In a recent article looking at CVITP coverage in 2025 of people living in poverty, I indicated that I would follow up with three more articles to provide a comprehensive picture of what the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is currently doing and plans to do to support poverty reduction.
This is the first of these three articles. It reviews and assesses three other CRA initiatives specifically designed to help low-income households file their returns and get the benefits to which they are entitled. As these benefits are income tested, their overall intent is to reduce income insecurity and poverty.
The article is broken up into three sections. Each initiative is examined in its own section.
The first of these, the Non-filers Benefits Letters initiative, closed in 2025. It is worth looking at because it contains weaknesses that are replicated in the other two initiatives and because it is the only initiative to assist low-income filers that the CRA has consistently reported on to Parliament.
The second, SimpleFile, has operated in one form or another since 2018 and has recently been expanded despite a record of very low use.
The third section is on automatic tax filing, the CRA initiative among the three that most people have heard something about. First announced in the September 2020 Speech from the Throne, this initiative has yet to see the light of day but is fast approaching the stage of implementation in the 2027 tax season.
While the results of its past and present initiatives have been unimpressive, will the CRA be luckier with this third initiative? There are good reasons to think not. The third section makes use of documents recently published by the CRA and the Parliamentary Budget Officer to explain why.
The headline to this article poses the question whether these three initiatives are better than the CVITP in helping low-income households file returns. The answers are no, no and, we won’t know for some time to come but the result is unlikely to be strong and will not, in any case, match the original intent. Read the conclusion to find out why.
In the next article in this three-part series, I will look at a report by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada on the CRA’s Sustainable Development Strategy as the report focuses specifically on the CRA’s commitments to promoting poverty reduction.