November 29, 2025
Summary: In the first article, I argued that the CRA seems to be betting on the introduction of automatic tax filing to reduce the demand for CVITP services. But this is a poor bet as demand is unlikely to shrink and may well rise significantly. Any future gap between the demand for and the supply of CVITP services 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.
The CRA and host organizations share joint responsibility for volunteer recruitment. Because of its bet on automatic tax filing, the CRA is unlikely to ramp up its very modest CVITP recruitment efforts in the years to come. Yet if the current trend in Canadian volunteering continues its downward trajectory, host organizations will face an uphill battle recruiting new volunteers.
The lack of growth in the number of new host organizations since COVID means that most new volunteers are being recruited by existing host organizations. With the announcement of the introduction of automatic tax filing, community-based organizations that may have considered becoming CVITP host organizations may now assume there is no need to offer CVITP services at this juncture. And most existing host organizations have no incentive to ramp up volunteer recruitment.
Given all the foregoing, I see the potential for an evolving crisis in CVITP service delivery over the next five years as the gap between the demand for and the supply of CVITP services grows ever larger. The results of the CRA’s bet that automatic tax filing will reduce the need for the CVITP will only be revealed in early 2028, after the first full year of automatic tax filing. If the CRA’s bet turns out to be wrong, it may only be then that the CRA realizes it still needs the CVITP as much and maybe even more than ever.
In the first article, I argued that the CRA seems to be betting on the introduction of automatic tax filing to reduce the demand for CVITP services. But this is a poor bet as demand is unlikely to shrink and may well rise significantly. Any future gap between the demand for and the supply of CVITP services 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. That is the subject of this second article.
First, I offer a brief overview of the current state of volunteer recruitment in Canada. Then I look at how the CRA and host organizations are addressing this challenge.
Canadian Trends in the Recruitment of Volunteers
What is the current environment like for recruiting new volunteers? Simply put, it is getting harder than ever.
Statistics Canada regularly publishes data on the state of volunteerism in Canada. This goes as far back as 2004. In June of this year, it released its study, based on its 2023 survey data. Statistics Canada makes the distinction between formal volunteering (through charities, nonprofits and community groups) and informal volunteering (helping neighbours, friends and local community projects). Volunteering for the CVITP falls into the category of formal volunteering.
The data presented below are for formal volunteering.[i]
The overall conclusion is that volunteering has continued to decline since the 2018 study. There are many reasons for this which need not concern us here. But the data illustrates that fewer people are doing formal volunteering. And on average, volunteers gave 173 hours in 2023, down from 206 hours in 2018. Unless the declining trend since 2010 has reversed or stabilized in the last year or two, recruiting CVITP volunteers will be a tough proposition for the foreseeable future.
CVITP Volunteer Recruitment – a Shared Responsibility
There are two ways a volunteer can be recruited. An individual can register through the CRA; if they do not know about tax clinics in their area, their CRA CVITP coordinator can point them to local clinics in need of volunteers. An individual can also show interest in the tax clinic hosted by their community-based organization; the tax clinic coordinator can point them to the CRA for registration.
Thus, both host organizations and the CRA play important roles in promoting the CVITP to attract new volunteers.
CRA – Recruitment plans
As I pointed out in my last article on this subject, What the CRA plans to do, the CRA’s recruitment strategy in 2021 centered around its new grant pilot project. Among the many of the CRA’s expectations for this project, two were relevant to volunteer recruitment.
The CRA assumed that the new grant funding would result in an annual increase in the number of volunteers associated with grant recipient organizations. Yet no target was established for the size of the annual increase. And there is no CRA data publicly available to assess the results.
Second, the new grant funding was supposed to encourage 5% growth annually in the number of CVITP participating organizations. The assumption was that a growth in the number of organizations would automatically lead to a growth in the number of volunteers. However, the CRA’s public data shows that it failed to meet this objective, with the number of participating organizations 8% lower in 2024 than in 2020, the year before the pilot project was launched.[ii]
For a number of reasons, the CRA is unlikely to provide any further grant funding beyond 2025. Considering the failure to recruit substantial numbers of new volunteers, does the CRA have an emerging recruitment strategy to support CVITP growth?
I see no evidence of this. And I’m not expecting one either. With the CRA’s current focus on introducing automatic tax filing, it seems to assume that in a couple of years, the demand for CVITP volunteers will diminish.
Yet the first article in this series casts doubt on this assumption.
The CRA should continue to recruit volunteers to support the CVITP’s roles as a traditional service provider and also as a partner facilitating the uptake of automatic tax filing. My final volunteer recruitment article on A Complementary Direct Approach outlined several no and low-cost ways in which the CRA could support further recruitment. Those remain relevant.
But because of the introduction of automatic filing, it will likely continue to rely upon existing measures.
There is also a second reason why the CRA is unlikely to become more proactive with volunteer recruitment. Traditionally, it has played a role in almost all aspects of the volunteer cycle offering:
- An avenue for recruitment
- The certification of all volunteers
- Training tools
- A dedicated helpline to support volunteers’ technical questions
- Modest recognition by providing certificates of appreciation
- Retention by contacting past volunteers to register for the next year
The only area where it has not played any role is in the direct management and supervision of volunteers.
