What's Hiding Inside Canada's Non-Profit Sector?
You’d be amazed how much money you can earn through a non-profit. Of course, because (non-charitable) non-profit financials don’t have to be made public, the rest of us will never know just how much. However, since the primary funding (and tax-free status) for many non-profits comes from taxpayer sources, it’s worth trying to unwrap as much of the mystery as possible.
First though, it’s important to distinguish between non-profit categories - of which there are four:
Charitable organizations (whose annual CRA filings are publicly available)
Government non-profits (like hospitals or school boards)
Business non-profits (like chambers of commerce, condominium associations, and professional associations)
Community non-profits (like social service and advocacy organizations).
For this article, I’m only interested in community non-profits. And that’s because that’s the sector where there’s the greatest risk of abuse and the least transparency.
For context, it’s worth reading Jonathan Ireland’s 2024 article: The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and the Corruption of the American City. Ireland does an excellent job showing how U.S. cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle have spent billions of dollars fighting problems like homelessness with - at best - negligible results. But his truly sobering point is that, in a break from tradition, it’s not the cities themselves who’ve wasted all that money. Instead the work has been out-sourced with minimal oversight and accountability to non-profits.
Many - if not all - of those new non-profits have been spending heavily on executive pay. But the system has also created a perverse incentive structure where nonprofits (in their roles as housing management organizations) benefit financially from rising rents through increased government subsidies. As a result, in some cases, they’ve been lobbying to block new public housing initiatives. The conflict of interest that results only deepens the housing crises.
Could this kind of outcome also be common in Canada? I really don’t know. But the first step to finding out will involve understanding the current state of the industry.
According to Statistics Canada, non-profit institutions serving households providing new-construction apartments in 2024 invested a total of $1.041 billion across Canada. That number has been growing steadily from $360 million in 2016. It’s reasonable to assume that around 60 percent of that money comes from government sources. Related data shows us that in 2023, Canadian community non-profits spent1 $6.3 billion on all "development and housing" projects.2
So it’s clear that significant sums of public money have been spent funding non-profits to build “affordable” housing. But it’s a lot less clear how much of that money is being successfully converted to real-world homes. One thing that’s fairly obvious is that housing construction is happening. This housing start data shows a noticeable growth trend:
That jump in Q2 2025 was likely driven by a shift away from a disastrous condo market and towards purpose-build rentals.
There certainly has been progress. But without greater visibility into how taxpayer dollars are used by non-profits, we’ll never know whether that progress has been cost-effective.
In this context, non-profit “income” is calculated as the value of their output and the sum of costs incurred in producing goods and services that are not sold at market prices - which is a rough proxy for spending
For context, Statistics Canada tells us that community non-profits spent nearly $29 billion on social services in 2023. Presumably most of that was also using government funding.