The purpose of this post is to explain why I looked into CHIMP and other charities run by Blake Bromley.
My curiosity about Bromley and his charities goes back a decade to when I was researching the funding of environmental activism.
Having worked in the charity for many years, including a decade with the UNICEF in the slums of Guatemala and Indonesia, I am familiar with charity. When I came back to Canada, I worked for a company that ran salmon farms on the B.C. coast and then, after I left salmon farming, I became a volunteer director of a Canadian charity. While I was looking for grant funding for that charity, I came across another charity called Tides Canada (now re-named Makeway) which funded activism against fish farms.
CRA’s website said that CHIMP made a gift to Makeway but the amount was so small, only $9 (you read that right, only nine bucks), that at first, I thought it was a typo. I checked CHIMP’s tax returns and found out that sure enough, CHIMP did report that very tiny gift to Makeway - and not only to Makeway but to thousands of Canadian charities. In fact, more than 3,000 gifts made via CHIMP are $19 or less.
CHIMP has since become a major conduit of funds to Makeway, having transferred $14 million to Makeway since 2020. In fact, by my analysis, CHIMP is currently the #1 top Canadian charity that channels funds to Makeway.
Makeway's Exchange Fund
One of my initial concerns with regards to Makeway, then called Tides Canada, is that it ran an operation called an "The Exchange Fund." By their own admission, The Exchange Fund enabled US$ 22 million to be transferred between Canada and the U.S. "without money ever crossing the border." When I looked into this, it appeared to me that The Exchange Fund was used, amongst other things, by an American corporation in order to obtain unwarranted tax receipts for millions of dollars. These receipts could have reduced the taxes that the corporation had in Canada. Of course, if the corporation made charitable gifts, the tax receipts make sense. The problem is, about $3 million that this corporation "donated" to a Canadian charity didn't get spent in Canada. Instead, the money got hop-scotched from a charity in Ontario to Tides Canada in Vancouver and then back to the U.S. via Tides Foundation in San Francisco. In 2016, I wrote a paper about this and testified to a Senate Committee. Within weeks, The Exchange Fund closed. In 2022, six years later, CRA revoked the charitable status of one charity - only one - that had used Tides Canada's Exchange Fund, Sentry Foundation.
The CRA audit report on Sentry Foundation said that its charitable status was revoked specifically for using Tides Canada's Exchange Fund to transfer money to an ineligible recipient in the U.S. This tells me that The Exchange Fund was offside and yet Tides Canada, which ran The Exchange Fund and used it to transfer US$ 22 million between the U.S. and Canada, did not lose its charitable status. This got me concerned about whether charities are audited consistently and fairly by CRA.
Blake Bromley
Blake Bromley initially caught my interest because one of his charities, Philanthropy Without Frontiers, covered travel costs for him to go to New York to meet with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) in 2001. At that time, the Rockellers were funding David Suzuki's foundation for "organizing First Nations on the BC coast." A few years after that, RBF began to fund activism against the Alberta oil industry. In 2007, RBF funded the coordination of initial steps of a campaign to reduce demand for Canadian oil in the U.S. The problem I saw with this activism, called The Tar Sands Campaign, is that it wasn't helping the environment because it put pressure only on the supply side of the oil industry - and on only one country. In total, the Rockefellers put about $4.5 million into the start-up of The Tar Sands Campaign.
As I was looking into CHIMP, I noticed that more than 200 charities shared the same address as CHIMP and that most of these charities were directed by the staff of Bromley’s company. One employee was listed as a director of 75 charities, an unusually large number. Other employees had been a director of 47 charities, 50 charities and 51 charities, all set up by Bromley. Since these charities are directed by the same people, they are not independent.
Another reason these charities caught my attention is because of the strange names of some of them, like Trust Me Foundation - not exactly a name that evokes trust.
But what concerned me most is that hundreds of millions of dollars seemed to be just going in circles. CHIMP is a prime example of this.
CHIMP claims that more than 200,000 people have used its services to give $1.5 billion to 14,000 charities. Again, this sounds impressive but taking a closer look one finds that, as mentioned earlier, the vast majority of gifts made via CHIMP are very small. The thousands of very small gifts made via CHIMP give an impression of large scale philanthropy. This obscures the fact that the vast majority of the dollar value of gifts made via CHIMP are transactions for very large amounts. You might say that its hard to see the trees for the forest.
Some of the gifts made by CHIMP are unusually large, like $74 million.
