"No big deal," said Peter Munk at the press briefing. "Anybody with a bank account can write a cheque." The founder and chairman of Barrick Gold certainly did that this week -- and not just any cheque, but a monster, a mythical beast of a monetary instrument, a veritable Hippocampelephantocamelos, straight out of Cyrano de Bergerac. Munk wrote a cheque for $37-million, as his and his family's gift to the Cardiac Centre at Toronto General Hospital that bears his name.
It was a Guinness Book of Records kind of donation, the biggest single gift ever made to a hospital in this country. In comparison, the government of Ontario's $7-million offering to the fundraising drive of the University Health Network -- Toronto General, Toronto Western, and Princess Margaret Hospitals --seemed paltry. Yet the enormous cheque was only the latest installment in the Hungarian-born Toronto businessman's contribution to the treatment of cardiovascular disease, bringing the total to $45-million.
At the media event this week, Munk's remarks centred on paying back his debt to a community that welcomed him generously as a young immigrant and gave him a chance to realize his dreams. Later, at lunch, he mused about cultures that share and nurture philanthropy, and cultures that do not. The difference is indeed striking.
In the first type of culture, not only do rich people donate millions to hospitals or art galleries, but penniless Anglican widows in Sussex keep sharing their pension cheques with Muslim disaster victims in Indonesia. In the second type, ruling circles of Muslim oil sheikdoms keep building dream palaces and hanging gardens for themselves, and contribute little or nothing to disaster relief. The first type of culture offers refuge to alien boat people; the second permits its own kin to languish in refugee camps for generations.
There is something about casting one's bread upon the water. On the whole, charitable societies where individuals take their civic responsibilities seriously are more likely to be wealthy and stable than callous cultures that lack all sense of noblesse oblige. Yet some people distrust obligations of nobility, whether of soul, wealth, or social standing, unless imposed by the state via the tax collector. They dismiss private charity as too haphazard. Not only, they say, is it less reliably planned, less equitable and less universal than governmental welfare schemes -- tax-deductible charity entails insufficient sacrifice on the part of donors.
Critics, including very sharp ones such as my colleague Andrew Coyne, have pointed out that tax-deductible donations can't, in strict parlance, be called charitable: That distinction belongs to gifts made in after-tax dollars.
Technically, this is correct. Elements of estate-planning inspire many charitable activities. Rather than charity, it might be more accurate to describe certain gifts as self-directed taxes.
But does this make private charity less valuable, morally or socially? Just the opposite, I suggest. It makes it more valuable. Tax-deductible individual donations not only put money in hands where it's likely to do some good, but keep money out of hands where it's likely to do much harm. Every dollar spent on a deductible charity is a dollar (or at least 50 cents) withheld from the folk that gave us the plot for the Gomery report. Beneficial as Munk's millions are for providing state-of-the-art imaging equipment, including some unavailable elsewhere in North America, that's still only the minor benefit. The major benefit of his donation is that it keeps millions away from hare-brained government schemes such as the gun registry. (Readers who like the gun registry can substitute another hare-brained government scheme.)
"And now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity," proclaims Corinthians 13:13. Indeed, callous cultures may also have faith and hope, but their charity begins at home, and chances are the wife and children of a man who kept giving away chunks of the family store would plot to have him certified, or worse.
For our Western culture of philanthropy it wasn't incongruous to see Munk's wife, Melanie, along with their two daughters and son, standing at a press briefing to applaud the husband and father who had just made a gift to the public of $37-million of their prospective inheritance.
It's true: Anybody with a bank account can write a cheque. This includes governments, alas, and Western governments have been doing so non-stop, domestically and globally. The gunslinger of the old West -- "have gun, will travel" -- is gone. He has been replaced by the money-slinger of the new West, whose calling card often reads: "Have bank account, will grovel." Western aid has been propping up some of the most corrupt and evil regimes in the world. Diverting funds away from this baneful enterprise may be tax-deductible private charity's most beneficial function.
© 2006 George Jonas
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