The Financial State of Canada's Environmental Movement
How they're using their charitable status
Right now I’m like a kid with a brand new bike. The Charities Directorate of Canada Revenue Agency just responded to my request for data. Lots of data. That data contains detailed information about each of the more than 82,000 charities that were registered nation-wide as of 2024.
As an experimental project to get acquainted with the dataset, I thought I’d explore a single charitable sector. To see what insights can come from having access to such a big picture, let’s zero in on charitable organizations whose legal mandates focus on the environment.
There were a total of 490 such organizations. 153 of those were registered in Ontario, 127 in British Columbia, and 109 in Quebec.
Combined, those 490 organizations spent $459,786,017 in 2024. However it’s important to look at that number in context. As you might recall from my Importing American Style Charity Activism article, many millions of dollars are routinely transferred across multiple layers of charities before they’re actually spent on charitable programs. So some of that half billion dollars will doubtless be double-counted.
How Charity Revenue is Calculated
Perhaps it’ll be more useful for us to think about where all that money is coming from. $87 million came through charitable donations from Canadians who were issued tax receipts. But another $68 million came in the form of federal government spending, $88 million came from provincial governments, and another $38 million came from municipal or regional governments.
Besides that $194 million total from governments and the $87 million from regular Canadians, there were another $56 million from “all sources outside of Canada” (both tax-receipted and non tax-receipted). That’ll bring us to around $337 million of “fresh”, non-duplicated inbound funding.
Technically, given how $107 million in tax receipts were issued for donations to these organizations, it could be argued that the total government contributions should include the $30 million or so of income tax revenues that will be reduced by those receipts. So we could say that the all-government contribution to the sector is as high as $224 million
That represents a reasonably-sized industry. Although, in context, that total does come to only around one-tenth of one percent of Canada’s entire charitable sector.
Just to get a sense for how many people the non-profit environmental activism industry employs, consider how $161 million was spent on compensation in 2024. A further $48 million went to “professional and consulting fees”, and $6 million was spent on “research grants and scholarships as part of charitable activities”.
Environmental charities also reported $18.5 million directed as grants to “non-qualified donees”. This is something that only became possible since the adoption of Bill C-19 in 2022. Before 2022, charities were required to execute their own programs or transfer funds to other charities (or similar organizations). Bill C-19 allowed them to also disburse funds to external organizations who would use those funds to advance the charity’s mandate.
Government Involvement in Charity Work
Here’s a bit more context about the charity sector as a whole. All-in, the federal government paid out around $13.1 billion in 2024 to charities from all sectors. Provincial governments added another $247.7 billion(!). And municipalities and regions topped that up with another $13.6 billion.
In other words, an eye-popping $274,496,667,705. That’s more than a quarter-trillion dollars.
However, that’s not nearly as crazy as it sounds. In fact, a lot of that money was paid out to charities for the execution of core functions of government, including:
Operating grants
Program funding
Service contracts
Per-client transfers
Public school system budgets
Hospital budgets
University operating grants
It’s also very likely that there’s some (perfectly normal) double-counting going on here too. Some recipients transfer portions of their funding to other charities who will also report what they receive as government payment.
One obvious example could involve a province funding a university which transfers some of their funding to an affiliated research foundation. Filings for both recipients would probably classify the money’s source as the same government.
All of this underlines the importance of properly accounting for the full context of the numbers we’re seeing in this data. But it also drives home how complex charitable operations can be, how vulnerable the government is to the possibility of fraud and misuse, and how important it is for Canadians to keep as careful an eye on things as possible.
A Glimpse Into Ottawa's Professional Lobbyist Industry
There are currently more than 7,000 professional lobbyists listed in the Canadian government’s lobbyist registry. Since 2009, records containing the details of nearly 300,000 meetings between lobbyists and government officials have been entered into the official database.
Importing American-Style Charity Activism
In the U.S., the Tides Foundation (controlled, in turn, by the Tides Network) is well known for funding left-leaning causes using what some call dark money. The money is “dark” in the sense that grants coming from Tides do not reveal which donor directed the funds. Tides has no legal requirement to disclose its donors’ identities.
Charity Campaigns vs. Charity Donations
Over the past few years, I’ve had canvassers coming to my home in Toronto on behalf of a wide range of non-profits - including hospitals and mental health and homeless support organizations. The fundraisers all “wear” a noticeable post secondary student vibe. That’s hardly news.
Prodigious effort here, David. Thank you for shining your light on these sorts of expenditures.
Astounding to see such mountains of public money spent with no apparent impact.
This is interesting and strange. Even with your caution about double counting, it does seem like a whole lot of money sloshing around the ecosystem—just this little corner of it!
What does this part mean: “In fact, a lot of that money was paid out to charities for the execution of core functions of government”? One of your examples is hospital budgets? The government pays charities (hospital foundations?) to do those budgets for them?
At this point, my working assumption is that no level of the Canadian government has a good handle on where or how this money is being spent. Is that fair?