Updated October 17, 2022
For many charities, it's hard to raise money but not for Charitable Impact Foundation, a Vancouver charity known as CHIMP.
Near the end of April, CHIMP reported that it had hit a big milestone: ONE BILLION dollars in donations. And within two weeks of that, CHIMP was up by another $100 million. Its running total now sits at $1.1 billion.
To put CHIMP's size and spectacular growth into perspective, it helps to compare with Vancouver Foundation which has been the biggest charity in the city for 75 years. In terms of tax-receipted donations, CHIMP, a relatively new charity, reports almost five times as much as Vancouver Foundation.
(NOTE: Vancouver Foundation is not affiliated with CHIMP. I mention it simply as a point of comparison).
CHIMP is a federally registered charity set up by Blake Bromley, a retired, Vancouver lawyer who specializes in tax planning. CHIMP is run by Bromley's sons, John and Clif.
Blake Bromley claims to have set up 650 charities that handled $2 BILLION worth of charitable giving. That's a lot of money, and a lot of potential tax relief.
Over the past four years, I have identified about 200 charities that were set up by Bromley's business. Since nearly all 200 charities are run out of the same office, that of Bromley's former company, and most of their directors are his former employees, I call them "the Bromley Charities."
Two of the largest projects of the Bromley Charities are Quest University Canada in Squamish and Fortius Sport & Health Centre in Burnaby, B.C (now named Christine Sinclair Community Centre).
The Bromley Charities that started the university and the sports centre reported MORE THAN HALF A BILLION DOLLARS in tax-receipted donations and gifts ($425 million and $106 million, respectively). With that level of support, both the university and the sports centre should have been in good shape financially but that was not the case. In 2020, the university was forced into foreclosure by one of the Bromley charities, Vanchorverve Foundation. The sports centre also closed, citing financial difficulties, and was sold to the City of Burnaby for $26.6 million.
As a result of its sale, Quest University lost ownership of all its land and buildings and is now reduced to leasing its campus from the new owner.
The sale of the university and the sports centre resulted in huge payments to The Bromley Charities for $26.6 million and $25.6 million, respectively. Thus, the Bromley Charities appear to have benefited substantially from the demise of their own projects. That's charity?
Just a few years ago, CHIMP gave a gift of $74.7 million to Fortius Foundation, the charity that built and owned the sport centre before it was sold. If that $74.7 million was of true economic value, there's no way that the sports centre should have needed a $25.6 million dollar bail-out from Burnaby taxpayers.
In my opinion, what appears to have happened is that both the university and the sports centre were financed primarily by "gifts" that were actually loans. The loans were kicked down the road, re-financed multiple times while the Bromley charities collected millions of dollars of interest on the loans. When the university and the sports centre were sold, the Bromley charities got their money back, not far from what The Globe & Mail first reported, nearly four years ago.
The question is, why is the CRA allowing this to go on so long?
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