The Advisory Committee on the Charitable Sector (ACCS) recently announced its second round of members to address the latest issues facing the charitable sector and qualified donees.

Out of 200 applicants who put their names forward in the spring of 2021, nine were chosen by Minister of National Revenue Diane Lebouthillier or Canada Revenue Agency Commissioner Bob Hamilton to sit on the ACCS. They’ll join six current ACCS members; terms are staggered terms of between two to three years to ensure the committee doesn’t turn over its entire membership all at once. Most of the April 2022 members have years – if not decades – of experience in philanthropy, frontline social service work, international development, charity law, or academia.

One of the few common threads within the new cohort, however, is a sense of optimism that the federal government is finally willing to reform the charitable sector. “The government has started to move, but there’s a lot more work that remains to be done,” says Jean-Marc Mangin, president and CEO of Philanthropic Foundations Canada – and one of the recent ACCS appointees. “The Advisory Committee can help the government to develop a new public policy regime for the charitable sector.”

The ACCS itself is far from perfect. As Future of Good previously reported, the transparency of ACCS recommendations – as well as the diversity of its membership – is lacking. Yet the committee, despite its flaws, is one of the most influential charitable sector reform initiatives in Ottawa. Its recommendations carry significant weight to the federal government. Future of Good spoke to roughly half of the ACCS’s new roster to understand why they threw their hats into the ring:  

The Islamic charitable history scholar

Anver Emon’s first analysis of charities came from reading a 12th century Islamic text on them. As director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, he studies the rich history of Muslim philanthropy, especially the waqf – an early charitable endowment structure used to support religious works with surprising parallels to modern Western philanthropic models.

“We talk about public-private partnerships today,” Emon says, “but in many ways, the waqf was doing just that with pious hopes embedded within them. At the same time, the waqf model became a way to avoid tax liability and a way to preserve funding for families.”

His more contemporary studies include the ways in which Muslim-led charities come under scrutiny from the Canada Revenue Agency, as well as Canada’s national security apparatus. In 2021, he co-authored ‘Under Layered Suspicion’ with the National Council for Canadian Muslims, a report that found Canada’s approach to anti-terrorism financing and anti-radicalization policy appears to make Muslim-led charities vulnerable to auditing or the revocation of their charitable status.

To Emon, the robustness of Canada’s charitable sector isn’t just an avenue of academic study – it is a metric for the overall health of Canadian democracy. His first goal when he arrives on the Committee is to better understand and appreciate the way Canada’s charitable sector contributes to society – and start really thinking about how it can support the country’s democratic culture. From there, he plans on using his skills as a historian to step back and take the long view on the many regulatory problems facing the sector today. “As I tell my students, we’re so used to the very fast scrolling of Twitter feeds that we expect very quick results in our reading,” he said. “I like to remind them to go slow – and hopefully, I’ll bring that slowness to the process.” 

The experienced fundraiser

Tanya Rumble’s career as a fundraiser has taken her from the board of the Association of Fundraising Professionals Canada to the faculty of arts at X University, where she currently works as director of development. Now, she’ll serve as one of the only dedicated fundraising professionals on the ACCS – a perspective she said isn’t always considered. “I think the profession of fundraising is often misunderstood and undervalued within the broader landscape of charities and nonprofits,” she says.

Rumble also wants to represent the perspective of sector workers like herself – racialized women, parents, and those with disabilities. “I think representing the identities that I hold is really important,” she said. “I felt they were lacking at a lot of the decision-making tables – including the ACCS – so [I’m] putting myself forward was a way of representing those identities in that space.”

Rumble said she hopes to contribute insights to the ACCS that are “steeped in equity” and understand how intersectional the social impact sector’s workforce truly is. But she also wants to learn. “The ACCS has a really impressive and incredibly dynamic group of leaders from across the sector,” Rumble said. “I hope that I’ll learn from them and perhaps even unlearn some of the things that I have picked up along the way.”

The frontline social service veteran

The ACCS is not Owen Charters’ first rodeo. The executive director of Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs of Canada (BGC Canada) has served on charitable sector advisory efforts going back to the 2000 Voluntary Sector Initiative. Still, he hesitated to throw his hat in the ring when the first round of ACCS member applications opened up.

“I think I was a bit standoffish,” Charters said of the ACCS. “I wanted to see if this was going to be useful. Now that they’ve settled into a pattern of the work they’re doing, it seems a little safer to jump in.”

One of his biggest concerns is the lack of action on a host of government initiatives to improve the charitable sector – the 2000 Voluntary Sector Initiative, the 2006 Independent Blue Ribbon Panel on Grant and Contribution Programs, not to mention the 2016 Special Senate Committee on the Charitable Sector.

But the ACCS’s commitment to driving change piqued his interest. He’s talked about establishing a ‘home-in-government’ for Canada’s charitable sector for years – an idea referenced in the Special Senate Committee report – as well as helping charities better understand the law, creating new philanthropic models, and rethinking the role of the CRA as simply a regulator.

Now that the ACCS is into its second term, Charters believes participating is one way to ensure all of the social impact sector’s asks over the past two decades bear fruit. “I think this is one of the levers to start to see better outcomes for the sector overall,” he said.

The current list of ACCS members

• Bruce MacDonald, president and CEO, Imagine Canada (co-chair)
• Hilary Pearson, former president, Philanthropic Foundations Canada (co-chair)
• Christian Bolduc, president and CEO, BNP Performance
• Owen Charters, president and CEO, BGC Canada
• Peter Dinsdale, president and CEO, YMCA Canada
• Anver Emon, director of the Institute of Islamic Studies, University of Toronto
• Sheherazade Hirji, former resident representative, Aga Khan Development Network, Afghanistan
• Arlene MacDonald, former executive director, Community Sector Council of Nova Scotia
• Jean-Marc Mangin, president and CEO, Philanthropic Foundations Canada
• Kevin McCort, president and CEO, Vancouver Foundation
• Andrea McManus, chief advancement officer, Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity 
• Sarah Midanik, president and CEO, The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund
• Martha Rans, founder and legal director, Pacific Legal Education and Outreach Society 
• Tanya Rumble, director of development, Ryerson University
• Bob Wyatt, executive director, Muttart Foundation
• Geoff Trueman, assistant CRA commissioner, Legislative Policy and Regulatory Affairs Branch (co-chair)
• Tony Manconi, Charities Directorate director general, Legislative Policy and Regulatory Affairs Branch 
• Pierre LeBlanc, director general, personal income tax division, Tax Policy Branch, Department of Finance 

Departing ACCS members (terms ended in 2021) 

• Denise Byrnes – Executive Director, OXFAM-Québec
• Terrance Carter – Partner, Carters Professional Corporation
• Peter Elson – Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Victoria
• Bruce Lawson – President & CEO, The Counselling Foundation of Canada
• Susan Manwaring – Partner, Miller Thomson
• Peter Robinson – Co-Owner, Hedgerow Farm; and Former CEO, David Suzuki Foundation
• Paulette Senior – President & CEO, Canadian Women’s Foundation
• Paula Speevak – President & CEO, Volunteer Canada

Tell us this made you smarter | Contact us | Report error