By my analysis of data provided by CRA, CHIMP made 60 gifts for a total of $297 million. These 60 gifts account for less than 0.2 percent of the 32,000 gifts made via CHIMP but they account for fully 60 percent of the total dollar value of gifts reported by CHIMP. Put simply, at the core of the transactions that CHIMP is involved in is a very tiny number of very large gifts. These warrant a closer look.
Very Large Gifts
Looking at the very large gifts made to and from CHIMP, two things stand out. First, most of these gifts involve charities located at the same address as CHIMP and are directed by Bromley’s employees. Second, most of these gifts consist of the transfer of land, mortgages and promissory notes. This got me looking into the ownership of real estate property by CHIMP and other charities run by Blake and John Bromely. And boy was I surprised by what I found.
According to land title records, CHIMP and other charities run by Bromley have owned 188 real estate properties. The current market value of these is approximately $288 million dollars.
In 2018, I began writing letters to Blake Bromley to inquire about CHIMP and its sister charities. Initially, they replied.
In the spring of 2018, I received a letter from John Bromley, CHIMP's CEO and CHIMP's president, Michael Cahen in which they strenuously denied my allegations about CHIMP providing "undue tax relief." Their letter called my allegations "fatally flawed and indefensible." "You have your facts wrong," they said. However, since then my allegations have been validated in numerous CRA audit reports, most recently in the revocation of Viva Voce Charitable Foundation which received $41 million from CHIMP.
While the 2018 letters from Blake Bromley and John Bromley derided my analysis, I felt that they left my questions unanswered so eventually, in 2021, I wrote to CRA, urging an audit of CHIMP and more than 200 related charities.
My main concern with regards to CHIMP is that despite the words “charitable impact” in its name, I didn’t see much true, charitable impact but I do see how the real estate transactions that the Bromley charities have been engaged in have benefitted the revenue of a private company called Chimp Technology Inc. which is owned by Blake and John Bromley. According to CHIMP’s financial statements, Chimp Technology Inc. is paid to provide tecnology human resources and business services to CHIMP. John Bromley's 2018 letter suggests that Chimp Technology Inc. pays John's salary.
Over the years, the yearly amount paid from Charitable Impact Foundation to Chimp Technology has soared from $50,000 to $13 million for a total of $79 million to date. One of the concerns I have is the origin of this money.
The main service that CHIMP provides is an online platform that enables donations to any charity in Canada. This service is “free to open and use," CHIMP says. Obviously, CHIMP did not earn $79 million by providing a free service. So where did CHIMP get the $79 million?
From my years of working in charity, I have learned to “follow the money” so I looked further into CHIMP’s finances.
In tax returns that I obtained from CRA upon request, CHIMP reports that it has received $271 million (2011-2023) from other registered charities. Using data provided by CRA, I identified nearly all of these charities, a total of 140 Canadian charities. What I found is that $242 million of the $271 million, nearly 90 percent, is from other charities operating at the same address as CHIMP. Most of these charities have no staff, no website, no public presence and most of them are funded primarily by each other, like multiple pockets in the same pair of pants. Not only these charities made gifts to CHIMP, they also received gifts from CHIMP.
For example, Foundation for Public Good (FPG) made gifts to CHIMP for $33 million and received gifts from CHIMP for $19 million. FPG also made gifts to other charities besides CHIMP but the only charities that ever received a gift from Foundation for Public Good are run by Bromley. FPG made gifts for a total of $59 million but not one single dollar ever went to a well-known, hands-on, working charity that is not run by Bromley.
When I obtained FPG’s financial statements from CRA, I learned that the “gifts” that FPG made consist of the transfer of mortgage loans and land between Bromley’s charities. The transfer of land, reported as a gift valued at $17.1 million, was confirmed in an audit report for a charity, Eden Glen Foundation, that CRA shut down specifically because it "misused" the land received from Foundation for Public Good. Eden Glen sold the land and transferred $10.5 million to CHIMP. But again, the charity one one end of an improper transaction was shut down but not the charity on the other end.
The loans made by Foundation for Public Good were for two projects financed via CHIMP: Fortius and Quest. Fortius was a sports centre in Burnaby B.C., and Quest was a spectacular, innovative university based in Squamish, BC. Both closed due to financial trouble and yet both Fortius and Quest received some of the largest charitable gifts in Canadian history.
Fortius ostensibly received two gifts for $97 million: $23 million from Scott Cousens and $74 million via CHIMP. Quest supposedly received $100 million from Stewart Blusson. The problem is, in both cases, these were not true gifts.
When some of the largest tax-receipted, charitable gifts in Canadian history are not true gifts, something's wrong.