Mr. Chairperson, there is an established process for determining whether an organization can be registered as a charity in Canada. Primarily it has to be established for exclusively charitable purposes and it needs to operate on a not-for-profit basis.
We look to the common law to determine whether the purposes of the organization are charitable. There are four categories for what is charitable at law: the relief of poverty, the advancement of education, the advancement of religion, and other purposes that have been found to be beneficial to the community.
We have a team within the charities directorate that would look carefully at the 4,000 or so applications we receive every year in order to determine, first of all, whether the organization has charitable purposes; second, whether it is proposing to undertake activities that will further those purposes; and third, whether they are conferring a public benefit by virtue of those activities.
Those are the broad strokes of the framework we would use. More detail is provided in some of the materials we have provided to the committee.