Political Activities by Charities Legal and Good For Society

July 17, 2014 No comments Article
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I’ve been watch­ing the com­ments sec­tions of news reports and columns run­ning on some of the larger media web­sites. And I notice a con­sis­tent piece of mis­in­for­ma­tion creep­ing in: that char­i­ties are not allowed to engage in polit­i­cal activ­i­ties. That’s sim­ply not true. One con­trib­u­tor below Carol Goar’s excel­lent col­umn (and I say excel­lent not just

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Would You Mistake a Charity for Radical Extremists?

July 16, 2014 No comments Article
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But why would any­one want to tar­get char­i­ties? After all, char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tions are among the most mod­er­ate civil soci­ety orga­ni­za­tions. They are not nor­mally drawn to highly con­tentious actions. They tend to do research and speak about pol­icy based on that research. Envi­ron­men­tal char­i­ties, for exam­ple, have his­tor­i­cally drawn on the research of gov­ern­ment and

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Which Charities are Being Targeted by CRA

July 15, 2014 1 comment Article
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Three kinds of char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tions are dis­pro­por­tion­ately under­go­ing audits by Canada Rev­enue Agency. You may recall the Feb­ru­ary 2014 CBC news report announc­ing that seven envi­ron­men­tal char­i­ties face CRA audits. The report quoted an Alberta Con­ser­v­a­tive deny­ing that the gov­ern­ment tar­gets any one sec­tor or any one char­ity, but tellingly the MP hinted at one

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Targeting Enviros for Audits an ‘Insidious’ Process

July 14, 2014 No comments Article
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Has the fed­eral gov­ern­ment directly inter­fered in the oper­a­tions of Canada Rev­enue Agency (CRA), telling them which char­i­ties to audit for “polit­i­cal activ­i­ties”? Or is there some other way that the gov­ern­ment ensures the tax man tar­gets tthose char­i­ties advo­cat­ing for dif­fer­ent pub­lic poli­cies than those pur­sued by the cab­i­net? Espe­cially envi­ron­men­tal issues con­cern­ing the

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Government Rhetoric Frames Charities as Criminals — and Worse

July 11, 2014 No comments Article
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Up to 10 per­cent of the resources—money, peo­ple, time—of a Cana­dian char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion can be devoted to what reg­u­la­tions call “polit­i­cal activ­i­ties.” Repeated stud­ies show that the aver­age is far below this, and that many char­i­ties do not par­tic­i­pate in polit­i­cal activ­i­ties. But a 2010 sur­vey by Imag­ine Canada, the umbrella orga­ni­za­tion of char­i­ties, found

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Charities Muffled & Distracted by Government Actions: Chill

July 11, 2014 No comments Article
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Check out my newly com­pleted the­sis, now posted to www.garethkirkby.ca. I looked at how char­i­ties are affected by fed­eral Cana­dian cab­i­net min­is­ters seem­ingly sug­gest­ing that they are crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tions and ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions and work­ing against the inter­ests of their coun­try. And how they are being affected by the fed­eral government’s new reg­u­la­tions gov­ern­ing char­i­ties and

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RCMP Complaint Commissioner Investigating Spying on Groups

April 4, 2014 No comments Article
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Why are the RCMP and CSIS spy­ing on per­fectly peace­ful orga­ni­za­tions whose mem­bers are not only exer­cis­ing their Char­ter rights to free­dom of speech and assem­bly, but also simul­ta­ne­ously doing their duty as active cit­i­zens in a democ­racy? And why have these agen­cies infil­trated First Nations and pos­si­bly envi­ron­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions with spies while simul­ta­ne­ously conceding

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Government Action, Not Consumer Guilt, is Solution to Climate Threat

March 30, 2014 No comments Article
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“Don’t you have a car?” a friend was asked by a co-worker after shar­ing an opin­ion against approv­ing any new oil pipelines. “Isn’t it hyp­o­crit­i­cal to oppose pipelines when you drive, too?” Ouch! The ques­tion seems rea­son­able on the sur­face — and I bet lots of peo­ple get asked that by co-workers and friends. After all,

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