Funding Public Interest Advocacy in Canada

The TQ community has suddenly realized the dangers of dependence on government funds and so should everyone

Photo by Jan Budomo on Unsplash

Queer and transgender activism in Canada is facing a crisis. For the last 9 years they have been kept afloat by federal cash, but that source will dry up if, as seems inevitable, the Conservatives win the federal election next year. An article by Kevin Hurren in Xtra Magazine explains the situation:

A review of publicly available annual reports and financial statements from more than a dozen large non-profits serving queer and trans people (whose revenues generally land in the millions) shows that federal funding accounted for at least 10 percent of all money coming in on the low end. Some organizations rely on the feds to cover as much as three-quarters or even 90 percent of their operating costs.

Egale Canada, which has played a leading role in a lot of he litigation over trans rights, has a budget of over $6 million In 2023 received 69% of its revenue from government grants in 2023.The Community-Based Research Centre, which played a leading role in supporting the conversion therapy law, received 81% of its $7.3 million budget from government grants. Even with government support some organizations are struggling. In October, The Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity announced that it was bankrupt and would cease operations.

The election of Donald Trump in the United States, where voter frustration with the Democrat’s positions on transgender rights played a role, provided a reminder that the next Canadian federal election must be held by October 2025 and for over a year the polls have shown that the Conservative Party is in a position to win by a landslide.

Despite what the Liberals and the NDP say, Conservative leader Pierre Polievre is not a Donald Trump but he is a fiscal conservative and he will be looking for ways to cut spending.

Private donations will not be enough to fill the gap. Hurren’s article notes that even now, LGBTQ+ groups are facing declining donations. Corporate donors look for causes that improve their public image and they are not going to been keen to support groups that advocate for policies like allowing trans-identified males into women’s sports that are opposed by over 70% of the public.

While the likely end of organizations that have supported sterilization of autistic and LGB youth and putting male sexual offenders into women’s prisons seems like unalloyed good news, there are reasons for concern. One is that the trans / queer agenda attained power by capturing organizations which had been built to support the LGB community. Many of these organizations continue to do important work for what is still a vulnerable community and there is a danger that they will be dragged down as part of a backlash against the excesses of the trans / queer agenda.

Federal Funding of Human Rights Advocacy in Canada

There is also a broader concern that the rise and fall of the trans / queer agenda has exposed a serious problem with how human rights advocacy has become dependent on government funding. The problem has roots in Canadian history and geography.

The geographical problem is that Canada has a small population spread over a huge area, which makes policy advocacy on a national scale very expensive. The cost of a two day business trip from Vancouver, Calgary or Halifax to Ottawa starts at around $800. Even the drive from Toronto to Ottawa takes around 5 hours so a flight or overnight stay is usually required. The practical result is that most national policy advocacy organizations are run by a board and staff that live in or near Toronto or Ottawa.

The historical problem is that until 1981 Canada did not have a constitutionally entrenched bill of rights which allowed legislation to be challenged in court. Human rights advocacy groups worked by writing letters to the editor, submitting briefs to legislative committees and organizing the occasional protest. These activities are all considerably less costly than litigation. The result was that Canadians never developed an equivalent to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has a robust fundraising program to support constitutional litigation.

The government of Pierre Trudeau hit on the dubious solution of the Court Challenges Program. The program had been started in 1978, before the enactment of the Charter, to support challenges to Parti Québécois legislation restricting English language rights and to support French language rights in other provinces. The Liberal government expanded the program to cover litigation by feminist, gay and disability rights groups and it continued to be supported in the early years of the Mulroney Conservative government but they eliminated it in 1992. The Liberal government of Jean Chretien reinstated the program in 1993. It was cut by the Harper Conservative government in 2006 and reinstated by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau in 2017.

A program in which the government funds challenges to its own legislation raises obvious problems. Commentators such as John Carpay, of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, have argued that the program has shown an ideological bias in favour of group rights and substantive equality at the expense of individual rights, freedom of expression and religion and formal equality before the law.

The reinstated Court Challenges Program has separate funding streams for official language rights and human rights. The human rights portion of the Program

covers.

• section 2 (fundamental freedoms, including freedom of religion, expression, assembly and association);

• section 3 (democratic rights);

• section 7 (life, liberty and security of the person);

• section 15 (equality rights);

• section 27 (multiculturalism) – when raised in support of arguments based on equality rights; and

• section 28 (gender equality).

