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ATTENTION ATTENTION Attention all non-profit service agencies' staff and board members and friends.....The Fraser Institute is launching a new initiative aimed at undermining the non-profit sector and attacking the relationship between government and non-profits. The Fraser Institute, the neo-liberal, corporate-funded "think- tank" based in Vancouver, has hooked up with the Donner Canada Foundation, a well-funded foundation which finances many right- wing causes in Canada, in a project aimed at gathering information to be used in its promotion of free market solutions to social policy issues. WARNING: DO NOT CO-OPERATE WITH THIS PROJECT AND IF YOU HAVE ANY RELATIONSHIP OR INFLUENCE WITH NON-PROFIT AGENCIES IMMEDIATELY ALERT THEM TO THE DANGERS OF CO-OPERATING WITH THIS PROJECT. The project, funded by and named for the Donner Foundation, offers six $5000 prizes purporting to award "best practices" by non-profit agencies and a $25,000 award for the agency "which best illustrates the principles of excellence." These cash awards in effect offer to pay non-profits for their co-operation in their own demise. Both the Donner and the Fraser Institute are well-funded right-wing bodies promoting exclusive market solutions to public policy issues. The Fraser Institute's explicit mandate is to reduce the social role of government to its barest minimum. Its motto is "Public problems, private solutions." In its fund-raising materials it boasts about being able to promote the interests of corporations in ways that corporations can not. Institute head Michael Walker once admitted that he and a fellow researcher in the U.S. engaged in an "informal contest" to see who could find the best evidence proving that women fare better in the workforce than men. The Fraser constantly attacks public medicare and public education as dismal failures, attacks official poverty statistics as wild exaggerations of real poverty levels. Its research is often questionable such as a "study" on hospital waiting lists based solely on the "impressions" of self-selecting doctor specialists (no random sample was used) who had a vested interest in creating anxiety about waiting lists. In a leaked five year plan the Fraser indicated it intends to double its budget through canvassing 25 large multinational corporations. Under the heading "Social Affairs Unit" the plan indicates a major new focus on social services and welfare and states: "A key aspect...will be to explore the possibilities of systematically replacing government programs in these areas with private alternatives." It also specifically states that it would undertake efforts to undermine the Vanier Institute whose studies have influenced past governments' social policy. One objective of the plan is to get Statscan to adopt the Fraser definition of poverty. The Donner Foundation funds the Fraser Institute's relentless attack on the government debt in which it promotes massive cuts to social spending as the only solution. It financed the establishment an east-coast clone of the Fraser Institute (Atlantic Institute for Market Studies); the neo-liberal "Next City" magazine, various charter school advocacy groups (promoting privately-run, publicly-funded schools); it provides funding to universities to be distributed to professors supporting their ideology; it gave the University of Victoria $450,000 to establish a Centre for Municipal Studies to examine lowering tax revenues and "market options in delivering public services." It has also funded a group of Canadian professors defending University of Western Ontario professor Phillipe Rushton, whose writings claim blacks are less intelligent and have smaller brains than whites. The "contest" application, sent out by the Fraser Institute and with a contact name Jason Clemens at the Fraser Institute, names some of the judges for the contest. They include Donner Chair Allan Gotlieb, one of the most vigorous proponents of free trade, Sally Pipes, Executive Director of the conservative Pacific Research Centre and Patrick Luciani, Executive Director of the Donner. While the cover letter written by the Fraser Institute describing the contest says the study will only use "aggregate statistics" detailed reports on each agency's "performance" will be produced. Nothing on the Donner application form makes any promise about how the data for individual agencies will be used. The questions which must be answered to "win" the context are loaded with neo-liberal traps which can be used to attack the social agencies which co-operate. Several questions seek information on performance indicators a neo-liberal application of private sector outcomes monitoring which are now finding their way into government administrations. Their effect has been pernicious. It is a new kind of Taylorism; a time/motion study approach used to judge social services and intended on proving that private sector providers are "more efficient" and should therefore replace government and non-profit providers. Other questions ask whether or not the agency "restricts the receipt of services on the basis of need?"; "Does you agency measure the frequency of usage by clients?"; It asks what percentage of board members are also employed as staff members and how many time the board met in 1996. There are many questions relating to funding and how much government funding an agency receives. These questions, in conjunction with questions about what services government provides that are similar to the agency, suggest an attack on "overlapping" and therefore inefficient services. The application form requires that the agency provide extremely detailed financial information from its audited report to all fund-raising activities and sources of funding.
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