Policy Forum: The Registered Charity Appeals Process—More Reasons (and a Few Proposals) for Reform

The current process of challenging decisions of the Canada Revenue Agency's Charities Directorate has significant shortcomings, which are well known within the field. A series of committees and scholars have urged Parliament to increase the transparency of the directorate's decision-making processes and create a more accessible appeal process for registered charities. In this article, the author discusses two developments that have made the case for reforming the charity appeals process even more compelling than before. The first is the Supreme Court of Canada's overhaul of the judicial review framework in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov (2019 SCC 65); the second is the trend toward public-law challenges to the registered charity regime in the superior courts. The author also outlines possible options for reform of the current Canadian model. Among other things, she considers whether elements of the English charity-law reference procedure could be accommodated within the existing registered charity regime in Canada's Income Tax Act.