How many registered Canadian charities are assisting an apartheid state commit a holocaust? How much money are they raising? And what percentage of these funds are taxpayers covering?
It’s difficult to answer these questions but it’s almost certainly more than I and other critics have been stating.
“Over 200 registered Canadian charities finance projects in Israel”, I wrote eight months ago in a piece headlined “Time to fix Canada’s anti-Palestinian tax code”. “It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much they funnel to a country with a GDP per capita equal to Canada’s, but Just Peace Advocates research has put it at around a quarter billion dollars annually. A third of that sum would be covered by taxpayers through charitable write-offs.”
The statistic of 200 groups raising a quarter billion dollars a year is based on the amounts reported on charities’ T2 fillings. That doesn’t include tax-receipted donations subsidizing Israeli universities, which fall under a different filing category. Yet Canadian Friends of Tel-Aviv University, Canadian Friends of the University of Haifa, Canadian Friends of Hebrew University, Canadian Friends of Ben-Gurion University, Canadian Friends of Bar Ilan University, Weizmann Canada and Technion Canada help raise money for universities that collaborate with Israel’s military. And the sums raised are astounding. In December Canadian billionaire Sylvan Adams gave $135 million ($US 100 million) to Ben-Gurion University at a Canadian Friends of Ben-Gurion University gala. According to the 2021 report Who Gives and Who Gets: The Beneficiaries of Private Foundation Philanthropy, the single top recipient of private Canadian foundations between 2014 and 2018 was Israel’s Technion, which received $89 million. By my calculation, Canadians raised half a billion dollars for Israeli universities over the past decade. (more...)
Canadian tax subsidies to Israel likely total billions
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