The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) recently released its Departmental Plan for the forthcoming fiscal year.  Since 2012, the CRA has reported to Parliament on the results obtained by the CVITP.  With the introduction of results-based performance reporting across all federal departments and agencies in 2017, the CRA has included the CVITP results within its performance indicators.

However, the new Departmental Plan has dropped any formal reporting on the CVITP; this means no data will be included on CVITP performance targets or results achieved.  Therefore, no information will be systematically made available to Parliamentarians, the public or even the CVITP host organizations and their volunteers.

In this article, we give four reasons why this is a problem:

1. any evidence on the linkage between the CVITP and the federal government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy will be lost;
2. Parliament will be unable to exercise any oversight over the CVITP budget increases it approved;
3. it calls into doubt the Minister of National Revenue’s commitment to a priority identified only three months earlier by the Prime Minister; and
4. CVITP host organizations and their volunteers who do the bulk of the CVITP work for the CRA using their own resources will now be kept in the dark as to the results of their efforts.

This is a strange way to mark the 50^th anniversary of the CVITP.