November 29, 2025

Summary: In this first article, I look at the demand for and supply of CVITP services and conclude that there has been a big mismatch between the demand and the supply, consistently leading to too few people being served.  Modest progress has been made, increasing from helping one out of five people in 2017 to one out of four in 2023.  But this improvement has come through increasing volunteer productivity, with largely the same number of volunteers in 2023 as in 2017 serving more people.

In the coming years, there will be two ways to close the gap between the demand for and the supply of this service.  The CRA seems to be betting that automatic tax filing will reduce the demand for the CVITP.  But I believe this is a poor bet as demand is unlikely to shrink and may well rise significantly.  Instead, the gap will have to be closed through an increase in the supply of this service.

Key to the increase in supply will be the recruitment and retention of volunteers.  The second article looks at what is being done to address this issue.

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Back in 2022, I wrote three articles on volunteer recruitment entitled Current trends, What the CRA plans to do, and A Complementary Direct Approach.  My focus was identifying no and low-cost solutions for improving volunteer recruitment.

I revisit the issue of volunteer recruitment in the two articles in this series.  In this first article, I look at the demand for and supply of CVITP services over the seven-year period running from 2018 to 2024.  After identifying three key features of that period, I speculate on what the demand for and supply of CVITP services is likely to be in the coming few years.  I conclude this article by showing there are two ways to close the gap between the demand and the supply.  I argue that one of the two ways is risky but that the other way entails a significant increase in volunteer recruitment.  The second article in this series looks at what is being done to address the issue of volunteer recruitment.

Past Demand for and Supply of CVITP Services

At one point in my career, I trained as an economist.  I learned how the demand for and the supply of a good or a service interact with each other.  This can be a useful way of thinking about the CVITP which provides a free service.

A. Past Demand

Pinning down exactly what the demand for this service has been in the last few years is complicated.  But there are a few ways to make it easier to measure.

When a service is offered for a price, economists like to argue that the price will rise (or fall) until there is an equilibrium between the demand and the supply.  But the CVITP is a free service.  In this case, theory says that the demand for the service will always exceed the supply available.

However, one limitation helps to narrow down the potential demand.  The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) says that this service should be offered only to people on low and modest incomes.  Therefore, it suggests income levels that host organizations can use to establish a person’s eligibility for this service.  In recent years, these have been consistently above the poverty lines for the smaller households, including single people, couples and single parents with one child.

Nevertheless, host organizations can adjust those income ceilings to their local circumstances.  This makes it difficult to establish the number of adults eligible for this free service.

Furthermore, not everyone on a low or modest income wants the free CVITP service.  Some people do their own returns; others pay someone else to do it and again there are those who do not want to do anything.  So, eligibility may not the best guide for measuring the demand for CVITP services.

To keep things simple, I look only at the number of adults living in poverty in a given tax year.  They are all eligible to file a return through the CVITP.   I exclude those on modest incomes from consideration.

Here are the adult poverty figures for the past few years:

I use these poverty figures[i] as a proxy for the demand for CVITP services in the subsequent tax season.  The number of people in poverty in 2017 is slightly higher than the number in 2023.  Thus, one could say that demand has shrunk modestly since 2018 (the tax season for the 2017 tax year), having dropped significantly during COVID and then rebounded.

B. Past Supply

The chief constraint in the provision of CVITP services is the availability of volunteers as these are the people who prepare and file returns for clients.

Volunteers need host organizations.  At least part of the time.[ii]  Once the regular season is over, there is nothing to stop CVITP volunteers who wish from freelancing.

Healthy growth in the number of volunteers from year to year comes through a combination of strong recruitment of new volunteers and high retention of prior year volunteers.

How well has the CVITP been doing on both fronts?  The CRA has data on new and returning volunteers.  It also has data on the number of years served by returning volunteers.[iii]  So it knows how the recruitment and retention figures for each year.  But it does not publish any of this information.

