October 6, 2025

Summary:  The CRA’s Departmental Plan (DP) for fiscal year 2025-26 states that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) will “increase, by 5%, the number of individuals helped through the CVITP in comparison to the 2024 program year.”  This statement is surprising given that the CRA stopped making any promises within its DPs to meet CVITP-related targets starting in 2022 (after the CVITP’s results fell short of the CRA’s targets during COVID).

How should we assess this commitment?  Looking at the historical record, one can tell whether this is an ambitious target.

Apart from 2020 when COVID severely disrupted the tax season, the number of people assisted by the CVITP has grown by more than 5% annually since 2019 and by more than 12% every year since 2020.  Despite the last four years of annual double-digit growth, the CRA is now aiming for low growth.

In the 2024 tax season, at best 27% of Canadians living in poverty in 2023 received free CVITP assistance, leaving 73% without help.  While some may have filed a return through other means, many did not, leaving them without poverty-reducing benefits to which they are entitled.

If the CVITP is to help more people living in poverty, the CRA needs to show more ambition with its growth target for the CVITP.  This is a necessary first step toward a long-term commitment to investing in the CVITP.

Previously, the CRA set modestly ambitious targets for performance but then failed to achieve even these; this happened with the CVITP itself in the 2020-2021 period and with its pilot grant project. This time, the CRA has set a target it is confident it cannot fail to achieve.  It has probably done this because it is not prepared to make any further new investments in the CVITP.  Those interested in the CVITP’s role in contributing to poverty reduction should be concerned the CRA is not doing more.

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The title says it all.  If you’re reading beyond this point, it is because you want to understand why I make this claim.  What follows is the evidence I believe justifies it.

Each year, every federal government department and agency that receives appropriations (money) from Parliament must prepare two documents which are tabled in Parliament and form part of the budget process: a departmental plan (DP) and a departmental results report (DRR). 

The DP is a forward-looking document, showing what the department or agency plans to do (“promise document”) with the funds it is allocated in the forthcoming fiscal year.  The DP is published in the spring, when the main budget estimates for the next fiscal year are tabled in Parliament.  (Exceptionally, this year there was no budget tabled in Parliament for the 2025-2026 fiscal year.  Instead, the DPs were published after the federal election period as it is an established practice that no government information of any significance is published during the electoral period itself.)

The DRR is a backward-looking document, showing what the department or agency managed to accomplish (“report card”) with the funds it was allocated in the last fiscal year.  The DRR is published in the fall, when the federal government tables the public accounts for the prior fiscal year; this is usually around the same time that it provides Parliament with an update on the current fiscal year in the form of the Fall Economic Statement.  (Exceptionally, the federal government plans to table its budget for the 2026-2027 fiscal year in Parliament on November 4, 2025.  The DRRs for the 2024-2025 fiscal year will likely be published around the same time, together with the public accounts for the same fiscal year.)

As the DPs and the DRRs are public documents, they are also communication tools and therefore contain lots positive messaging (spin).  The media usually pay little attention to the DPs and DRRs when they are tabled in Parliament.  Rather, they focus on the annual budget in the spring and the fall economic statement which are tabled at the same time as the DPs and the DRRs respectively.  The same could probably be said for parliamentarians on the opposition benches; their interest is the big picture policy positions laid out in the federal government’s budget documents.

If you are a regular reader of this website, you will know that I am a bit of a policy wonk: I read the CRA’s DPs and DRRs and make use of any information they contain that may be relevant to the CVITP in my articles.  This allows me to situate the CVITP in its historical context, something that is usually lacking in government communications documents – unless there’s a positive story the government wishes to highlight.

A new target…

The CRA’s DP for the 25-26 fiscal year (which runs from April 1, 2025, to March 31, 2026) includes several statements about the CVITP.  Most of these are positive but lacking any real substance.  However, there was one that caught my eye.  Within the first section dealing with delivering high quality services, under increasing automation of tax filing and improving access to benefits, the DP states that the CRA will “increase, by 5%, the number of individuals helped through the CVITP in comparison to the 2024 program year.”

