March 23, 2026
Summary: The following article uses recently released data about CRA grants in 2024 and CVITP host organizations in 2025 to give a better picture of what happened in the 5-year pilot grant project. Nothing in this article changes my assessment published in September 2025 that the pilot was a failure. But it provides further evidence which challenges the CRA’s existing narrative that the project was a success.
The project was meant to spur CVITP growth by providing an incentive for community-based organizations to become partners hosting tax clinics. The CRA anticipated there would be annual 5% growth in the number of CVITP host organizations. CRA data show a U-shaped curve in the growth rates over the five-year period of the pilot project: the number of host organizations declined in the initial years, stagnated in the middle year and then grew mildly in the final years. Whereas the compounded growth rate over the five years of the pilot project should have been a 34% increase, there was instead a 6.4% decline.
Grant expenditures also showed considerable variation in the first four years. This may be due to one or more factors, three of which I have already covered in a previous article. I outline a further factor in this article. However, in the absence of more data, it is impossible to say definitively how the grant financing actually impacted the project’s results.
Loyal readers will know that I have been following the issue of CRA grant financing for the CVITP ever since the pilot grant program was first introduced in 2021.
I wrote articles assessing the initial proposal as well as the first, second and third year of operations. At one point, the CRA extended this pilot project beyond its initial three-year time frame to a fourth year and then again to a fifth year. When the fifth year extension was announced, I looked again at this pilot project. Then in September 2025, I wrote a series of articles declaring the pilot project was a failure, providing the evidence to support this claim, explaining why this happened, and speculating on what might happen next.
This article looks at the pilot project with further data that has come to light since I published the September 2025 assessment.
Growth in CVITP host organizations during the pilot project
After the pilot project was launched in 2021, the CRA identified identified five objectives for the pilot project, one of which it later dropped. Of the four remaining objectives, only one – “encourage growth in the number of CVITP participating organizations” – had a performance measure.[i] This was an annual 5% increase in the number of host organizations participating in the CVITP.[ii]
The CRA’s recently released CVITP statistics for 2025 show that the number of host organizations increased by 1.7% between 2024 and 2025.[iii] This continues the trend seen in previous years of the pilot grant project: it did not lead to increases in the number of host organizations in any year by anything close to 5%.
The 5% annual increases should have resulted in a compounded growth rate of 34% over the lifetime of the project. However, when comparing the number of host organizations in 2025 (the final year of the pilot project) with the number in 2020 (the year prior to the start of the project), there was a 6.4% decline in the number of host organizations. Between 2021, the first year of the project and 2025, the last year of the pilot, there was a 2.6% increase in the number of host organizations overall.
While the project was intended to increase the number of host organizations, given this evidence I think it is fair to maintain that it failed miserably to do so. The reasons why I believe this happened are outlined here.
Grant spending from 2021 to 2024
Grant funding was intended to be the tool for spurring CVITP growth, serving as an incentive to bring in and retain host organizations, thereby leading to an increase in the number of host organizations. Above, I have shown this did not happen. This section explores the pilot grant’s budget and spending in search of an explanation as to why it did not happen.
In early February 2026, the CRA published grant data for the fourth year of the pilot project’s operations on Open Government.[iv] This was for the eligibility activity period which ran from June 1, 2023, to May 31, 2024, and for which grants were disbursed in October 2024. CRA’s data shows that it disbursed $3.8 million for 1,727 grant agreements.
This is substantially lower than the $5.9 million the CRA announced it would allocate for the fourth year of the pilot project. It also represents a 37% drop from the $6 million that it disbursed to 1720 host organizations in 2023.
Key to the reduction in spending in 2024 was the change in the funding formula: unlike in previous years, payment was limited to $5 per return filed using the COIN. Host organizations that received grants in 2024 filed on average more returns in than in 2023 but were paid $1,200 less for their efforts.
Although the financing terms were the least generous in the first year of the pilot’s operation, 2021 was the year that the greatest percentage of host organizations applied for and received grant funding. Since then, the percentage has never surpassed half of the CVITP organizations in operation.
Why did this happen?
One can only speculate. Previously, I offered three possible reasons. But there are other possible factors which could also have contributed to the poor results.
When the pilot project was announced in early 2021, the budget was set at $10 million over three years. This would have amounted to $3.3 million per year. However, in the first three years, expenditures came in at $14.8 million. This represents a 48% cost overrun.
Costs rapidly spiralled for two reasons. First, the CRA made the financing terms more generous in the second and third years. Second, part of those financing terms – the $5 per return – contained an inherent increase factor: for every additional year the pilot was in operation, the awards based on the number of returns filed would increase due to the increase in the number of years of eligible COIN based returns.[v]
The tightening of financing terms in the fourth and fifth year was likely one response to these rising costs. One can see the result with the decline in grant expenditures in 2023 from $6 million to $3.8 million in 2024.
However, the CRA may also have been doing something else behind the scenes to limit its grant expenditures. At the outset of the pilot project, the CRA had indicated it might limit grant application approvals and expenditures to ensure an equitable distribution of spending across the provinces and territories. As there is no data on the number of unsuccessful grant applications and on the reasons for their failure, it is impossible to say if this measure was also used to limit expenditures. If it was used, one could see how this could further reduce the potential incentive effect from offering grants: anticipating that their grant application might not be approved, some host organizations might have avoided the application process altogether.
What about grant financing for 2025?
There is no public information available yet on grants awarded in the fifth and final year. This was for the eligibility activity period which ran from June 1, 2024, to May 31, 2025, and for which grants were disbursed in October 2025.
At this stage, the only public piece of information about funding for the fifth year is contained in the CRA’s response to its own Ombudsman’s annual report for the fiscal year 2024-2025. This shows that the CRA was planning to allocate $4.2 million for grants in the fifth year.[vi]
Conclusion and next steps
In various reports, the CRA and its Ombudsman maintain the pilot project was a success, without providing any evidence to support this claim. That said, I believe there is enough public information about the project to conclude that it was largely a failure in terms of the objectives the CRA set for itself.
In the coming weeks, I will publish an article on the new three-year grant program that was recently announced.
Data on CRA grants awarded to host organizations in the fall of 2025, the final year of the pilot project, will only be published on the Open Government website in early 2027. This will complete the picture of the pilot project. At that time, I will publish a final article on the pilot grant project which will include this data.
At this stage, there is no public CRA report assessing this pilot project. It may still come. If so, I will publish my own evaluation of the report. But readers should not hold their breaths: the CRA is quite unaccustomed to providing this level of transparency despite the fact it used public funds (“your tax dollars at work!”) for this purpose.
[i] The other performance measure attached to an objective was dropped during the five-year period. Two other performance measures, not attached to any objectives, were retained but were meaningless as they did not include any meaningful measures of performance.
[ii] Notably, of all the performance measures, this was also the only one which had CRA data publicly available which could be used to assess performance.
[iii] In the CRA Ombudsman’s annual report for 2024-2025, the CRA’s Ombudsman reports it was told by the CRA that there was a 22% increase in host organizations in 2025 over 2024. It is difficult to reconcile this with the CRA’s own statistics for 2025.
[iv] The only public source for CRA grant is the Grants and Contributions dataset on Open Government. CRA grants to CVITP host organizations for the first four years of operation are now available there.
[v] The COIN was first introduced in 2021 for 2020 income tax and benefit returns.
[vi] This represents a significant drop from the $5.9 million the CRA announced it would allocate for the fourth year of the pilot project.