The program does not publish details of all the cases in supports but a review of the limited details it has provided in its annual reports suggest that its human rights funding is still mainly for the promotion of substantive equality.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has refused to accept government funding and new groups such as the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms and the Canadian Constitution Foundation support Charter litigation which favours individual rights.

The Charter Challenges Program is only a small part of a much larger series of federal programs funding “gender equality” and 2SLGBTQ+ rights. This money includes $75 million under a new 2SLGBTQI+ action plan announced in 2022 as well as other programs. Like all spending, it comes with hidden costs.

The Costs

Giving grants to non-governmental organizations allows the federal government to interfere with areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction such as healthcare, social services and education. Sometimes this interference is direct by funding court actions to challenge provincial policies on education. The court cases to challenge the Saskatchewan and New Brunswick policies requiring parents be notified when a child changes name or pronouns at school are recent examples.

A more indirect form of interference is to fund the development of teaching materials on issues like sexuality which reflect the federal government’s priorities. These materials can be promoted directly to school boards and teachers, bypassing the provincial departments of education. This kind of federal involvement is often welcomed by smaller provinces, which have limited resources to develop their own materials, but when federal and provincial priorities diverge, it can give rise to federal-provincial conflict.

Promoting government policies through grants also allows the government a degree of plausible deniability. Programs delivered through private groups are not subject to the same sort of scrutiny as programs delivered directly by government departments. This can result in erosion of parliamentary oversight of spending and control of policy.

For the groups that receive funding, the cost is their independence. The government is willing to be challenged on some issues but draws the line on others. Groups that cross one of these lines will not be funded. The influence of government cash can be seen in the way in which gender ideology has taken over established LGB and feminist organizations. The Women’s Legal Education Action Fund has been a major recipient of Charter Challenge Program funds over the years and still receives around 28% of its budget from federal grants. It also unequivocally supports the idea that transwomen are women.

Heavy reliance on government funding discourages groups from building their own fundraising capacity and encourages them to build up administrative structures well in excess of what they could sustain without government support. They are therefore vulnerable to a change of government or even a change of policy in the existing government. This is the danger that many Canadian advocacy groups are confronting as they contemplate the likelihood of a Conservative majority next October.

There is another problem behind the immediate difficulties of fundraising without government support that many of the trans / queer captured groups have yet to confront: The reason they have difficulty fundraising is that not many people really support what they do. Too much dependence on government funds has caused them to lose touch with broader public opinion and even the real interests of the groups that they claim to represent. An advocacy group cannot be effective in holding the government to account if it needs government support to exist.

Charitable Status and Political Advocacy

Becoming a registered charity offers substantial indirect government support to organizations which qualify. Donors are allowed a tax credit for donations and most income received by the charity is tax free.

At one time, Canadian charities were restricted from spending more than 10% of their resources on non-partisan policy advocacy. (Direct support for political parties was and is absolutely prohibited.) The rule became the source of controversy during the Harper government when a number of major environmental charities including, The David Suzuki Foundation, Tides Canada, West Coast Environmental Law, the Pembina Foundation, Environmental Defence, Equiterre, and the Ecology Action Centre, were audited by the Canada Revenue Agency as a result of a complaint by Ethical Oil, an online group which supported development of the oil and gas industry. Some charities lost their registrations during this period.

The 10% restriction was eliminated in 2019. As is now common in Canada, this change was not the result of in-depth study or debate but a response to a decision by a single judge that the restrictions violated the freedom of expression guarantees of the Charter. Rather than appealing the decision, the Liberal government amended the law to remove the spending restriction. The change was no universally welcomed by the many in the charity sector who questioned whether it was good policy to allow wealthy Canadians a tax benefit for promoting their pet causes.

Moving Ahead

The problem of how to finance citizen engagement in a democracy remains intractable. The Canadian system of heavy reliance on government funding has contributed to the mess that it gender ideology. However, the United States system of unregulated funding by wealthy individuals and foundations has created the same mess. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will clean up or simply lurch into another equally bad mess.

There are some signs of hope. One of the only enduring benefits of the COVID-19 lock downs is that people become accustomed to online meetings so it is now easier to organize on a national or international basis without spending thousands of dollars on travel. The development of online giving platforms like GoFundMe has made it more cost effective to raise money through small donations. (Unfortunately, some of these platforms are controlled by trans-activists who de-list any gender critical groups.) Getting federal money out of the system in Canada would help restore some balance, but what we need is a real commitment from all sides to rebuild the conditions for civil debate.