My recommendations are, first and foremost, that section 241 of the Income Tax Act should be amended so that CRA has the ability to disclose serious non-compliance with respect to the Income Tax Act.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly—and we saw it with the Ornge air ambulance issue that's been covered a lot by The Toronto Star—when you have non-profits where there is no transparency and they work with a few charities, they can get away with doing transactions that are not helpful to the charity sector. Therefore, my second recommendation is that section 241 of the Income Tax Act be amended so that these non-profit organization returns, the T1044 that CRA has on an access database...that basically the information here, or large parts of it, be made available to the public.
Right now there are between 80,000 and 100,000 of these non-profits. We have no idea where they get their money from or how they spend their money. Some of them may have revenues of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. I'm not entitled to know that information, and you aren't either. Hopefully, there will be some changes in that regard.
I guess the main purpose of this committee is to look at the issue of tax incentives. Hopefully, you'll look at transparency as well.
Thank you very much.