A new report from the Broadbent Institute is raising questions once again about the political activity audits conducted by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and whether or not the agency has unfairly focused on charities with missions that don’t align with the interests of the federal government.

The report finds nine out of 10 prominent right-wing charities claimed zero per cent of their budgets were used for political activity in the most recent fiscal year. The final filing for the tenth organization has yet to be submitted or made public by the CRA.

The report is an update of a similar October 2014 investigation, which discovered all 10 charitable organizations reported zero political activities between 2011 and 2013. That investigation led the Broadbent Institute to call for an independent inquiry into the CRA’s audits to ensure charities under investigation aren’t the target of political attack.

The new report, which reviews the 2014 filings of the 10 organizations in light of their public activities, renews calls for an independent inquiry “to ensure transparency and fairness in the CRA’s decision-making.”

Under CRA rules, charities are allowed to spend up to 10 per cent of the organization’s time and money on "political activities," which the CRA defines as any activity that seeks to change, oppose or retain laws or policies.

According to the Broadbent Institute, many of the public activities undertaken by the organizations in question, which include the Fraser Institute and Focus on the Family, appear to meet the definition of political activity.

For example, in September 2014, Marco Navarro-Genie, president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies published an opinion piece in the Chronicle Herald that discouraged governments from banning fracking, saying the move “closes opportunities for greater innovation…and the development of more employment.”

“Prohibition is the wrong impulse,” he wrote.

The report also cites the example of Macdonald-Laurier Institute managing director Brian Lee Crowley, who in July 2014 argued the federal government should “assert its power to sweep away barriers to trade created by the provinces” in the Globe and Mail.

Other groups investigated in the Broadbent report are: C.D.Howe Institute, the Montreal Economic Institute, Canadian Constitution Foundation, Energy Probe Research Foundation, and Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

“The examples cited are only some of the many possible examples of political activity in which these groups engaged,” Jonathan Sas, Broadbent Institute director of research and author of the report, writes. “The juxtaposition calls into question how these charities interpret the restrictions on engaging in 'political activity' and why, if these groups are engaging in political activity, as defined by the CRA, the agency continues to allow them to report zero per cent.”

So far, at least 52 charities have been the target of the CRA’s $13.4 million audit program, which began in 2012.

Environmental Defence, the David Suzuki Foundation, Equiterre, Pen Canada, Canada Without Poverty, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Ecology Action Centre have all been subjected to investigation and audit since the program began.

In March 2015, the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre released a report, prepared for DeSmog Canada, that called for significant reform to Canada’s charitable tax law.

The report found current rules around the issue of political activity are confusing and create an “intolerable state of uncertainty.”

The report called on the federal government to clarify rules about what constitutes political activity and to loosen the 10 per cent rule on allowable limits.

The Broadbent Institute report confirms the broad discrepancies in how charities view reporting requirements around political activities.

“This report makes clear that the CRA rules around political activity are interpreted, to put it charitably, quite differently by many right-leaning charities,” Sas concluded in the report.

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A new report from the Broadbent Institute raises fresh questions about whether Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) audits are being used as a politicized tool to pressure critics of the federal government. 

The report, Stephen Harper’s CRA: Selective audits, “political” activity, and right-leaning charities, says several right-leaning charities are reporting zero “political” activity while engaging in work that appears to meet the CRA’s definition.

“We know charities that have been critical of policies of the Harper government are being audited by the Canada Revenue Agency. With mounting evidence suggesting bias in auditing decisions, we need to find out what’s going on here,” said Rick Smith, executive director of Broadbent Institute, a non-partisan organization founded by former NDP Leader Ed Broadbent.

Fifty-two charities are being targeted in a $13.4 million audit program launched by the federal government in 2012 to determine whether any are violating a rule that limits spending on political activities to 10 per cent of resources. Those charities include Environmental Defence, the David Suzuki Foundation, Canada Without Poverty, Ecology Action Centre and Equiterre.

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The Broadbent report examined publicly available CRA tax filings of 10 charities and cross-referenced these with their publicly available work. In each case, the charities had reported that they had conducted no political activity between 2011 and 2013.

The Broadbent Institute’s review, which includes the Fraser Institute, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies and Focus on the Family, provides examples of activity for each of the charities that appear to meet the CRA’s definition of “political.”

For example, on Oct. 22, 2012, the Fraser Institute released a report calling for the B.C. government to lift its moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration, which appears to fall under the CRA’s guideline on what constitutes political activity, which states an activity is political if “the intention of the activity is to incite, or organize to put pressure on, an elected representative or public official to retain, oppose, or change the law, policy, or decision of any level of government in Canada or a foreign country.”

The report raises fresh questions about the CRA’s selection process for determining which charities are targeted for political-activity audits.

Other groups scrutinized in the Broadbent report are: Macdonald-Laurier Institute, C.D. Howe Institute, the Montreal Economic Institute, Canadian Constitution Foundation, Energy Probe Research Foundation, Frontier Centre for Public Policy and Institute for Canadian Values.

It’s unknown whether any of these groups are currently under audit.

The Broadbent Institute is calling for the establishment of an independent inquiry to examine CRA processes to ensure transparency and fairness in its decision-making criteria around political-activity audits and interpretations of “political” activity, and to ensure such processes are not subject to political pressures or interference. 

“Political activity is a critical part of many charities’ work. Progressive or conservative, blunting the ability of civil society to advocate and to engage in debate and, occasionally, dissent should concern us all,” Smith said.

