75% of the organisations whose charitable status was revoked from 2008 to 2015, were Muslim, however, no Muslim charity or any affiliated individual has been charged with financing terrorism.

Harun Nasrullah

Canada’s intelligence watchdog declared on March 14 that it will investigate claims that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) had a systemic Islamophobic bias when auditing the country’s largest Muslim charity and grassroots NGO.

The National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) will comply with a request by the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) for an investigation into the CRA’s audit, which began in 2015 and could jeopardise MAC’s charitable tax status.

A 2021 report by the Ottawa-based International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group said the CRA’s Review and Analysis Division carried out audits “with little accountability or independent review.”

The national civil liberties’ coalition reported that 75 per cent of the organisations whose charitable status was revoked following division audits from 2008 to 2015 were Muslim charities, and at least another four have seen their status pulled since then.

Despite these revocations, no Muslim charitable organisation or individual affiliated with one has been charged with financing terrorism.

The CRA, a federal agency that collects taxes and administers tax laws, has a review and analysis department that probes registered charities like MAC to ensure that donations are not being used to finance terrorism.

MAC, which has chapters across 13 major Canadian cities, filed a court challenge last year to stop the audit, claiming the tax agency is biased and targets Muslim charities because the agency is “tainted by systemic bias and Islamophobia.”

“The audit would never have been approached in the way it has been had the organisation in question been Christian, Jewish, or Hindu,” said Geoff Hall, a lawyer at McCarthy Tetrault LLP, in a statement last April. The intelligence agency said the review will focus on the CRA’s “national security activities and decision-making relating to registered Canadian charities, to assess their reasonableness, necessity, and compliance with the law.”

The National Revenue Minister, Diane Lebouthillie, who in 2021 asked that the charge of Islamophobia against the CRA be investigated, welcomed the announcement.

“The government of Canada stands with and supports Muslim communities across Canada and reaffirms its commitment to take action to denounce and tackle Islamophobia, hate-fuelled violence, and systemic discrimination whenever and wherever they occur,” she said in a statement.

She added, “NSIRA will be able to examine documents and specific charity files unavailable to the Ombudsman for review due to the restrictions of the Income Tax Act and other acts that govern national security matters. We are confident that NSIRA will complement the Ombudsperson’s report and offer a comprehensive and rigorous examination of the issues raised.”

The CRA was embroiled in another row of bias, when according to court documents filed in May, it violated its own policy when it granted a secretive tax deal to a major corporation.
Over 2,000 pages of highly sensitive government records recently filed in Federal Court reveal details of an internal CRA squabble over the tax deal.

A former director rejected the deal, according to CRA documents. One CRA manager refused to approve the deal and wrote in the records that an executive tried to make him support it, which was “completely unethical and “wrong,” according to the documents.