In one of my previous lives, I was the chair of a charitable foundation. I remember the CFO of the foundation constantly reminding us that we were doing certain things that could be seen by Revenue Canada as being profitable, and that we had to scale those back or risk losing our charitable status. Where do you draw the line, though? That frustrated us. We couldn't get donations for certain events, but people would pay to come to them. If you made a profit from an event, or if you did too many of those events and made too much profit, then suddenly you crossed the line and became a profitable organization, at which point you'd lose your charitable status. How do you balance that requirement? How do you open it up without having people abuse the system and turn what is essentially a for-profit business into a charity to avoid taxes?
