Only by making charities much more publicly accountable can Canadians make sure their tax dollars are not going to bankroll terrorist activities abroad, a Liberal backbench MP said yesterday. John Bryden, who has campaigned for better reporting requirements and public disclosure of financial audits of charities and non-profit groups, was responding to a published report that federal Solicitor-General Andy Scott is asking the cabinet to take steps to remove the charitable status of organizations that are suspected of being terrorist fronts."If you leave it to the bureaucracy, it's an impossible task," Mr. Bryden, a former journalist who now represents Hamilton-Wentworth riding in southern Ontario, said of the approximately 75,000 charitable organizations and tens of thousands of non-profit groups across the country. You can't allow bureaucrats to do it, you have to allow people to do it. You have to do two things: change legislation and regulations so that the standards of financial reporting are much stricter and broader than exist now - and there are real penalties for failing to fulfill those standards - and, secondly, you have to open up the Income Tax Act so that the information that is supplied to Revenue Canada is publicly available."
Last spring, Mr. Scott, warning that most international terrorist groups have established a presence in Canada, pledged to change laws to make it more difficult for terrorist organizations to raise money in Canada. He did not identify any specific groups. "Some Canadians," he said, "make donations with the mistaken impression that the funds will be directed toward humanitarian efforts."
His statement was followed by an extraordinary public disclosure by Ward Elcock, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, to an in-camera meeting in June of the special parliamentary committee on security and intelligence. Mr. Elcock said the counterterrorism branch of CSIS is currently investigating more than 50 organizational targets and about 350 individual targets. "Terrorist groups are present here whose origins lie in virtually every significant regional, ethnic and nationalist conflict there is," he said.
Mr. Elcock said the support of terrorist activities in Canada includes logistical support, exploitation of ethnic communities through propaganda, intimidating immigrants and fund raising in aid of terrorism. However, he did not name specific organizations in Canada that are involved in such fund raising.
David Charters, of the University of New Brunswick's Centre for Conflict Studies, said he was not surprised by Mr. Elcock's statement that some groups are fronts for terrorists. He also said that groups engaged in illicit activity go to great lengths to conceal their activities. Further, he said, government enforcement and intelligence agencies do not want to reveal information publicly because of worries over compromising international intelligence sources and national security.
Earlier this year The Globe and Mail reported that a Sikh refugee who has lived in Canada since 1991 was arrested as a suspected terrorist and held under national-security legislation that prevents him from knowing the evidence against him.
More Information on NGOS
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