Working just with the overall figures, we cannot tell how much of an annual figure is split between new and returning volunteers.  So, it is impossible to be precise about retention rates.  But a positive difference between two consecutive years represents part of the recruitment effort.

However, what the CRA calls a volunteer is not what one would normally think of as a volunteer.  The CRA counts any host organization staff registered to participate in their tax clinic as volunteers.  I assume that each host organization has at least one staff person (usually the tax clinic administrator) registered with the CVITP as a volunteer.  To arrive at an estimate of the number of real volunteers, I subtract the number of host organizations from the CRA’s count of volunteers.  This yields what I call the adjusted volunteer estimate.[iv]  (See the article on Current trends for a more detailed discussion of this point.)

Here is the most recent data on the growth rates for adjusted volunteer estimates.

Growth in the 2023 and the 2024 tax seasons, at 11% and 16% respectively, looks healthy.  However, by 2024 the CVITP had still not fully recovered from the aftereffects of COVID: both the CRA count and my adjusted estimate were still well below the peak attained in 2019.

A+B = Interaction Between Past Demand and Supply

How well has the supply matched the demand?

Three conclusions can be drawn from these figures.

1There has been a big mismatch between the demand and the supply, with consistently too few people being served.  Simply put, the supply of CVITP services has not been enough to meet the demand.

While the measure I use for the demand (adults in poverty) may not be the best measure, the National Advisory Council on Poverty’s latest report confirms my first conclusion.  It provides anecdotal evidence that eligible Canadians have been denied access to this service.

2Although the number of people served remains too low, it rose from 20% to 27% over the 2018 to 2024 period.  In other words, the CVITP went from serving one in every five people to serving one in every four people requesting this service.  This is a notable improvement.

3This improvement came through increasing volunteer productivity as the volunteer trend between the 2018 and 2024 period has remained broadly flat.  In other words, the average volunteer served more people over time.  Maybe this is because they volunteered for fewer hours in the earlier tax seasons.  Or maybe volunteers have become overstretched in the more recent tax seasons.

Future Demand for CVITP Services

Statistics Canada will publish the poverty numbers for 2024 early in 2026.  There’s no reason to believe the proportion of people in poverty will have fallen.  As the overall population has grown, it means the number of people living in poverty will have risen.  It is also possible that the proportion of people living in poverty may have grown.  We shall have to wait and see.

The same could be said for 2025 onwards.  We simply don’t know at this point.

However, there is a recent development that could change the demand.

This month, the federal government announced that it will be introducing automatic tax filing for low-income Canadians in 2027.  One might conclude that this will reduce the demand for CVITP services.   Presumably this is why the CRA is providing no further grant funding for the CVITP.

But there are good reasons to think the demand will not decline and may even grow a lot more.  Why?

Although all the details are not yet known, some elements of the automatic tax filing process have been made public.

The CRA will mail pre‑filled returns based on the income information it has.  It will give recipients 90 days to respond.  If they don’t contact the CRA or file their own return by the deadline, the CRA will file their pre-filled return.  By 2029, the CRA expects to issue up to 5.5 million pre‑filled returns.[v]

This will help people with simple tax and benefit situations.

But many people will still face challenges.  Pre‑filled returns won’t include claims for expenditure-related federal and provincial benefits because the CRA doesn’t have that information.[vi]  Other problems include income errors, and changes in marital status or mailing address during the tax year.

Where will people turn for help?

They should be able to call the CRA.  But the CRA struggles with call volumes. And it faces $1 billion in budget cuts every year for the next 4 years.  Even if a person gets through to an agent, getting past the client verification questions can be daunting.

Most Canadians don’t understand the tax system.  That’s why, each year some 60% ask others to prepare and file their returns for them.  Low‑income Canadians are no different.

Many will continue to seek help from community clinics.  For some, it may be simply to understand their pre-filled returns.  Of course, they may still ask their volunteer to prepare and file their return (just as most recipients of SimpleFile invitations chose to do).  Maybe because they won’t trust the CRA to do their return properly.  Or maybe they will want to get estimates of the benefits they should be receiving.

