Should she win the current federal Liberal leadership contest, Chrystia Freeland is pledging to scrap a controversial division of the Canada Revenue Agency that Muslim charities and civil liberties advocates have long accused of discriminatory auditing practices, CBC News has learned.
Her campaign has yet to make an official announcement, but Thursday morning she signed and sent a letter about her plan to the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), one of Canada’s larger Muslim advocacy groups, about her plan to get rid of the Research and Analysis Division.
The RAD has been criticized by Muslim groups for unfairly targeting their work as it looks for sources of terrorism financing in the country. An intelligence review body, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA), undertook a review of its activities in 2023, a probe that has yet to be completed.
In the letter, Freeland writes: “No charity serving Canadians in good faith should operate under a cloud of unwarranted suspicion. There is well-documented evidence from civil society organizations and independent experts suggesting that the Review and Analysis Division has a bias against racialized charities.”
“This is why, if I become Prime Minister, I will dismantle the Review and Analysis Division of the CRA,” she adds.
She is also pledging to establish an independent CRA oversight body “to ensure that audit and compliance processes are conducted fairly.”
And she said she would implement both these measures before the next federal election.
Not the first Islamophobia allegations against CRA
In 2021, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group found the RAD carried out audits “with little accountability or independent review.”
It also reported that 75 per cent of the organizations whose charitable status was revoked following division audits from 2008 to 2015 were Muslim charities, and at least another four have seen their status pulled since then.
Also in 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the CRA in his prepared remarks at a National Summit on Islamophobia.
“There is no question that there is work to be done within government to dismantle systemic racism and Islamophobia. Because from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to security agencies, institutions should support people, not target them,” he said.
Also that year, a report by the University of Toronto’s Institute of Islamic Studies found that Muslim charities are disproportionately targeted for audits by the CRA, identifying structural biases that may be influencing the audit process, such as the belief Muslims are somehow “inherently foreign or outsider.”
Liberals, Muslims have had fraught relationship recently
Freeland’s announcement comes after more than a year of fraught relationships between the governing Liberal Party and Muslims, in part over its stance in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
In November 2023, a group of Muslim Liberals publicly dropped out of the party’s top donor ranks, citing Trudeau’s disinclination at the time to call for a ceasefire in the fighting.
Last summer, Liberal political staffers wrote a letter stating they would refuse to lend their efforts to the party in a heated Montreal byelection it ultimately lost to the Bloc Québécois, citing what they called the government’s reluctance in calling out “war crimes” by Israel.
Freeland’s own campaign launch speech in Toronto in January was repeatedly interrupted by a rolling protest of pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney, who has widely surpassed her and other Liberal leadership contestants in donations, has also attracted support from the highest number of Liberal caucus members, including prominently pro-Palestinian voices such as MPs Sameer Zuberi, Salma Zahid and Shafqat Ali.
NCCM spokesperson Reem Sheet welcomed the announcement by Freeland and said the organization expects anyone vying to lead the country to follow suit.
“Our job is just to make sure that our communities are being treated fairly and that minority groups aren’t being policed.”
“I think oversight is really important and I agree that it is necessary to improve safety,” Sheet said. But she said the RAD has not been doing any of that.