March 18, 2025
Summary: This article updates the 2021 findings on inequalities of access to CVITP services across Canada for 2023. It finds that:
- There continued to be wide divergences between the provinces in the proportion of people living in poverty who are served by the CVITP. In 2023, participation rates ranged from 34.3% in New Brunswick to 14% in Ontario. It is not clear what accounts for these differences.
- The participation rates have declined in all provinces since 2021. This is due to the number of people living in poverty rising faster between 2020 and 2022 than the rise in the number of people accessing free CVITP services during the same period.
- On the one hand, some of the most populated provinces – notably Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario – continued to perform especially poorly.
- On the other hand, two provinces managed to improve their rankings. Quebec rose from the middle of the pack in 2021 to become the second-best performing province in 2023. It is unclear what accounts for these comparatively stronger performances.
In an article published last year, I noted that people living in poverty experienced increasing difficulty accessing free CVITP services in 2023. Even though the CVITP served more people in 2023 (for the 2022 tax year) than in 2022 (for the 2021 tax year)[i], there were substantially more people living in poverty in 2022 than in 2021. Thus, the percentage of people living in poverty who received free CVITP services declined in 2023 to 25% from 28% in 2022.[ii]
If one believes the free CVITP service should be offered to those who need it the most – those who can least afford to pay for the service – then the CVITP should be trying to serve as large a percentage as possible of those living in poverty. Thus, it is worrying to see that the CVITP is experiencing increasing difficulty in doing this.
In a more recent article, I looked at disparities in access to free CVITP services across Canada by comparing figures between the provinces. To do this, I took 2020 Census poverty figures for the 10 provinces and compared them with the CRA’s CVITP statistics for those served by the CVITP in the 2021 tax filing season.[iii]
In this article, I update the 2021 findings on inequalities of access to CVITP services across Canada for the 2023 tax filing season.
Methodology
First, I take Statistics Canada estimates of population by province for 2022[iv] and apply the recent Statistics Canada estimates by province of population percentages living below the official poverty line in 2022 to them. This yields estimates for the number of people living below the official poverty line in every province.
Then, I then compare the number of people living in poverty in each province with the number of people served by the CVITP in the 2023 tax filing season in the province. This gives a percentage of those living in poverty who got access to free CVITP services for each of the provinces. (As with previous calculations, I generously assume that all CVITP clients live below the official poverty line.)
Finally, I compare the performance of each province in 2023 with their performance in 2021.
Main findings
- There continued to be wide divergences between the provinces in the proportion of people living in poverty served by the CVITP. In 2023, participation rates ranged from 34.3% in New Brunswick to 14% in Ontario. It is not clear what accounts for these differences.
- The participation rates have declined in all provinces since 2021. This is due to the number of people living in poverty rising faster between 2020 and 2022 than the number of people accessing free CVITP services during the same period.
- On the one hand, some of the most populated provinces – notably Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario – continued to perform poorly.
- On the other hand, two provinces managed to improve their rankings. Quebec rose from the middle of the pack in 2021 to become the second-best performing province in 2023. (This demonstrates once again that population does not explain the differences in participation rates.) It is unclear what accounts for these comparatively stronger performances.
The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has access to the same data. But it does not appear to have any strategy in place to address either the declining participation rates within all the provinces nor the large inequalities of access to free CVITP services between the provinces.
What do you think the CRA could be doing to improve CVITP participation rates, especially in the poorest performing provinces? What lessons could host organizations in these provinces learn from the comparatively stronger performances shown by their counterparts in Quebec and New Brunswick?
[i] The CVITP served 649,420 people in the 2022 tax season for the 2021 tax year whereas 758,540 were served in the 2023 tax season for the 2022 tax year.
[ii] These figures are based on the generous assumption that every client served by the CVITP fell below the official poverty line. The income ceilings recommended by the CRA and used by most tax clinics across the country to establish a client’s eligibility to receive this free service are still above the official poverty line in most parts of the country.
[iii] The territories were not included because the 2020 Census did not include poverty figures for the territories.
[iv] As 2022 was not a census year, Statistics Canada only provides population estimates by province.