said the funds will help feed 850 people through the food bank’s grocery program for a full week. “It’s very significant,” Tittley said.

Tittley added the donation campaign is also sparking important conversations about the funding of critical services.

“[There is] definitely a desire for organizations and services like us, like housing services, to actually be funded by the government,” he said. He shared that the “vast majority” of Parkdale’s funding comes from grassroots fundraising. The Ottawa Food Bank, the region’s largest food bank, receives less than two per cent of its funding from the City of Ottawa, with no provincial or federal funding.

Many of the approximately 185 rebate cheque donors are first-time contributors, Tittley said, in what has been a sizeable boost to kick off a challenging year.

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“It’s a great launching point for us to start the year — like most charities, most of that fundraising comes in November and December — so to have this big push at the beginning of the year has been really great in terms of us being able to plan to hit our goals a little bit sooner,” he said. “It’s been a really nice show of support from the community and especially from people who have never donated to us.”

Outside of the Parkdale Food Centre’s campaign, the rebate cheques may have encouraged more charitable giving.

Erin O’Manique, director of the Gloucester Emergency Food Cupboard, shared that while her food bank hasn’t actively solicited rebate cheque donations, she suspects around $3,000 has come in since the end of February that may be from rebate cheques. Normandeau said the $200 rebate is “found money,” so “the pain is much less than taking $200 out of your bank account.

“The less money the government has, the more likely they’re going to tell us they don’t have money for extra services,” she said. “So let’s support the organizations that are frontline and providing those services.”

What did you do with your rebate cheque? Let us know in the comment section.

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