Yet, despite its involvement in all these areas, there seems to be a long-standing attitude within the CRA that volunteers remain primarily the responsibility of host organizations and not the CRA. Some of this is reflected in the passive approach it has historically played in recruitment. But it is also reflected in the CRA’s desire, prior to the introduction of the pilot grant project, to maintain a distance from the CVITP, claiming it had an “arm’s length relationship” with the program.
At this stage, I do not expect the CRA to do much of anything new to promote CVITP volunteer recruitment over the next few years. Should it eventually realize that the success of its automatic tax filing efforts rides, in part, on enhancing CVITP capacity, it may become more interested in actively promoting volunteer recruitment.
Host organizations – Recruitment plans
Lacking the data, it is impossible to make precise statements about host organizations’ recruitment efforts. So, I draw on anecdotal evidence, both from people I have spoken with and my own experience volunteering with four host organizations in a large municipality, to give some impressions of their efforts.
I have previously suggested that community-based organizations offering CVITP clinics can broadly be divided into two types. There is a relatively small number of CVITP host organizations whose objectives go well beyond the preparation and submission of returns to include building their clients’ financial knowledge. And then there is the majority of CVITP host organizations which offer a range of other social services to their clients in addition to this service or which focus on providing CVITP services to a specific ethnic or religion-based community. Neither of these latter organizations prioritizes promoting the broader objective of empowering their clients financially.
The first group of host organizations takes CVITP volunteer recruitment seriously as this impacts on their ability to deliver part of their core mandate. But the second group is under less pressure to deliver CVITP services; as this is not part of their core mandate, they are less accountable to their boards or donors for their performance in delivering CVITP services.
As a result, I believe the second, larger group of CVITP host organizations takes a more passive approach to volunteer recruitment.
Although this more passive approach may not apply to all host organizations in this second group, I have witnessed a few behaviours that I suspect are widespread.
Few of these organizations have established strategies for dealing systematically with volunteer recruitment. The tax clinic coordinator may be responsible for recruiting their own volunteers. If they work in a multiservice organization, they may have other job responsibilities throughout the rest of the year. Their attention often turns to recruitment only late in the calendar year when it may already be too late to register and fully prepare a new volunteer by early March.
Some organizations are lucky because new volunteers find them. Others contact colleges and universities to recruit students who have little or no experience in filing returns. Yet again, others take referrals from the CRA.
Often recruitment is haphazard, based on whom one can get, not whom one wants.
Lacking a well-defined and supported process for managing new volunteer induction, some organizations lose their new volunteers before the tax season even begins. This occurs when, for example, the volunteer misses some of the training, cannot get registered with the CRA in a timely fashion, is unable to get the UFile software to work on their laptop or realizes they just cannot follow through with their original time commitment.
Finally, some organizations make do with their existing volunteer complement. If they lose some of last year’s experienced volunteers through attrition, they reduce their supply of CVITP services accordingly. This will be especially true for ethnic or religious based organizations if they feel they already have sufficient capacity to meet the demands of their own members.[iii]
But there is another dimension to this more passive approach. It is the mirror image of the attitude adopted by the CRA. Some host organizations clinic coordinators see CVITP volunteers – at least their recruitment, training and technical support – as principally a CRA responsibility.[iv]
Conclusion
To sum up, there has been a big mismatch between the demand and the supply, consistently leading to too few people being served. It has improved modestly over time, going from serving one person in five that demanded this service in 2017 to one in four by 2023. But this improvement has come through increasing volunteer productivity, getting largely the same number of volunteers in 2023 as in 2017 to serve 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 unwise as demand is unlikely to shrink and may well rise significantly in the next few years. Instead, the gap will have to be closed through an increase in the supply of this service.
Key to increasing this supply will be the recruitment and retention of volunteers.
The CRA and host organizations share joint responsibility for volunteer recruitment. Because of its bet on automatic tax filing, I don’t expect to see the CRA ramping up its very modest CVITP recruitment efforts in the years to come. Yet if the current trend in Canadian volunteering continues its downward trajectory, host organizations will face an uphill battle recruiting new volunteers.
The lack of growth in the number of new host organizations since COVID means that most new volunteers are being recruited by existing host organizations. With the announcement of the introduction of automatic tax filing, community-based organizations that may have considered becoming CVITP host organizations may now assume there is no need to offer CVITP services at this juncture. And most existing host organizations have no incentive to ramp up volunteer recruitment.
Given all the foregoing, I see the potential for an evolving crisis in CVITP service delivery over the next five years as the gap between the demand for and the supply of CVITP services grows ever larger.
The result of the CRA’s bet that automatic tax filing will reduce the need for the CVITP will only start to be revealed in early 2028, after the first full year of automatic tax filing. If the CRA’s bet turns out to be wrong, the CRA might then realize it still needs the CVITP as much and maybe even more than ever.
[i] These data are based on Statistics Canada’s Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating, which was run every 3 years until 2013 and thereafter every five years.
[ii] While the number for 2025 is not yet available, it is unlikely to surpass the peak achieved in 2020.
[iii]I know of one colleague who is the sole volunteer for four different host organizations. He has told me that none of them have done any succession planning. If he decides to stop one year, he suspects they will simply start referring former clients to other host organizations in the same area.
[iv] I have spoken with tax clinic coordinators who have said this.