The charity industry has found its niche as governments, cash-strapped by growing populations all demanding their fair share of attention as they see it from universal tax-paid coffers, find themselves struggling to meet the demands of social issues from grants to medical, education, legal, migrant-settling, and a host of other matters claiming first priority, forcing them to end up editing their priorities, cutting back on support, relying increasingly on private charities to fund themselves.

The proliferation of call centres working for private industry as well as charitable institutions has made life miserable for people responding to telephone calls that are either automated or anchored by someone whose use of the English language has been diluted through the lens of their native tongue. The irritation quotient of incessant dinnertime calls, of doorbells ringing to reveal itinerant, low-paid representatives of one never-heard-of-charity or another, or fly-by-night service enterprise drives people crazy.

Aside from alienating potential donors to worthy causes who tend to lump all such pleas for support as nuisance calls into a basket of negative thought, the well-known charities whose work has been well established and creatively useful, are increasingly seeing their once-guaranteed avenue of fund-raising closing down.

I have found, increasingly, when out canvassing my neighbourhood for the long-established medical charities such as Heart & Stroke, Arthritis Society, Canadian Diabetes Association, Canadian Cancer Society, that people are suffering from an overkill of requests. Rather than face someone on their doorstep many people now prefer to make their own choices online and conduct charitable giving in that manner. Who can blame them? I do it myself, while never turning away someone canvassing for a legitimate charity at my door.

With the advent of so many incidents (we read about these events in the newspapers and shudder lest something like a home invasion occur to us) of increasing urban crime, people are becoming loathe to acknowledge a doorbell ringing after dark; they simply will not respond. A door-to-door canvasser knows it's useless to canvass during the day when people are either out at work or shopping, so they will use the week-end to canvass, and alternatively, the evening hours when people do tend to be in their homes.

It's a Catch-22 situation. Canvass in daylight hours to find no response from an owner-empty house, or do it in the evening when people have had their evening meals, want to relax and shut out the outside world, and gain their enmity for disturbing them. The era of the neighbourhood door-to-door canvass has seen its death-knell, thanks to the alienation of a charity-overtaxed society.