The Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA) pilot project was announced at the beginning of 2021, after the disastrous performance of the CVITP in 2020.  This was the first time the CRA offered financial support to community-based organizations hosting CVITP clinics.  It has now run for four years and is completing its fifth year in the fall of 2025.   This is a three-part series of articles, examining the project to date and what lies ahead.

1The first part, “The Evidence”, assesses the performance of the pilot project after four years (2021-2024) of implementation.  I conclude that the project has failed to meet its most important objective (and the only one for which public information is available) and that the project is a failure which the fifth and final year will be unable to rectify.

This article also offers new financial information that is quite different from what the CRA has previously reported for 2021-2023.  Together with the budget announced for 2024, it demonstrates that the pilot project has proved to be more expensive than originally planned.

2The second article, “Why Did This Happen?”, provides three reasons – the financing formula changed in an untimely way, the financing formula was not generous enough, and the assumption that financing was the main constraint to expansion was dubious – why the pilot project has been a costly failure. 

Given these considerations were known to the CRA toward the end of 2023, the third year of the original pilot, this article speculates as to why the project was extended for a fourth year.

3The third article, “What Next?”, looks at 2025, the fifth year of the pilot project as it has been extended for a second time, and beyond.  It gives different reasons for the second extension of the pilot project.

Finally, this article gives four arguments – failure of the project to achieve its most important objective, the project’s cost, the government’s current budget saving exercise and the priority it attaches to automatic tax filing – why the pilot project is unlikely to be extended yet again, for a sixth year.