CRA issued a few new guidances today, including a guidance on the advancement of education: CG-030, Advancement of education and charitable registration. This is a welcome new guidance that explains what CRA expects from a charity or an entity applying…
Today, CRA released it’s new Guidance, CG-029, Relief of poverty and charitable registration. This relatively short guidance provides some useful information on what CRA considers to be charitable activities that relieve poverty. As so many charities are involved with relief…
CRA released today the updated guidance CG-002, Canadian registered charities carrying on activities outside Canada. Essentially, this guidance deals with Canadian charities conducting foreign activities. About 5000 Canadian registered charities conduct foreign activities every year. Over the next 10 years…
Earlier this month, CRA update the T3010 form found here. With the CRA’s COVID-19 extension for the T3010 Annual Return, many charities must file their T3010 by December 31, 2020. This deadline is fast approaching and many charities may have…
Here is a description of the presentation on November 24, 2020: Lunch ’N Learn Panel: WE Have a Problem Jaya Mootoo , Ann Rosenfield, MBA, CFRE , Hawa Y. Mire, MA , Mark Blumberg, LLB, LLM, TEP Description:…
Mark will be presenting on November 19, 2020 at the CIMA Canada Conference on “Dealing with Ethical Dilemmas: at Work and Beyond”. CIMA is the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants® (CIMA) which was founded in 1919 and is the world’s…
CRA recently sent out a newsletter reminder that charities with a T3010 (Registered Charity Information Return) filing due between March 18, 2020 and December 31, 2020 must file by December 31, 2020. It is vitally important that all charities file…
Our firm has been using online tools for over 10 years – primarily webinars. In 2018, we moved to providing paid online courses dealing with charity and non-profit legal compliance and risk management to the non-profit and charity sector as…
We were pleasantly surprised to see that The Charity Report “your independent source of news in the charity sector” recently published an article Blumberg Snapshot: Taking measurement of the charity sector, 2010 to 2018. It profiles the many years that our…
Foundation Magazine has focused on the WE Charity scandal in its latest edition. A number of different articles deal with different aspects of the media coverage over the last 6 months.
Here is a guide from Open Road Alliance (openroadalliance.org) with some helpful tips for emergency grant funding. The guide outlines the following key principles to help organizations streamline and focus their grant making during emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic:…
The CRA has service standards and the Charities Directorate publishes those service standards. The service standards are for “enquiries” and “charity applications”. At the moment, despite COVID, anecdotally it seems that CRA has been quite quick in their responses especially…
Here is our Blumbergs Canadian Charity Sector Snapshot 2018. We recently reviewed the T3010 Registered Charity Information Return database for 2018 as part of the Sean Blumberg Transparency Project. The database covers about 84,323 of the 85,800 registered charities in…
The Canada Gazette on October 17, 2020 published the names of over 170 Canadian registered charities that had requested voluntary revocation. Here is the list. The last voluntary revocations that happened were on March 28, 2020. The last “failure to file”…
The Ontario government has recently extended the ability for Ontario Corporations Act (OCA) corporations to have virtual meetings until May 31, 2021. It is contained in O. Reg. 544/20: EXTENSION OF TEMPORARY SUSPENSION PERIOD. This will be useful for some Ontario…
Every year Blumbergs has its Blumbergs’ Canadian Charity Law Institute. This year we will be doing a “mini-institute” – very virtual, much shorter and more affordable but covering a number of topics that are of concern to Canadian charities. So…
A lot has happened since we originally published this article on September 4th so here is an updated version below. The WE Charity scandal has now been going on for over 3 months. It has caused the Minister…
The Canadian access to information system seems to underperforming when it comes to the WE Charity scandal. See this PDF of Completed Access to Information Requests from the Government of Canada. The PCO and the OCL in six access requests…
[Update – the motion to extend the period within ONCA can be brought into force was carried on September 21, 2020.] As we have noted before, ONCA was passed in 2010 and it was never brought into force. Unless…
While restrictions are easing up and businesses are getting back to work, now is still a good time for registered charities to get on to CRA’s new Digital Services for Charities. CRA launched this new online services a year ago…
The Charities Directorate of CRA sent out an email today to their electronic mailing list. The full text is below and our comments are in [brackets and italics]. If you want the boring stuff from CRA then you should definitely…
In the case Eisbrenner v. Canada, the Federal Court of Appeal deals with 2 tax shelter donation schemes that were not accepted in the Tax Court of Canada and the FCA denied these appeals. Here is the text of…
In the case of Mudge v. The Queen, it deals with a charitable scheme and a motion by the taxpayer to strike out portions of CRA’s pleadings when CRA was trying to deny the deductibility of the ‘donation’. The case…
A recent public opinion poll by Proof Communications, which runs the CanTrust index, dealing with trust shows a 6% decline for the non-profit and charity sector from May to September 2020. Clearly having over 2 months of very negative WE…