Charity in Canada: A governance and historical institutional lens on charitable registration

The dissertation compares the impact of charitable registration on recently registered charities and on a comparable group of organizations that are not registered. Eligibility for charitable status is important to the changing relationship between Canada's voluntary sector and the federal government. This relationship is more vital today given the changing nature of governance where the government works with a variety of 'new' actors including voluntary organizations. Framed within the context of this new governance, the research examines whether having charitable status builds capacity for voluntary organizations to work with government.;Eligibility is a public policy issue because charitable status matters to the financial capacity and legitimacy of voluntary organizations. While other common law countries have initiated reform, Canada has lagged behind. To understand why change has been slow in Canada, the research relies on historical institutionalism. Although change has been marginal in Canada, to the extent it has occurred, it has come through incremental, informal, and endogenous measure---through layering and conversion rather than exogenous shocks.;Through an examination of the institutional machinery that supports the charitable registration, we see how the voluntary sector pushed for change and how the regulator, the Canada Revenue Agency, made deliberately incremental change. While these changes are important, they do not represent a major policy shift because they are largely administrative and regulatory. For major policy change to occur, the Department of Finance must act. This dissertation argues that Finance has used its power to resist change for four reasons: political considerations, anticipated financial considerations, divided jurisdiction and a perceived lack of consensus within the voluntary sector as to whether a problem actually exists.;The results reveal that while charitable status has an important impact on funding and legitimacy, it may not matter as much to being consulted by the government and being part of networks. In terms of advocacy, charitable registration had little impact on those charities that are more geared towards service delivery. For those charities that develop public policy however, it had a negative impact on their ability to advocate since charities are limited in the amount of advocacy that can be performed.