With the Charities Directorate call centre suspended till April 5, 2020, we thought we would have a Registered Charity Q&A on Friday, March 20. This will be a free opportunity for those with relatively straightforward questions to connect and we…
Over the last year, Blumbergs has released 8 online courses. In case you are interested we have provided over the next 2 weeks a 50% discount coupon for new registrants wishing to access our Blumbergs charity law courses. We realize…
Here is an updated Canadian Charity Legal Checklist by Mark Blumberg. It is a checklist for Canadian registered charities to assist them with managing compliance issues. We use it as part of our informal risk reviews that we do for…
Blumbergs is pleased to announce that we will be hosting Blumbergs’ Canadian Charity Law Boot Camp again on Monday, April 20, 2020. An easy enough date to remember! This is a one-day boot camp on compliance and standards issues for…
The List of foreign charities that have received a gift from Her Majesty in right of Canada has now 5 foreign charities listed. Here is the list: Keep in mind that the placement on the list is only for two…
The list of municipal or public bodies performing a function of government in Canada registered as qualified donees has grown to 462. It is predominantly indigenous bands but also has some other groups such as school boards. Here is the…
Journalism has been under a lot of stress for many years. The Trudeau government has proposed a number of complicated and convoluted initiatives to ostensibly support journalism. One of them was to have a qualified donees category of “registered journalism…
We recently put online CRA letters to registered charities that had been revoked over the last few years as a result of audit. It was interesting to see a number of charities that were revoked just because of being dormant. …
I recently looked at a couple of ATIP documents from the Charities Directorate and I was quite surprised at the decline in the number of charity applications that CRA is accepting. These statistics go back to 2000. What we see…
CRA has said that they will no longer accept the RC59 Business Consent for Offline Access and now as of today one will need to use the new Form AUT-01 Authorize a Representative for Access by Phone and Mail. The…
Here is our article “Some initial issues for a new Canadian grantmaking foundation“. Hopefully, it will provide some ideas as to issues that new (and perhaps existing) foundations should be considering. Also, here is our more comprehensive Canadian Charity Legal…
If a University is outside of Canada and on a special list maintained by CRA then that foreign university can issue Canadian “official donation receipts” under the Income Tax Act or tax receipts which are very valuable to Canadian taxpayers. …
The CRA on December 20, 2019, put out a press release on their incentives relating to journalism. As well CRA has released the T625 Application for Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization Designation form both as a regular PDF and a fillable…
A recent Federal Court of Appeal case Church of Atheism of Central Canada v. Canada (National Revenue) deals with a group promoting atheism who applied for registered charity status, CRA rejected the application, the group appealed to the FCA and…
There is a list called “foreign charities that have received a gift from Her Majesty in right of Canada”. As the name suggests a group that gets a “gift” from the Federal government can apply to CRA to be on…
There are a couple of important qualified donee categories that have increased in size – first the “List of municipal or public bodies performing a function of government in Canada registered as qualified donees” which is largely aboriginal bands and…
I have been asking the Ontario government for months for an update on whether ONCA is coming into force and when. On September 25, 2019 I received a short note from the Policy and Business Law Unit of the Ministry of Government…
Join us on Monday October 7, 2019 in Toronto for the 8th Annual Blumbergs' Canadian Charity Law Institute. We will be featuring a number of speakers covering different legal and compliance issues affecting Canadian charities and non-profits. It will be a full…
CRA is encouraging non-profits that want to apply to become registered charities to use their new CHAMP system for the application process. They recently made an announcement that they will still however accept paper applications using the old Form T2050…
We have just launched our 3rd online course – this one is entitled “Fundraising from Canada: A course for groups outside of Canada“. It is geared towards those outside of Canada thinking about fundraising in Canada and the options for…
CRA in June 2019 brought in a new charity application system under their CHAMP modernization program. Here is our article Making sense of CRAs new online Canadian charity application system which discusses the new system and also provides a paper copy…
The Journalism and Written Media Independent Panel of Experts released a report that they had provided to the Federal government relating to the 2019 federal budget and the proposals on journalism. Here is a copy of the report. As well…
On June 28, 2019, the Tax Court of Canada released its decision Promised Land Ministries v the Queen, in which it upheld CRA's decision to suspend the registered charity Promised Land Ministries (“PLM”)'s receipting privileges for one year for failing to…
We have created two new online courses for those outside of Toronto who are not able to easily attend our programs. They might also be helpful to those in Toronto who cannot wait for our next session as they sometimes only…