Obtaining public records in Canada

Question

I would like to obtain minutes of Board of Trustee meetings from a federal charity organization in Canada. I know how to do that in the U.S. How does one do it in Canada? Is this something that technically only a Canadian citizen can do?

Update: I checked at the Canada Revenue website and discovered that there is a distinction at least for their purposes between charity and non-profit, and that the organization I'm interested in is a charity not a non-profit. For what that's worth.

Answer 1

In general

First, it is true that individual provinces have their own rules governing non-profit organizations, and that federal charities are treated separately from other types of non-profit organizations in Canada. Since you are interested in a federal charity, the documents of interest are the Income Tax Act and the Access to Information Act. However, the process proscribed in the latter act seems to be rather involved and obscure.

The Canadian government provides “How to get information about a charity”, a web page that suggests you:

1. Contact the charity directly. There is significant variance on the policies of individual charities, and it might be worth your time to simply ask for the information.
2. Search the list of charities for access to publicly available information. Here are two search pages, one for charities and the other for federal corporations. Each may prove useful.

Specifically

Here are the search results for the entity you mentioned in a comment:

• Charity search

• Federal corporation search

Note: it appears that they are overdue on their annual filing.

Further remedies

3. Make an informal information request through the Canada Revenue Agency. The “How-to” page included above states that this process is free and can yield a variety of non-confidential information, including governing documents. It is unclear whether this includes minutes from a board of trustee meeting specifically.

Make an informal request

4. Make a formal “access to information” request through the Canada Revenue Agency. This process may include processing fees, and usually offers only the same information as the informal requests, but allows you to complain to the offices of the information and privacy commissioners.

Make formal request

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_{Note on board meetings for non-profits in Canada: taken separately from charities, there is some concern in Canada regarding the lack of information about non-profit entities.}