PM’s charity audits look for ‘bias, one-sidedness’

The more information that comes out, the more it smells of bias in the choice of charities it audits:

The CRA says it will do 60 audits, and there are 86,000 charities in Canada. So that’s a one-in-1,400 chance of being audited by random selection. Only it’s not random. The CRA admits it’s looking for red flags, including “bias.”

“Audit selection occurs after a substantial screening process,” the CRA said in an email. “This may include considering issues such as ‘point of view,’ ‘bias,’ or ‘one-sidedness.'”

In Dying With Dignity’s case, its offending activities apparently included attempts to change public opinion.

“It is not legally charitable to engage in pressure tactics on governments such as swaying public opinion, promoting an attitude of mind, creating a climate of opinion,” the CRA’s auditor wrote to Dying With Dignity.

Still, there is a whole class of charities, known as think tanks whose major purpose is creating a climate of opinion or promoting an attitude of mind, activities that fall under the general category of “research as a charitable activity.”

“Think tanks make it very clear from the beginning that their objective is to shape public opinion, and public policy,” says Western University political science professor Donald Abelson. He has spent two decades studying think tanks in Canada and the U.S. and he’s currently writing a book about them.

Just read the annual reports from some of Canada’s leading think tanks to find proud claims of “shaping the national discourse”, “prodding governments, opinion leaders and the general public,” “changing the minds of decision makers,” yet none of that activity apparently trips the wire between political and charitable activity.

“We’re in kind of a grey area, particularly over the last several years, where the lines between policy research and political advocacy have become increasingly blurred,” Abelson said.

Which circles back to the prickly question of how to define “political activities.”

Why the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and not the Fraser Institute? Why Dying with Dignity and not the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms or the Canadian Constitution Foundation?

PM’s charity audits look for ‘bias, one-sidedness’ – Health – CBC News.