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Has Canada’s Taxman Been Weaponized?
On Aug. 10, the Canadian branch of the registered charity, Jewish National Fund (JNF), received an email from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), notifying it that its charitable status had been revoked, effective immediately.
The grounds stated for revoking the status, which enabled JNF Canada to issue charitable receipts for income tax purposes, was that the organization had strayed from the objective for which it had originally been granted charity status. (READ MORE: Healthcare in Canada Wasn’t Always This Way)
This was partly true, but not unusual because charities do evolve. The real question should have been whether the charity was still doing well-defined charitable works, which, by objective standards, it most definitely was. In that case, its objective could have been amended through negotiation with the regulator, which is exactly what JNF Canada had tried to do several years ago when the regulator first raised the issue. The charity sent the CRA a list of 10 possible alternative objectives, all based on those of other charities that were currently operating under the agency’s good graces — they were met with radio silence.
There were other circumstances, aside from this stonewalling, that suggest that the revocation was not done in good faith. First, the agency and the charity were already litigating another matter in court. Given that the courts can strike down regulatory decisions it deems out of the scope of the regulator’s legislative authority, for the agency to take such a drastic step while in court with an organization that it regulates is extremely unusual, to say the least. To make such a decision while in litigation appears to be an attempt to make an end run around the court. In addition to the ongoing litigation, JNF Canada has now been forced to initiate another lawsuit to try to reverse this decision.
Finally, there was the manner in which it was done. CRA had other methods at its disposal but chose the most drastic one. Because the revocation was published in the government’s Gazette, at the end of one year, the charity is required to dispose of all of its assets. Given that litigation will likely last longer than a year, even if JNF Canada wins in court, it will have to start all over again.
JNF In the Crosshairs of Canada’s Left
JNF Canada has been in the crosshairs of the Left in Canada since 2014 when the charity became the target of a public campaign #StopJNFCanada by leftist pro-Palestinian activists, including Independent Jewish Voices and the socialist New Democrat Party, to put it out of business. This is to be expected given the work that JNF has been doing to help restore and build up the Jewish state.
Established in 1901, in the early days of the Zionist movement, JNF is a venerable Jewish charity. It was founded to raise money in the Jewish diaspora to buy land for Jews who were beginning to return to their ancient homeland. The land, then ruled by the Ottoman Empire, had become desolate and contained only about 300,000 inhabitants compared to the 10 million that live there now. Back then, restoring the land entailed back-breaking work using only primitive equipment to drain malarial swamps and plant trees to hold the eroding soil and to reforest the non-arable parts of the country that would later serve as parks and wildlife reserves. Over the years, JNF has planted over 240 million trees, built 180 dams and reservoirs, and established about 1000 parks. (READ MORE: Oct. 7 Celebration Rallies Are on the Way)
For Jewish children, this charity served a second purpose: It trained them to fulfill the cardinal commandment of donating to charity while connecting them to the Jewish homeland. Back in the day, and even in the present time, the classrooms of Jewish schools contained little blue-and-white tin boxes with slits on the top and a map of Israel printed on the side — they were nicknamed with the Yiddish word pushkehs — and into these little tin boxes, children were routinely encouraged to deposit their spare coins. The money gathered was designated for planting trees in Israel. It also became customary in the Jewish diaspora to plant a tree in honor of a recently deceased person. At its peak between the World Wars, over a million of these pushkehs were to be found in Jewish homes all over the diaspora. Given its narrative about Jewish settler-colonialism, it is not surprising that the leftist-Palestinian coalition would harbor particular hatred for the JNF.
JNF Canada was established in 1968, generations after the mother organization was first chartered. Like the flagship charity and other chapters around the world, JNF Canada has gotten involved with all sorts of other projects. Recently these include building a pavilion for a psychiatric hospital that treats patients suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) caused by terrorists and repairing Kibbutz Kissufim, a community near the Gaza border that was heavily damaged during the Oct. 7 Hamas pogroms.
Who Shall Guard the Guardians?
Since JNF Canada and the CRA have been at loggerheads for years, I want to mention a few points of contention to illustrate what has been going on between them; two are obviously political, and one appears frivolous.