Others won’t qualify to receive pre‑filled returns, including people who have not filed for the previous two or more years.  (These are the very people that automatic filing was originally intended to help.)   They will want assistance.  As the CRA will not prepare pre-filled returns for prior years, some will also want help in preparing and filing these returns.

For these reasons, automatic filing is unlikely to lead to a reduction in demand, at least in the early years.  While it is impossible to tell how many low-income people will make use of the automatic tax filing option once it becomes fully operational in 2027, it could very well lead to a significant increase in demand for CVITP services.[vii]

Regardless, those who do not receive pre-filled returns or who distrust the CRA to file their return properly will still seek out CVITP services.

Implications for the Future Supply of CVITP Services

As shown above, there has been a consistent gap between the demand for and the supply of CVITP services.  Normally, the CRA should want to reduce this gap, so that more low-income Canadians get to file their returns free of charge.

The CRA may believe that by offering automatic filing, it will close the gap by reducing the demand for CVITP services.  I have argued above that there is a risk that automatic tax filing will not decrease and may even significantly increase the demand for this service.

The other approach to closing the gap is to increase the supply of the service.  This has already been achieved by increasing the productivity of volunteers.  Over the 2018 to 2024 period, roughly the same number of volunteers served a growing number of people, enabling the CVITP to go from assisting every one in five to every one in four people living in poverty.

But this approach may have reached its limits.  To further increase supply, efforts need to be made to recruit new volunteers.  Recruitment will also remain important to deal with volunteer attrition.

In the second article in this two-part series, I examine what is being done to recruit volunteers.

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[i] These numbers are derived by subtracting the number of persons under 18 years from the total of all persons living in poverty as listed in Canadian Income Surveys, Table 3. 

[ii] There was a time when CVITP volunteers did not have to be affiliated with any host organization.  But the CRA made the policy decision to discontinue that practice.  Among the many reasons, this was probably to enforce the rule that all volunteers needed a valid police records check (PRC).  It was not efficient for the CRA to enforce this rule directly with volunteers.  But it could work more efficiently through host organizations, checking with clinic coordinators that all their volunteers had submitted valid PRCs.  Volunteers approved under the old system have been “grandfathered” in and are not required to offer their CVITP services under the umbrella of a host organization.

[iii] It can get this data through its CVITP registration process as it can determine if volunteers are new or returning, and in the case of the latter, the number of years of CVITP service.

[iv] The number of registered volunteers reported by the CRA annually is probably larger than the number of volunteers who provide CVITP services during the year.  This is because the effective dropout rate for new volunteers can be significant.  Some new volunteers do not attend the training and are therefore not used by their coordinator as they lack the necessary experience.  Others withdraw when they realize the time commitment is more than they expected.  Still others have technical difficulties (either with their CRA registration or the software) which prove insurmountable in the short period of time available.  It will also not help if the host organization’s support provided throughout the volunteer’s induction process is uneven.  When the peak season is in full swing, this means that fully functional new volunteers probably only represent a modest portion of the volunteer cadre.  The number of volunteers reported by the CRA does not make the distinction between those registered and the subgroup that ends up preparing and filing returns.

[v] In my recent article on what might happen starting in 2027, I gave three scenarios and speculated that the most likely scenario was for the CRA to seek the individual’s consent before filing their return but that they would not file it without the client’s consent.  Budget 2025 makes it clear that, while the CRA will initially seek consent, the Income Tax Act will be changed to give it the authority to file returns where it does not get that consent.

[vi] Examples of federal credits include charitable and political contributions, and the Digital News Subscription Tax Credit.  Depending on the province or territory, there may similarly be many refundable credits.

[vii] The introduction in 2018 of the CRA’s automated phone service for filing a return has had no noticeable impact on the demand for CVITP services.  Even though 2 million low-income Canadians have been invited to use this service in 2024 and again in 2025, less than 5% have taken up this offer; users of SimpleFile represent around one tenth the number of CVITP clients served in each of 2024 and 2025.