An Aug. 10 email from the Canada Revenue Agency “blindsided” Lance Davis, CEO of the Jewish National Fund of Canada. The country’s equivalent of the IRS informed, without prior warning, that it revoked the JNF’s charity status.
The note felt like it was “some sort of mistake,” Davis told JNS.
In a publicly available notice, the CRA alleged that JNF was guilty of “failure to meet the parts of the Income Tax Act.” (It alleged in the notice that the pro-Israel group Ne’eman Foundation had done the same. JNS sought comment from the foundation.)
JNF received no advance notice of an investigation, and Davis told JNS that there was reason to suggest that the government agency’s action was influenced by pressure from anti-Israel groups.
“Is the CRA antisemitic? No. Was there bias? We believe yes,” he said.
The revocation notice came after months of unrest in Canada, with communal leaders and politicians commenting publicly on rising Jew-hatred in the country, and police data indicating that antisemitic hate crimes were up 70% in the country in 2023 compared to 2022. The scholar Gad Saad recently told JNS that he can sense a “tipping point” when Jews will need to flee Canada, and there have been efforts to curb kosher slaughtering in the country.
On Wednesday, more than 100 Canadian synagogues and Jewish organizations received bomb threats, which ultimately proved to be hoaxes.
Set up as an independent Canadian charity in 1968, per its website, JNF Canada uses Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund “as its agent to advance its charitable objectives.” More recently, it “expanded its partnerships beyond KKL to a variety of Israeli charities that demonstrated real impact,” it adds.
Davis told JNS that the CRA’s “primary and fundamental issue is our founding charitable object, which both CRA and JNF Canada agreed to in 1967.”
“JNF would fund indigent workers, mainly new immigrants, providing them with employment, thereby keeping them out of the welfare system in an effort to combat poverty,” he said. “More than 50 years later, the CRA decided that this object is no longer charitable. Therefore the funding we provided to advance this object is not directed to a charitable purpose.”
He added that “JNF Canada believes that it is unfair and unjust to change a charitable object that was valid for decades and to not negotiate a new charitable object.”
A JNF Canada Access to Information request (like a FOIA request stateside) “found all sorts of content within our file that we believed would contribute to the reasonable apprehension of bias amongst the CRA,” Davis said. “The content was indeed written by anti-Israel forces, antisemitic forces.”
Those notes were “explicit,” Davis told JNS and came from unions, groups and political parties.
“As the union representing over 17,000 CRA professionals, and an organization that will always stand for human rights, we commend CRA’s decision to revoke the Jewish National Fund’s charitable status,” the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada wrote on social media.
“No organization that uses tax-deductible donations to support war or genocidal efforts in an occupied territory should be able to benefit from Canadian charitable status,” it added.
Corey Balsam, coordinator of Independent Jewish Voices, which supports boycotting Israel, wrote on social media that his organization “started working on this 15 years ago” and that “we doubted it would ever come to pass, but never gave up and kept on pushing. JNF is appealing so we’ll see, but for now, this is a big win for justice.”
In a separate post, Independent Jewish Voices said that “greenwashing and land dispossession” is “at the heart of the JNF’s mission.”
The ‘last stop’
JNF is indeed appealing the Canada Revenue Agency’s decision in a case before the Federal Court of Appeal in Ottawa, Davis told JNS.
Davis expects that the appeal process could take nine months to land in court, but fortunately, donors are still writing checks, although they aren’t tax deductible, he told JNS. (In Canada, donations to charities are tax-deductible, while contributions to nonprofits are not.)
Although the Canadian revenue body typically aims to resolve disputes, in this instance, it made no apparent effort to be “collaborative, cooperative, to resolve the dispute” ahead of the notice, according to Davis.
“I think that that speaks volumes,” he said. “We don’t understand why JNF was treated differently than so many other organizations.”
JNS sought comment from both the Canada Revenue Agency and the Canadian prime minister’s office. After the article published, Kim Thiffault, a spokeswoman for the CRA, told JNS it “can confirm that the charitable registration of the Jewish National Fund of Canada Inc./Fonds National Juif du Canada Inc. is revoked effective Aug. 10, 2024, in accordance with the Act.”
“As of that day, this organization is no longer qualified donees and cannot issue official donation receipts,” Thiffault said.
Revocations are for “the most aggravated cases” and typically the “last stop” after a charity has shown serious breaches, according to Davis, the JNF Canada CEO. The CRA could take a series of steps, including education, compliance agreement and sanctions before bringing the hammer down with a revocation.
“The first two steps of education and compliance never—never came to realization,” he said. He told JNS that the CRA sent JNF Canada a letter noting its intent to revoke the charity status in July 2023.
“CRA confirmed that it will pursue revocation and provided us 30 days to appeal to the courts, which we did,” Davis said. “Now that we are 10 months since Oct. 7, the people of Israel need JNF Canada’s help more than ever. Our friends in Israel tell us that they cannot imagine rebuilding without JNF Canada.”
“Sadly, when our ally Israel needs support, the Canada Revenue Agency decided to revoke our charitable status,” he added. “If the government of Canada has delegated the responsibility of this decision to a small group of officials, they have made an error, and they should take responsibility.”
JNF Canada asked for meetings “many, many times” after receiving the July 2023 notification, but it was only a few months ago that two CRA representatives met with JNF Canada, and said that the two came with neither notes nor questions.
“That conversation went nowhere,” Davis said. “The normal course of action is that there’s a presumption of innocence, so charities get to continue to function as a charity, and give receipts until you have your day in court. In our case, the CRA published a notice of revocation before we had our day in court, and we are surprised.”
“We’re not an aggravated case, and the CRA told us that,” he added.
JNF has filed a legal application for judicial review for CRA to withdraw its notice of revocation. David Stevens, of Gowling WLG, and Adam Aptowitzer, of KPMG Law, are representing JNF.
“We don’t have a choice post-Oct. 7,” Davis told JNS. “Israel has to get rebuilt. Our extended family needs our support.”
“We are moving forward with what we normally do,” he added. “We’re having events, we’re raising money, we’re doing all the important things that that we normally do, and we’re keeping our head held high because we know that we haven’t done anything that is fraudulent or aggravated, and we’re really hopeful that the judicial review will take place quickly, and we can have this decision reversed.”
‘A sign of the times’
If the Canadian government persists in court in denying JNF its charitable status, the charity “can move forward, just in a different manner,” according to Davis.
“I can’t say what that actually means yet. But needless to say, whatever we do will be CRA-compliant and will respect all the laws and regulations,” he said.
Rafi Yablonsky, a former campaign director at JNF Canada, told JNS that he suspects foul play.
“Why else would all of a sudden this happen? Why would all of a sudden the union go crazy on Twitter, right? How did this happen out of the blue?” he said. “You’re supposed to get a letter saying, ‘You didn’t do X, Y, Z.’ Like an audit. Then you have a chance to clear the air.”
“This is purely a hit job and a sign of the times,” Yablonsky said.
Shimon Koffler Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, stated that JNF, which is “a flagship charitable project that has been active in Canada in one form or another for almost a century,” has “a compelling case to make in light of a troubling experience with CRA, which is mandated to work with charities rather than adopt an adversarial approach.”
“CIJA remains hopeful that JNF and CRA will ultimately identify a constructive resolution, permitting JNF to continue its important work ranging from relief from poverty to environmental reclamation,” he added.
An online petition supporting JNF had drawn 10,600 signatories at press time.
“The work that JNF has been doing over the years has been so critically important, and that’s why we can’t walk away,” Davis told JNS. “We can’t wash our hands of this. We’re essential. We are going to find a way to keep doing our work because there’s no other choice.”
