Wow! Only 511 / 84,641 (.6%) of all charities reporting expenditures in 2015 admitted to spending money on political activities! Have a look at the map below, showing the percentage of expenses used for political activities for each of the 511 charities:
What you can see is that there are obviously lots and lots of non-profits who have reported a low level of political spending, and an especially brave few who have reported that the majority of their expenditures were for political reasons!! As you can see, there’s a very noticeable cluster in Alberta! Which non-profits were those? The names of the brave and few Albertans follow:
Bawlf Senior Citizens Society
St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church
Smoky Lake District Cultural and Heritage Society
Tilley and District Fire Association
Vermilion Senior Citizens’ Centre
Flagstaff Satellite Family Day Home Society
It will be very interesting to see how this changes after a couple of years of the Liberal government being in power. They’ve already suspended the political audits and revocations of charities and are perhaps in a position to “broaden the ability of registered charities to engage in political activities“. When this happens, I predict that we’ll see more charities reporting political spending (hey, perhaps at least 2,000 by the 2017 return!!) and perhaps we’ll see even more charities in the higher echelons of political spending.
Source: 2015 T3010 charity tax return – all charities regardless of revenue.