JNF Canada has built amenities on IDF army bases, including a playground for the dependent children of personnel who are stationed there and a recreation facility for high school students who spend a week there for orientation purposes. Additionally, JNF Canada built a project in the disputed territories, specifically a park that critics claim is on the ground where Arab villages once stood. And the frivolous one? JNF has been supporting indigent workers, mainly recent immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, by hiring them to plant trees and dig water reservoirs and CRA is concerned that JNF has been paying them above minimum wage to do so.
When notified about these issues, JNF complied. It completely stopped doing projects on IDF bases and likewise in the disputed territories (it should be noted that CRA supports charities all over the world and many other charities build in disputed territories). As far as the frivolous issue is concerned, one of JNF Canada’s original stated objectives was to “relieve poverty.” Though these workers are indeed being paid well above the minimum wage, they are not being paid enough to make them rich. To put this in perspective one must bear in mind that Yasser Arafat and the recently assassinated Ismail Haniyeh both died as billionaires. They were both terrorist supporters who grew rich on the dime of taxpayers in all the Western nations that support them.
Whatever one thinks of JNF Canada, it is neither a fraud nor a racket compared to many charities around the world. (I do not doubt that it has been incompetent in how it runs its operation, but this is not uncommon. In the past, the CRA has issued blanket amnesties.)
Greenpeace, which is the largest charity in the world, is exemplary of genuine corruption in the charity sector. It started out espousing widely commended causes, first by opposing U.S. hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska, then by fighting against whale fishing and seal hunting. But then it switched gears, first by opposing the chlorination of drinking water, a process that has saved millions of people from the scourge of dysentery, cholera, and other water-borne diseases that often lead to death. Greenpeace also began to crusade against golden rice, a GMO food. In 2016, 107 Nobel Laureates sharply criticized Greenpeace for opposing GMOs in general and golden rice in particular. These scientists stated that there has never been any harm done by GMO foods and that they are better for the environment. (READ MORE: Tucker Carlson Gives Credibility to a Hatemonger)
Greenpeace eventually lost its charity status in both Canada — well before the Trudeau regime — and New Zealand for being too political and was likewise criticized along these lines in Germany and Australia. In 2014, Greenpeace activists faced criminal charges in Peru for desecrating a sacred Incan site with political messages. Because it lost its charitable status in Canada, in 1998 it was forced to move its international headquarters to the Netherlands, where the government partially supports it with proceeds from its national lotteries. The Dutch government has achieved the dubious distinction of funding a perfidious non-profit organization with a regressive tax.
The Netherlands’ support of Greenpeace highlights another important part of the big picture: governments themselves are often the biggest donors to certain notorious charities, some of which would not even exist without government donations. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall guard the guardians themselves?
This Is What Real Charity Looks Like
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that CRA’s recent decision was politically motivated. When the news of the revocation broke out, one of Canada’s public employees’ unions was delighted.
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada wrote on social media “As the union representing over 17,000 CRA professionals, and an organization that will always stand for human rights, we commend CRA’s decision to revoke the Jewish National Fund’s charitable status. No organization that uses tax-deductible donations to support war or genocidal efforts in an occupied territory should be able to benefit from Canadian charitable status.”
It is ludicrous that the Canadian government has revoked the charitable status of the Jewish charity for straying from its mandate and lax auditing — both of which are issues it has been working to rectify — when all of its works, including land reclamation and relief of poverty, have long been recognized the world over as public goods.
To Americans, this story will be reminiscent of the IRS scandal during the Obama administration when Lois Lerner, who directed its charitable status division, slow-walked and harassed conservative organizations that were applying for charitable designation. She famously wrote in an email “Republicans are assholes” and, when testifying under oath, pled the Fifth Amendment and was forced to resign her position, but with a full pension. Was CRA’s decision partisan?
The CRA decision to publicly revoke the charity status is bound not only to give satisfaction to Israel’s enemies but will likely also fan the rising flames of antisemitism in Canada, which the Trudeau government has done little to nothing to smother.
After JNF Canada’s charitable status had been revoked its CEO Lance Davis maintained that his organization would continue to do its charitable work and remarked “Just yesterday we received a gift for $144,000, and the donor said, ‘I don’t need a charitable receipt. I’m happy to give it. The work we’re doing is really important.’…And it’s not just the top donors. It’s the grassroots people. Trees are still being purchased.”
To hell with charitable receipts. This is what real charitable giving looks like.
The post Has Canada’s Taxman Been Weaponized? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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