I found this statement surprising because the CRA DP (like that of every other department and agency) includes a table with performance indicators and targets.  The table continues to exclude any reference to the CVITP.[i]

I have lamented elsewhere how the CRA dropped any further references to the CVITP in its table of key performance indicators after the CVITP’s results fell short of the CRA’s targets during COVID.  Since 2022, there have been no other CVITP commitments or targets made in subsequent DPs.

But here we have a separate objective, just for the current fiscal year.  Why this objective?  And why not some kind of objective for the CVITP over a longer time range than just one fiscal year?  I will give some answers to these questions in an article entitled “The Past, Present and Future of the CVITP” which I will finalize and publish shortly after the budget for fiscal year 2026-2027 is tabled in Parliament on November 4.

…that is less than recent annual results…

In the meantime, what are we to make of this target of 5% growth?  Presumably this is meant to be in calendar year 2025 rather than in the 25-26 fiscal year.  This is because the CRA publishes CVITP statistics based on the calendar year.  And because one fiscal year ends (March 31) and another begins (April 1) in the middle of the tax season, basing the target on the fiscal year would involve blending the data from two tax seasons.

The easiest way to assess the target of 5% growth in the number of individuals helped over the 2024 season is to compare this target with previous annual growth rates for the CVITP.  For this, I draw on the data provided in my most recent update of The Evolution of the CVITP.  I reproduce the relevant table below.  (This table is built on data from the CRA’s CVITP statistics from 2021 onwards and from data peppered throughout various CRA DPs and DRRs prior to 2021.)

It is noteworthy that, apart from 2020 when COVID severely disrupted the tax season, the CVITP has grown by more than 5% annually since 2019 and by more than 12% every year since 2020. Despite the last four years of double-digit growth, the CRA is now aiming for low growth.

…and falls short of the need

In my latest review of the CVITP’s performance, I found that in the 2024 tax season, at best 27% of Canadians living in poverty in 2023 received free CVITP assistance. That leaves 73% without help.  That the CRA is once again including a growth target for the CVITP in its strategic priorities may be a welcome development, even if it is only for one year.

But if the CVITP is to help more people to access the poverty-reducing benefits to which they are entitled, the CRA needs to show more ambition with its growth target for the CVITP.  This would be a necessary first step toward a long-term commitment to investing in the CVITP.

What is at stake?

Why then, in the face of such large needs, is the CRA not showing greater ambition?  Probably because there is no money to back up any ambition with the necessary investments.

Previously, the CRA set modestly ambitious targets for performance but then failed to achieve even these; this happened with the CVITP itself in the 2020-2021 period and with its pilot grant project. This time, the CRA has set a target it is confident it cannot fail to achieve. 

When the CRA includes such a low target within its “strategic priorities” for the 2025-2026 fiscal year, what does this tell us about the real priority it attaches to the CVITP?  Those interested in the CRA’s role contributing to poverty reduction should be concerned the CRA is not doing more.

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[i] On a broader note, the CRA’s DP for fiscal year 2025-2026 contains a confusing array of performance indicators with results and targets, strategic priorities and commitments, and program inventory indicators with targets and results.  Given the multitude of indicators, targets and results, it is not surprising that the reader could be left confused as to which among these are the more important.  But then, maybe that’s the whole point of this exercise: for the few outsiders who manage to review the entire DP, it becomes difficult to hold the CRA accountable in any meaningful way some 18 months later when the corresponding DRR is released showing the CRA’s failure to achieve some of the targets it had set for itself.  The CRA could always ward off criticism for such failures by responding that these areas are not central to the accomplishment of its mission and to look rather at its successes.  My experience is that few if any media or parliamentarians hold any department or agency accountable for failures to meet some of the targets they have set for themselves.  This is both because their focus is on the budget documents that are tabled in parallel with the DPs and DRRs (as mentioned earlier) and because they prefer to rely on the Auditor General of Canada to highlight shortcomings in the programs that department and agencies manage.