Bad design, bad delivery

Sometimes a program sounds like such a feel-good nobrainer that it doesn’t get the scrutiny it needs before it’s rolled out the door.

The Canada Student Service Grant program, which connects students who need work with charities that need labour, is a textbook case.

Last week, the federal government announced that it had outsourced the administration of this $912-million pandemic relief program for student volunteers to WE Charity.

The fact that the prime minister’s wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, is a well-known volunteer ambassador for WE isn’t a great look for the government. But that’s the least of this program’s problems. The design itself is deeply flawed. The program allows eligible post-secondary students and recent graduates to apply for up to $5,000 for 500 hours of volunteering.

The very definition of volunteering is to help others without being paid. That’s why it’s called volunteering, not working.

So if volunteers are essentially being paid an hourly wage, as they are under this program, are they still volunteers?

This degree of line-blurring raises serious concerns about whether the program will harm the charitable sector more than help it.

On top of the problematic suggestion that young people need a financial incentive in order to volunteer, this servicegrant doesn’t even pay minimum wage anywhere in the country. It works out to just $10 an hour.

Worse still is the possibility that some organizations that might have hired students to work this summer or fall will replace those jobs with volunteer hours under this no-cost labour option.

Canadians may never get clear answers on what the student grant program actually achieves and what unintended consequences come with it since the government’s decision to outsource its administration to a third party is quite likely to reduce oversight and scrutiny.

It makes little sense to outsource a service-grant program to a charitable organization in the first place. It makes even less sense to do it without a competitive bidding process.

According to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, federal bureaucrats decided that WE was “the best and only organization” in Canada with the national connections to run the program.

That seems particularly ridiculous in light of the fact that WE itself sought to outsource the work of connecting with organizations looking for volunteers to yet another charity, Volunteer Canada.

Such a haphazard design and delivery of a program originally announced back in April suggests the government didn’t really know what to do to help the charitable sector, which is facing financial disaster with vital fund-raising events cancelled because of the pandemic and regular donations hard to come by.

But opting for a poorly designed, feel-good program is no way to treat more than $900 million in taxpayers’ dollars.

The charitable sector needs financial assistance to weather the pandemic. Students need paid work or assistance to pay for tuition and living expenses if they can’t find work. This program addresses neither of those significant problems particularly well.

When a national organization like Volunteer Canada decides not to participate in a program to promote volunteering, that should have been a significant alarm bell for the government and prompted it to rethink this program.

“Volunteering can be a fantastic way to build skills, make contacts or just give back,” Trudeau said in April when he first announced plans to provide volunteer grants to students who couldn’t find work because of COVID-19.

He was right about the merits of volunteering. But the program his government unveiled doesn’t promote that. Instead, it turns volunteering into yet another underpaid labour pool.

That’s not the sort of “national service” Canada should be promoting.

This degree of line-blurring raises serious concerns about whether the program will harm the charitable sector more than help it