CRA wouldn’t meet with Jewish charity for years before revoking its charitable status: documents

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OTTAWA — Documents obtained by the National Post show that Canada Revenue Agency wouldn’t meet with senior officials at the Jewish National Fund for years as it tried to bring itself in compliance with the agency’s rules for charities.

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The papers detail a mostly one-sided series of correspondences between 2019 and 2023, in which the CRA didn’t respond to efforts on the part of the JNF’s leadership to fix issues identified in the agency’s final audit of the Jewish charity.

“The Charity, and its counsel, noted the unusual refusal by the CRA to meet with the Charity despite several attempts,” wrote a lawyer representing the JNF in a letter dated Oct. 24, 2023.

The JNF’s legal team suggested three years earlier that CRA officials meet virtually with the fund’s CEO and CFO, noting in a correspondence dated Oct. 28, 2020 that the two parties had “not had any direct contact… outside of written correspondence” since the audit started in 2016. (COVID restrictions in effect at the time precluded an in-person meeting.)

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“Please let us know if you would be open to a brief teleconference or video conference with (CEO Lance Davis) and (CFO Edit Rosenstein) on a day and time that suits you,” concluded the October 2020 letter.

It wouldn’t be until May 2024, just three months prior to unilaterally pulling the JNF’s charitable status, that the CRA would finally give an audience to fund executives. The 11th-hour meeting proved fruitless.

Davis says he felt like the agency’s officials were going through the motions during the long-awaited sitdown.

“They came into the meeting without an agenda and didn’t seem all too interested in what we had to say,” Davis told the National Post by phone.

The CRA announced it would be terminating the JNF’s charitable status in the Aug. 10, 2024 edition of the

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Canada Gazette

, citing its failure to meet parts of the Income Tax Act pertaining to registered charities. It announced in the same news release that a second Jewish charity, the Ne’eman Foundation, would be deregistered for the same reason.

Davis suspects that outside pressure campaigns may have negatively impacted the CRA’s dealings with his organization. The anti-Zionist group Independent Jewish Voices Canada, for example, ran a postcard campaign aimed at urging the minister of national revenue to “Stop the JNF.”

A motion record obtained by the National Post shows that Robert Delaney, then head of compliance for the CRA’s charities directorate, met with three IJV-affiliated activists in the fall of 2017 to discuss the complaint against the JNF.

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A spokesperson for Minister of National Revenue Marie-Claude Bibeau told the National Post by email that the CRA’s investigation of the JNF involved “no consultation (with the minister) nor any involvement of political staff.”

Whether or not the pressure campaigns played a role in the CRA’s decision, it’s clear that the agency’s deregistering of the JNF and Ne’eman Foundation has emboldened activists to go after other Jewish and pro-Israel organizations.

In a joint press release circulated last Wednesday, Just Peace Advocates and the Canadian Foreign Policy Institution called on the CRA to investigate 200 “

Israel-focused

” charities. This list includes several widely respected charities like the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies and Birthright Canada, as well as multiple Jewish hospital foundations.

“What has happened with JNF Canada is an example of the increasing weaponization of the CRA to target any Jewish organizations in Canada, and even those from the non-Jewish community who support those in need in Israel,” Davis said in an email on Wednesday. “This is a broad-based attack designed to make Canadian charities an ideological issue.”

“The list from Just Peace Advocates, sends a chilling message to the Jewish community that this is another means to target us.”

rmohamed@postmedia.com

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