Application for Charitable Non-Profit status to the Canada Revenue Agency

 In early fall I had a chance to meet with Nancy Gray of Cycling Without Age - Hamilton & Burlington and found out that although she had an accounting background, she was loath to start a non-profit corporation for herself.  Fortuitously she found an existing charity in Hamilton with the express purpose of promoting cycling in the city but did not themselves have a senior/disabled program and so a match was struck that could have been made in heaven!  New Hope for Bikes provides CWA-H&B with the umbrella they need to protect them from liability as well as the resources they need to raise funds for capital purchases and ongoing expenses.

However, after hearing of JoAnn Bell's harrowing experience with a partnership with a long term care facility in Brockville which didn't end on the most friendly terms resulting in the loss of access to two trishaws and a covered trailer, she encouraged me to register as a Non-Profit Charity with CRA since several CWA chapters in Canada had done so successfully, including hers, and so there was a track record of the success of similar ventures.

After the bitter experience, JoAnn decided that she would rebuild CWA-Brockville on her own establishing it as a Non-Profit Charity.  She found the staff at the CRA quite helpful on the phone in answering all her questions and not being web savvy, submitted all the documents on paper to the CRA.  After several months, she had to prod them to approve her application as there were a few donors waiting to receive tax reciepts for their large donations to her cause.  She encouraged me to pursue Charitable status without risking the chance of losing assets to a third party.

I went online and registered CWA-Mississauga as a Non-Profit corporation with Service Ontario and after trying to figure out my way around the CRA website, with the assistance of telephone support staff could not get the website to work.  I was advised to download all the information I had submitted and print it out filling the last few entries by hand and mail it in.  Unfortunately, I did not confirm the mailing address and found a Sudbury address as the one I needed to use for submitting the form.

A few months after not having heard anything back on even a receipt of the form, I got back on the CRA website and after speaking to staff, learned that the form I had submitted was outdated and that it should have been sent to Ottawa since Sudbury had stopped submitting Charitable applications to the head office!  I decided to make another concerted effort at applying online and after filling out everything I could, I could not make any progress without a security code that would be snail-MAILED to me.  I waited for a week and checked the mailbox (which had been upgraded recently after a series of break-ins) daily.

As soon as I got the code, I logged back into the CRA website and spent the better part of the afternoon today submitting my application.  I will now have to be patient and keep checking the status of the application occasionally hoping that all the documentation I submitted would be enough to get approved.  The fact that several chapters have successfully pursued this route is comforting.  I will inform you of my success or failure on the website and various other social media avenues.