I am very grateful that Mary Barroll, President of CharityVillage, spent over an hour with me discussing the charity sector in Canada including business activities and social enterprise as well as regulator and public policy issues. For those interested in…
In an article entitled Charities will soon have a higher spending quota to keep charitable status, Chris Nardi of the National Post discussed the Federal budget’s change in the disbursement quota. For our coverage, see Canadian Federal Budget 2022 and…
The CRA recently published their annual “Report on the Charities Program 2020 to 2021″. (PDF) Here are some comments: The Minister of National Revenue states: “To continue building and maintaining public trust in the charities regulator and the charitable sector,…
Here is our article List of Canadian Registered Charities Revoked as a Result of an Audit Over the Last 30 Years In the article, we discuss how we recently requested and received from CRA a list of all Canadian registered charities…
Here is our Blumbergs Snapshot of the Canadian Charity Sector 2018 – Fundraising which shows fundraising revenues and costs over a number of years. Some of the highlights of the Blumbergs’ Snapshot of the Canadian Charity Sector 2018 –…
The Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson is reviewing CRA audits of registered charities. I have extensive comments at the bottom of this note, if you want to skip some of the background below. There have been concerns expressed by some in the…
The CharityData.ca website is the preeminent freely available transparency tool for information on Canadian registered charities. It has been available since August of 2016 and we have been making intermittent improvements to CharityData.ca ever since it was created. If you…
Here is the Blumbergs’ Pre-Budget Submission for the 2022 Federal Budget that we filed on February 25, 2022. Our top recommendations are: List of Recommendations Primary Recommendations Recommendation 1: That the Federal government amend Section 241 of the Income Tax…
For those who don’t know there is a concept called tax expenditures. It is an estimate of the cost to a government of certain tax concessions. How much does it cost the Federal government to give a tax break such…
There have been many people wondering how COVID has affected the Canadian charity sector. On March 24, 2021, we released our first report which looked at 1676 registered charities. We released our second report on June 9, 2021, with 11,821 registered…
There are approximately 6,300 private foundations in Canada. Private foundations have been growing at a higher rate than any other type of Canadian registered charity. They have assets of around $100 Billion. Although there are some differences between a private…
The National Post recently had an article by Christopher Nardi “Charity sector worth $300B per year, but CRA audits have dropped four-fold since 2010“. It discusses the dramatic decline in CRA audits previously discussed on our blog at Dramatic changes…
I was very pleased to see an article by Roger Colinvaux “Speeding Up Benefits to Charity: Donor Advised Fund and Foundation Reform“. This US article looks at the US charity system but in Canada, we are currently examining similar issues. …
I recently read on a blog with some statistics relating to the number of audits that the Charities Directorate of CRA was conducting each year. Frankly, I could not believe the numbers so I wrote to CRA to ask them…
On October 19, 2021 I read the following from a newsletter of Imagine Canada: Imagine Canada supports increasing the disbursement quota to above 5% The disbursement quota consultations closed on September 30. In our submission, we recommended that the…
The last complete data year from the CRA and the T3010 is now 2019. Consequently, we have updated CharityData.ca to be based on the 2019 data when conducting searches or filtering. The website still has material from 2003 -2020 but…
Here is Blumbergs’ Written Submission to the Department of Finance about the disbursement quota. As we note in the submission, we are firmly in favour of an increase in the disbursement quota. We so suggest possible changes in our submission…
In this article “Should the disbursement quota for registered charities in Canada change or be left alone?”, Mark Blumberg and Jessie Lang discuss the disbursement quota (DQ) and the Department of Finance’s consultation on whether the Income Tax Act should be…
We have recently upgraded the CharityData.ca website. The work on the upgrade has taken place over the last eight months. Some of the changes or improvements include the following: A new search engine that is quicker than the old…
At a time when charities need funds and private foundations alone are sitting on $95 billion dollars, the Advisory Committee to the Charitable Sector (ACCS) has prepared a submission to Finance Canada stating that the disbursement quota (DQ) issue is…
We reviewed the Canadian registered charities that identified they issued official donation receipts and the total amount of donation receipts issued was approximately $19.6 billion. Here is a list of the Canadian charities that issued the largest amount of official…
Here is our note on Which Canadian charities had the largest assets in 2019?. Canadian registered charities are required to disclose on the T3010 their assets. The total assets of all the 83,832 registered charities were over $518 billion. Below…
In the Statistics Canada “Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, third quarter 2021” it has some interesting comments relating to non-profits. Stats Can notes that “This survey collects information on business expectations in the future and the ongoing impact of the…
We recently reviewed the T3010 Registered Charity Information Return database for 2019 as part of the Sean Blumberg Transparency Project. The database covers about 83,892 of the approximately 86,000 registered charities in Canada that had filed their T3010 and were…