It was with a certain pleasure that I read in Monday's Star that some international aid charities are banding together to challenge the Harper-directed CRA witch hunt into charities that promote views counter to government policy:
A dozen such groups conferred last week about a joint strategy to present to agency officials next month, a reversal from the last two years, when many charities refrained from speaking out for fear of aggravating the taxman.
The challenge by a dozen charities, many of which have been or currently are being subjected to CRA audits/witch hunts, is being conducted under the aegis of the Canadian Council For International Co-operation, which represents some 70 groups who funnel charity dollars abroad to alleviate poverty and defend human rights. They have elected to send a delegation to meet directly with senior Canada Revenue Agency officials.
Says Julia Sanchez, executive director of the council,
The political-activity audits are just one element of a deteriorating relationship with the Canada Revenue Agency. She cited the case of Oxfam Canada, which was required by CRA officials to alter its mission statement to no longer refer to the prevention of poverty, only its alleviation.
“That’s a narrow and outdated definition of what tackling poverty actually means”.
About the Cra's attack on CoDev, in which it demands the organization translate every Spanish document it receives from its partners in Latin America into French or English, even taxi receipts, Sanchez had this to say:
[I]nternational-aid charities work in more than 200 official languages overseas and that such a requirement applied broadly would be a “huge amount of work.”
“We’ve never done that before in our sector . . . All of a sudden this comes up”.
Only the guileless or the extraordinarily naive would give the benefit of the doubt to either the Harper regime or the CRA. Click here to see the pattern of harassment that has emerged. You will note that no right-wing cheerleader of the Harper agenda has been targeted for an audit.
For more on this development, check out The Star's editorial in today's paper.
