Good afternoon.
My name is Karen Cooper. I'm a tax practitioner. My clients are largely charities and NPOs. I also teach the law of charities at the University of Ottawa. However, I'm not here in that capacity. I'm a volunteer and a board member with the Canadian Land Trust Alliance.
The Canadian Land Trust Alliance is a national land trust alliance that represents a membership of 55 land trusts across the country. We also work with the Land Trust Alliance of B.C., the Ontario Land Trust, and the Alberta Land Trust, which also represent local organizations.
What is a land trust? It's a charity whose principal objective is to provide long-term protection and management of ecologically sensitive lands. So these are land-based registered charities.
Land trusts can own this land outright, and they sometimes have conservation easements, so that's a right to have a say in the long-term protection of the land.
There are about 200,000 individual members and donors. We've got about 20,000 volunteers involved in the land trust movement in Canada.
They've done a lot over the last few years to get their house in order, including the development of detailed standards and practices that all members have to adopt in order to be a member of the Canadian Land Trust Alliance. In addition, most land trusts are eligible recipients under Environment Canada's ecological gifts program. To be an eligible recipient under the ecogifts program, you have to adhere to the Canadian Land Trust Alliance's standards and practices. To date, over 920 ecogifts have been made, with a total value of $577 million, including 141,000 hectares of wildlife habitat.
Why are we here today? We have two recommendations to the committee. The first is an extension of the carry forward provision for ecological gifts to a minimum of 10 years. The reason we're saying to extend the current five-year carry forward to 10 years is because the gifts we deal with are ecogifts, they're large gifts, and very often the availability of the credit can't be used within the five-year period prescribed in the act.
This is particularly the case for lands under significant development pressure. We're talking about coastal land, waterfront property, the last little bit of undeveloped land on the outskirts of Calgary. All of that land comes at a high value, and very often the donors aren't high income to match. They're referred to as cash poor/land rich donors. So by extending the carry forward to 10 years, you give those donors a longer opportunity to benefit from the ecological gifts program.
The cost to the government of extending this carry forward is minimal, if any, because in fact the donor already has the entitlement to the credit. What's falling off the table at the end of the six years in total is their ability to claim it.
As I said, these are large gifts. The average value is about $600,000, if not more these days. Because of that, donors tend to divide their gifts. Sometimes it'll be half the land one year and six years later they'll do another half. Sometimes they'll provide the conservation easement one year and then the underlying title in their will. Multiple donations over time increase the cost to the government of administering the program and they also increase the transaction costs for our members.