It was almost two months ago that I wrote about Rebel News' somewhat sketchy claim that donations to its "Fight the Fines" campaign were eligible for charitable tax receipts as long as you laundered^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hredirected them through a mysterious and unassociated registered charity called "The Democracy Fund," a claim that seems to be contradicted by the CRA's own clear guidelines:
More recently, while others (including moi) were pointing out the unabashed sleaziness of the JCCF paying PIs to stalk public officials, I again raised the issue of the dispensation of charitable tax receipts. Well, it would appear that the rest of the world has finally caught up with me:
The article opens with the obvious observations:
but then, a bombshell:
Wait ... what the absolute f... so the registered charity JCCF got a sizable chunk of its revenue via other registered charities?
How the fuck does that work? Are we looking at an incestuous circle jerk of right-wing propaganda outlets that are abusing their charitable status to collect funds, hand out tax receipts, then turn around and pass that money on to other registered, right-wing charities? What in the hell is happening here?
And, yes, at this point, it makes sense to ask if Rebel News and JCCF and The Democracy Fund have some weird pass-through operation going, wherein Rebel organizes the "Fight the Fines" campaign, The Democracy Fund collects the funds and (as a registered charity) hands out tax receipts but simply passes the money back to Rebel, who then shovels it off to JCCF ostensibly as lawyers' fees (and would that entitle Rebel News to a charitable tax receipt?), or is The Democracy Fund transferring all those donations directly to JCCF and itself getting tax receipts (while giving out tax receipts of its own), or ... or ... I'm sorry, this is so fucked up, I've lost my train of thought.
In the end, is it too much to ask Canada Revenue Agency to take even a minimal interest in this? Or are they still too fucking busy auditing birdwatchers?
P.S. Good. It's time for shit to go down.
2 comments:
At a wild guess, I'd suspect that the JCCF's books are filled with creative accounting all over the place, and auditing them would quickly turn into audits of dozens of other "charitable" organizations that are ultimately laundering money for each other.
In fact, I'd go so far as to wonder aloud about the $2M in receipted donations, and how many of those come from people who got the money from another charitable organization.
How has Rebel evaded this kind of scrutiny thus far? Of course, the JCCF investigation may likely end up leading to Ezra Levant.
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