The Political Physicist

Well, it’s that time of year again. The good people at Bell, through their Let’s Talk campaign, are once again donating money to mental health initiatives. All they ask in return is that we spread the word by sharing their posts about it on Facebook. Isn’t that nice of them?

Well, no, it’s not, on several levels. First and foremost, if they really care about mental health then surely they can just donate the money anyway, rather than only do so if people share their Facebook posts. Which let’s us know that mental health is not what they really care about here. As, I suspect, with most corporate donations, the real motivation is how it will effect their image. Donating to charity will make them appear to be generous and good corporate citizens, at least to those who are less cynical than me. Presumably they feel that this will make people slightly more likely to choose them over Rogers (or whatever other company you decide on from the myriad of—pardon me, virtually no—other choices that exist in Canada).

But here Bell are exceptionally clever. In addition to the usual posturing you get when a company donates to a good cause, this campaign is all about providing Bell with advertising. It’s built into the model, as the more people who share Bell’s post, the more money they will donate. They say that for every time their post is shared they will donate 5 cents to mental health initiatives. According to one website, it costs about 25 cents to reach 1000 people on Facebook. That means that each person sharing the Bell post would only need 201 friends in order for this to be cheaper.¹ This is far cheaper than advertising in conventional media, or even most other online media. Furthermore, these shared Bell posts will not be susceptible to adblocking software, as normal Facebook advertising is.

So, we’ve established that Bell is not doing this out of the kindness of their heart, but because of the positive impact on their brand and the advertising which it generates. But surely we can still be happy about the positive outcome, regardless of the motives behind it? Well, in a sense I suppose we should, as this money is certainly better spent on mental health initiatives than on returns to shareholders. But then again, we shouldn’t. If Bell feels that it has this money to give away, then to me that indicates that they aren’t being taxed enough. If they were then the revenue could be used by the government to provide mental health initiative directly. Moreover, it would be under our democratic control to decide if this is, indeed, the best way to spend it. Maybe we’d decide that there is some other health concern which would be a better use of the money. As it stand now, we have no choice in the matter.

You might ask why we should have a choice. After all, it’s Bell’s money. But where does Bell get it’s money from? Consumers, of course. So it’s all of our money really. That means that we should have a say over how it’s spent.² Furthermore, as a way of collecting money to provide services, this is highly regressive. Why should the amount that we spend on telecom determine how much we contribute towards mental health initiatives? Shouldn’t those who have more money be contributing a greater percentage of their income? This is the approach we take to taxation, after all. This argument, of course, applies to all corporate charity. Given this, surely the best way to fund things like mental health initiatives is via taxation.

So, Bell, if you want to help contribute that money to good causes, why don’t you give it to the government? They can spend it as necessary. Better yet, you could let yourself be voluntarily nationalized, so that telecom could be provided at cost, or even for free. Let this essential service, like those surrounding mental health, be funded progressively.