Photo: Obert Madondo via Flickr

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It is always difficult to know what to publish on Earth Day. It’s been around for 34 years, which means that much of what’s worth writing about has already been covered. Then there’s the question of whether to inform your readers with facts, inspire them with positive stories about solutions or just overwhelm them with the beauty and wonder of nature.

Despite the challenge, it’s still a little perplexing why one of Vancouver’s two major newspapers published, on Earth Day, a column about climate change that is so poorly written, so haphazardly argued, so lacking in any genuine concern for the truth, that had a freshman submitted it in one of the university courses I teach, I would have given it an F.

The column to which I refer, “Earth Day is cult indoctrination,” was published by The Vancouver Sun on April 22 as a “guest editorial” by Michelle Stirling-Anosh. Nothing I read in the mainstream media shocks me anymore, and most of it doesn’t even deserve a response, but Stirling-Anosh’s contribution to the climate change debate is worth some critical attention, if only as a warning to others.

Although she did cobble together a few of the selective and decontextualized “facts” commonly used by climate change deniers, Stirling-Anosh’s real currency is fear. Earth Day, she claims, is nothing but an insidious opportunity to “bombard” us with treacherous “appeals to protect the earth for our children.”

This may seem like a laudable goal to most of us — I’d certainly like my daughter to enjoy a planet at least as healthy and livable as the one my parents bequeathed to me — but Stirling-Anosh is quick to point out this irresponsible barrage of dangerous information is part of a campaign of “agenda-driven indoctrination” to brainwash our children “that would make Stalin proud.”

To support her claim equating climate scientists and activists with mass-murdering dictators, she cites a report, published by a UK non-profit with close ties to fossil fuel companies and the climate denial community, which reached the terrifying conclusion that “global warming/climate change propaganda has infiltrated every aspect of education.”

Apparently, the 'Climate Change Cult' has convinced universities not to push students into “hard sciences like petroleum engineering (sic) or geosciences” (you’d never know it from a stroll around the University of Calgary). Elementary schools, too, “have successfully destroyed the basics of scientific inquiry in children,” though she forgot to provide a reference for this ‘factoid.’

Putting aside the factual inconsistencies, you’re just left with the vague and nefarious “they” who are out there in our schools, terrorizing children with the terrifying consequences of climate change, inducing in them a psychological state, similar to Stockholm Syndrome, that leaves them bereft of critical thinking skills and “unable to liberate themselves from their tormentors.” Which, of course, then allows the ‘Climate Change Cult’ to tell them how they “should live, as well as … what they should think.”

Who would spend the time and energy writing such a hopeless piece of drivel? According to her byline, Stirling-Anosh is communications manager for Friends of Science. Ah ha. Five minutes of research on the Internet indicates that she is, as one might have deduced by now, an ideological soldier in the legions of faithful climate change deniers.

Friends of Science is a controversial public relations project, funded by Big Oil through the University of Calgary, whose raison d'être is to cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific evidence that indicates human activity (namely, burning fossil fuels and levelling forests) is causing the temperature of the planet to rise dangerously high. (In case you missed it: 97 per cent of the world’s climate scientists agree that manmade global warming is real and that the burning of fossil fuels is a significant factor.)

She is also a research associate for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, another think tank that goes out of its way to debunk reputable climate science. On LinkedIn, she calls herself a “creative writer,” not in the realm of novels and poems but in the dark art of “corporate communications.” 

(Read more background information on the Friends of Science and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy)

Perhaps most enlightening is her blog, DarkGreenDevils, dedicated to the “dense network of interests keen to manipulate markets and make you, the taxpayer, pay for ideological dreams of ‘free’ and ‘clean’ energy.”

To quote from one among many paranoid rants, Stirling-Anosh argues that, “Self-important artists pose a threat to life as we know it. Such as using their advanced communications skills to advocate for eco-causes, the science of which they know nothing about, they are killing industry and causing global warming through all their hot air.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on Stirling-Anosh. In a way, I almost feel sorry for her. It’s as if she’s the one who has been indoctrinated into a cult, the Cult of Free Market Extremism, where ideologues dispense with imagination and critical thinking and gather together to worship at the altar of the mythical “free” market. It is this unassailable belief, rather than the falsity of the causes and costs of climate change, that makes the notion of regulating greenhouse gas emissions out of existence (and creating a clean energy economy) such a heresy.

But none of this explains why The Vancouver Sun would publish this column at all, never mind on Earth Day. When I first read the headline “Earth Day is cult indoctrination,” I thought the paper was putting us on, a late April Fool’s joke of sorts. Or perhaps the editors were aware of just how absurd it is and were trying to be ironic. But then I discovered the Sun’s sister newspaper, The Province, published a similar column by Stirling-Anosh two weeks earlier.

The Province column is another attempt to convince us that “global warming stopped before [the] Kyoto [Protocol] was even implemented,” and that, the “overall benefits of ‘carbon’ far outweigh the alleged social costs.” Both of which are patently untrue.

In a democracy where freedom of speech is sacrosanct, there’s little to be done about voices like Stirling-Anosh. But the editors of the Sun and the Province should know better. Please don’t insult the intelligence of your readers by printing baseless propaganda written by PR hacks lurking in the darkest corners of the oil industry. Climate change is too dangerous and we’ve already dithered for too long. Leave what little space you have for climate coverage for those with more honorable intentions.

Jeff Gailus is the author of Little Black Lies, about the use of propaganda in the war over the future of the tar sands. Originally from Alberta, he now lives in Missoula, Montana. 

Image Credit: Edward Musiak via Flickr

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