Canada is putting more money on the table for Venezuelans still digging out from last month’s earthquakes, after donations from ordinary Canadians blew past the government’s original target within weeks.
Randeep Sarai, the secretary of state for international development, announced Thursday that Ottawa will raise its dollar-for-dollar donation-matching ceiling from $4 million to $7 million, a nearly two-fold increase from the commitment made just last month.
The jump comes because Canadians gave generously enough to hit the original $4-million cap well before officials expected, according to a statement from Sarai’s office announcing the increased matching contribution for donations made to the Canadian Red Cross and the Humanitarian Coalition.
The scale of the crisis has been staggering. Northern Venezuela was struck by a rare double earthquake two major tremors just 39 seconds apart last month, an event seismologist rarely see and one that left the country’s government scrambling to cope with the fallout.
The human toll has continued to climb in the weeks since. Recent reporting has put the death toll from the quakes as high as 3,535, with thousands more still unaccounted for or displaced from their homes.
Sarai’s office says the money raised through the matching program is being funnelled directly to organizations working on the ground the Canadian Red Cross and a coalition of a dozen Canadian humanitarian groups collectively known as the Humanitarian Coalition. That funding is going toward essentials: food, shelter, medicine and clothing for people who lost everything when the ground shook.
When Ottawa first unveiled the matching program in late June, it pledged to match every dollar Canadians donated to the two organizations between June 25 and July 14, up to $4 million. The program was framed at the time as doubling the efforts of Canadians already stepping up to support relief work on the ground.
That ceiling didn’t last long. Public generosity outpaced the government’s expectations, prompting Thursday’s announcement of the higher $7-million threshold.
Combined with earlier assistance pledges made in the immediate aftermath of the earthquakes, the increased match means Ottawa’s total humanitarian contribution to the Venezuela response will reach $12 million if the new $7-million target is fully met by donors.
This isn’t the first time the federal government has turned to donation-matching to mobilize support for overseas disasters Ottawa used a similar model after the 2023 Türkiye-Syria earthquakes and again following Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean last fall. But the speed with which Canadians exhausted the original Venezuela cap appears to have caught officials by surprise, forcing the swift upward revision.
For a country under authoritarian rule that has struggled to organize its own emergency response, the continued flow of international aid much of it now driven by everyday Canadians rather than government coffers alone remains a critical lifeline for communities still searching for the missing and rebuilding from the rubble.
