sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½

A commentary by a retired journalist living in Sidney. 

The capital region’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic underlines two things you should already know.

First is that our communities have a lot of good people who’ll step up when they’re needed.

The second is that, oh boy, do we ever have a lot of need now.

Cleaning ladies, oculists, shop owners and clerks — these and myriad more have seen their livelihoods go poof! Many of them need help.

Which is why it’s so gratifying to see the response from those lucky enough to still have some cash to spare. Spearheaded by the Victoria Foundation, the Jawl Foundation and the sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½, the newly created Rapid Relief Fund has garnered a lot of money in a short time, and the flow of donations continues.

Yet, the size and the urgency of this snowballing need is also why it’s so galling to see a chunk of this money disappear. A small but significant percentage that could and should be supporting the people who need it is going instead to fat-cat companies that for many years have been making a bundle — and still are — from people like us.

These are Visa, MasterCard, the banks and their partners and competitors who, according to the Victoria Foundation, are charging between two and three per cent right off the top of every credit-card donation.

This charge does not actually erode the value of any donation you make — but only because the Victoria Foundation has laudably decided to pay these fees from other income sources so that every dollar donated can do what it’s intended to do. But this doesn’t change the sad reality that a lot of money — about $25,000 per $1 million of donations — is no longer available to meet needs in our community.

Worse — or maybe better, depending how you look at it — a great many donations to the fund are being made by credit card.

This is worse because it costs our community too much. But it’s better because credit cards have some important advantages for fundraising in an emergency like this. Donations can be made online, so the response really is fast. There’s no potentially contaminated piece of paper — no cash or cheque stuffed into an envelope — that has to change hands. And people can donate from anywhere without having to break quarantine or risk an encounter with an infected person.

So the answer is not for you to stop donating by credit card or, worse yet, to stop giving altogether. No, the answer is to help put pressure on the credit card companies and their financial partners to also step up when they’re needed. Hundreds of other businesses in our community and right across sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ are making sacrifices in this time of great need, and so should players in the multibillion-dollar financial industry.

There is some precedent — not much, I fear — for this sort of thing. A decade ago when that awful earthquake devastated Haiti, sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½â€™s financial industry did itself proud. The credit card companies, the banks that issue the cards and the companies that process payments collectively agreed to waive fees on the millions of dollars that Canadians donated to help the afflicted.

They did the same thing a year later when that enormous tsunami flattened northeastern Japan.

Yet, this very worthy business practice does not seem to have caught on. There have been plenty more disasters since then in many parts of the world, and Canadians have shown their generosity in the wake of quite a few of them. But if these companies have acted as responsively and responsibly since then, it’s news to me. And the communications folks from Visa, the largest credit card issuer, didn’t respond by deadline to my questions on the issue.

The other COVID-related credit card issue in the news — the plight of people who’ve lost their income and can’t make their payments — is getting both media attention and some help these days. Some credit card issuers are cutting their customers some slack by allowing more flexible and less costly repayment options.

Good for them, and I hope this practice spreads industry-wide.

Meanwhile, the issue of fees charged a charity for accepting urgently needed credit card donations may be small potatoes by comparison, but it’s important, too. The credit-card industry did the right thing in at least a couple of cases when the misery was thousands of kilometres from their customers’ homes.

Now that it’s on our doorstep, they need to do the right thing again.