FOURNIER: Are Canadian ENGO charities just a way to make money?

In times of great inflation, it is a no-brainer to expand the supply of energy, lumber, food and minerals. Yet, Canadian environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGO) take every opportunity to block Canadian attempts to expand our natural resource sector.This is one reason I am increasingly shining light onto the questionable ethics of the ENGO charity-industrial-complex that operates in Canada.By my calculation, the after-expenses free cash holdings of the top six of Canada's ENGO charities increased on average by $6,000,000 per year from 2019 to 2022 — and their largest donors were the Government of Canada and endowment funds with charity status.The optics of such a rapid build-up in free cash holdings makes me wonder: Are these ENGO charities really not-for-profit? Or are ensuring their donors receive the highest return on their charitable contributions.Blumbergs is a Canadian law-firm that assists non-profits and charities in trying to be transparent, legal, ethical and effective.The six ENGOs that I have examined using Blumbergs CRA T3010 tax filing data are Pembina Institute for Appropriate Development, The David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defence Canada, Ecojustice Society Canada, Sierra Club of British Columbia Foundation and Raincoast Conservation Foundation. .Figure 1. Total cash holdings of 6 Canadian ENGO charities from 2013 to 2022.Figure 1 shows the Blumberg line item called cash, bank accounts and short-term investments (i.e., free cash holdings) under Assets in their CRA T3010 filings, which are summed annually for all six ENGO charities listed above and plotted from 2013 to 2022.I have broken the time series into two periods.From 2013 to 2018, free cash holdings grew by approximately $1,000,000 per year between these 6 ENGO charities. Then in the second period from 2019 to 2022, we see that free cash holdings experienced a six-fold increase to more than $6,000,000 per year.Clearly revenues are outstripping expenditures among these six ENGO charities and at the current rate of growth of cash holdings, this value to grow to as much as $90 million dollars by 2030 if their funding levels and accounting practices remain unchanged. .When we examine the largest donors of these six ENGO charities, we find that aside from Pembina, the top donors are all registered charities. Pembina's largest donor is the Government of Canada and in 2022, they received more than $1.5 million from the Liberal Government.You have to ask: How is one charity fine with donating to another, knowing full well that the recipients of their donations have experienced a 600% growth in profitability over the past four years?What kind of charity is okay with receiving a reduced rate of investment on their charitable donations?When we examine the largest donor charities, we find a special type exists, such as The Trottier Family Foundation, whose sole purpose is to manage a large pool of cash and dole out donations to smaller charitable enterprises.The Trottier Family Foundation's cash reserve in both short- and long-term investments has grown from $32 million in 2013 to $688 million in 2022 and their earnings on said investments are deemed tax free by the CRA.This practice of large charities funding smaller ENGO charities complicates efforts to audit where funds originate, their intended application and anonymizes their original donors, individual or corporate.Of these six charities, The David Suzuki Foundation pays its executives the most among these six entities and in 2022, their CRA filings show a cumulative payment between $850,000 to $1,050,000 to its top four leaders. Paying a charity's leader $300,000 per year, lies somewhere between ironic and unethical, given so many Canadians are living hand to mouth.Another most peculiar observation was that for Pembina's 2022 gross revenue of $7,277,515, only 12% of its donors received tax receipts for their contributions. This is not to suggest that Pembina is acting unlawfully. Rather it simply shows how very little of its funds are truly charitable as per CRA definitions and worthy of a tax receipt.As far as I can see, the ENGO charities mentioned in this article have lost their not-for-profit status and their donor base is anything but a grassroots collection of individuals. Rather their donor base is increasingly dominated by a highly sophisticated group that are more like large institutional investment agencies than traditional charities.

FOURNIER: Are Canadian ENGO charities just a way to make money?

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