For summer reading this year The Philanthropist offers some practical law and some thoughts on the regulation of charities. The practical law comes from Blake Bromley of Vancouver. Some years ago, in Volume V, Number 2, he wrote an article on planned giving entitled “The Great Circle Route”. In this issue he updates his previous article and, in particular, expands his discussion of some of the legal forms that are available to the planned giving officers of charities as well as the donors they are approaching.
The Ministry of National Revenue, Taxation, known to all as Revenue Canada, published a Discussion Paper last fall dealing with its role in administering and thus regulating charities. We review in this issue the response to the Minister of three organizations representing many of the significant charities in the country. In the next issue we will continue the review with a response from a single expert observer.
Both charitable organizations and members of the legal profession will be interested to learn through an article by Ronald Manes, a Bencher of the Law Society of Upper Canada, of an innovative pilot project which the Society is undertaking this fall. It is designed to test the feasibility of providing greater, more affordable legal assistance, particularly to smaller charities.
Ed Waitzer, formerly of our Editorial Board, makes a welcome return to our pages with a review of a book which explores the question of what leads volunteers to do charitable work.
Claudia Willets continues her tireless work of bringing order out of our collected pages through the Index to Volume IX. Claudia’s efforts make our material more readily accessible to the casual as well as the professional researcher and provide a significant foundation for our ability to serve as a general educational resource to the charitable sector and its advisors.
We embarked on this mission almost 20 years ago, under the original editorship of Bertha Wilson, then of the Toronto law firm of Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt. Since that time, of course, the Honourable Bertha Wilson has been an outstanding member of, first, the Ontario Court of Appeal and then the Supreme Court of Canada, where a combination of scholarship and imagination resulted in judgements that are prized by students of the Court, as well as members of the public. The Editorial Board of The Philanthropist takes this opportunity to express its regard for its founding colleague and to wish her well in her retirement.
John D. Gregory
Editor
