Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Questioning McVety's Money Trail...

I don't have much time for Charles McVety on good days. I think he is an unpleasant little man who will stoop to anything to turn Canada into a Theocracy - but that's just my opinion.

Fortunately, the keepers of the Shuffl blog are a little more patient than I about the man and have done an outstanding job of tracing through McVety's little lobbying empire and revealing quite a bit about how money apparently moves around his world. (There's much that we can't see without access to McVety's books, but I imagine a forensic accountant would have a grand old time with them.)

The upshot of it all is that an awful lot of the contact pages from various organizations affiliated with McVety (CFAC, Word.ca, Institute for Canadian Values and Canadians United for Israel) all ultimately point back to telephone numbers and an address that mysteriously corresponds to Canada Christian College.

Of particular interest are observations such as how the "donations" page from Word.ca mysteriously links to the "donations" page for the "Institute for Canadian Values".

All of this doesn't actually prove that McVety is engaging in a shell game with donor's money, but one does have to wonder about how "arm's length" the relationship between known political lobby organizations (such as CVI) and McVety's college (which is a registered charity) really are. CFAC is a bit of an oddity here, since its offices are in Calgary, and I believe that Rushfeldt founded CFAC locally - although McVety is the titular President. The details of the relationship between Rushfeldt and McVety are unknown to me, but their names keep popping up together on various organizations McVety runs.

I can only imagine what would turn up if Revenue Canada actually did an audit of the books for the various organizations that McVety is affiliated with - and the financial shell-games that are being played to fund the various political lobby organizations.

In any case, the donation pages along with the suspicious collision of offices makes me wonder aloud about whether or not donations actually go where people think they are going in the first place.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link my SHUFFL post on Chuck, the and nice review!
I'm working on another post abut his charitable empire, but with the end of the semester and what not I'm a little stretched for time.

I did go to the Canada Revenue Agency site a few weeks ago and found you can actually search their list of charitable organizations for addresses. There were quite a few at 50 Gervais Dr. in Toronto. THe list did not match the list of occupants I had from an internet search, so I think some of the sites are relics of earlier tenants.

There are a number of other non-religious organizations at 50 Gervais (caterers,lawfirms etc), and I assume they are renting or leasing space perfectly legally. I don't know who owns the building, which is quite large.

The large number of charities however, is "interesting".

Dr. Jim from SHUFFLE

Alberta's Anti-Trans Legislation

So, now that the UCP has rolled out their anti-trans legislation, we can take a long look at it.  Yesterday, they tabled 3 related bills and...