The fairgrounds, the hall, and a statute older than the province.

In most of Canada's 269 registered agricultural societies the fair is older than the province. Upper Canada paid a society per district from 1830; the Territories had an ordinance before Alberta had a legislature; Ontario once had more than five hundred. Canada's fairs association reaches 743 fair and exhibition bodies today, so the record has fewer than half of them, because a society is a creature of its province's statute first and a registered charity only if someone once decided it should be. The Prairies have more than half of the registered ones, most of them Alberta's to judge by the towns on the returns, where the Act makes the Minister approve the society's formation and its by-laws and the province pays a grant to every one that files; Ontario has a quarter; the rest are scattered through British Columbia, the Atlantic exhibitions, and a few in Quebec.

By money they are middling and steady: a median of $174,000, forty-four per cent on under $150,000, only eighteen on under $25,000, and twenty-five over a million, the exhibitions and the year-round agriplexes. Nearly all of them are registered for community benefit. The revenue is the gate, the midway, the rentals, the bingo, and in Alberta the grant; donations are almost nothing. Twenty-three draw more than half of what they have from government.

The boards are large. The median is twelve, and 190 of the 258 that reported have ten or more; fewer than five have three or fewer. The statutes require it: sixty incorporators within forty kilometres in Ontario, fifty in Alberta, a share of them farming. A fair is run by committees, the light horse, the heavy horse, the homecraft, the 4-H, the demolition derby, and each committee has a chair who sits on the board. A society with twelve directors and no one under sixty is common, and a society with twelve directors and no one to chair the fair is where the closures in this case study begin.

By annual revenue

By region

Region follows the riding a registration's mailing address falls in; 38 could not be assigned. Median revenue is $174,000 and the whole body reports $141 million; the median board has 12 members.

The model flags twelve of the 269, under five per cent, half the national rate. A flag means only that an organization's filings over several years resemble those of charities that later lost their registration, and eight of the twelve run on under $150,000. Fair societies file steadily; a fair is a fixed date with a fixed set of accounts and a treasurer who has kept them for twenty years. The model sees the books and not the fair.

The register shows five societies ended since 2019, every one for failing to file, none by choice, which in a body this size and this old means the record does not see how these societies actually end. What happens is that the fair stops. Mount Forest's society, formed in 1860, held its last fair in 2022 and wrote to the township the next spring that for lack of interest it might have to dissolve, and then that the board had decided to. Peterborough's, formed in 1844, announced in January 2025 that its board would step down for want of committed people to lead it, and a new board of twelve was elected two weeks later. The Nova Scotia Provincial Exhibition's operator cancelled its contracts this year and a volunteer committee kept the August fair. Camrose suspended its bull congress. The regional societies in Alberta report fewer volunteers every year. None of that is a revocation. Most of it never will be, because the society goes on holding the grounds after the fair is gone, filing a return that says less each year.

Ontario cut the membership a society needs for its grant from sixty to forty in 2023, because the numbers had not come back after the pandemic. A province said in a regulation what a board says at its annual meeting when the same eleven people are elected again.

Revocations on the record, by year

Revocations published in the Canada Gazette, matched by name, 2011 to 5 September 2026. 15 in all.

How an agricultural society ends is written into its statute, in every province, and each province wrote it differently. In Alberta the members resolve at a special meeting on thirty days' notice, the Director cancels the certificate, a liquidator pays the debts, the former members may give the surplus to a community body in the locality, and what is left after that goes to the Crown. In Manitoba the surplus must be offered to the rural municipality first, and only if the municipality refuses may it go to another society or a community organization. In Ontario the directors on the day of dissolution become trustees of the assets and, with the Director's approval, dispose of them as they decide. Three routes, and at the end of each the grounds: a fairground, a hall, an arena, sometimes the only one in the district, and often the society's since before there was a municipality to give it to.

Then the second step, under the Income Tax Act, which no provincial statute mentions: the final return, the transfer of what the charity held to another charity within the year, the notice in the Gazette. A society that has followed its own Act to the letter can still owe revocation tax on a fairground it meant to give away, because the provincial process and the federal one are different, and nobody on the board has been through either. Mount Forest got the most important part right: the buildings went to the township, which agreed in writing to keep them for the community, and the society said so in public before it closed. The successor was named and the wish written down before the vote, which is the order the Guide recommends, and a society of volunteers in Wellington County worked it out on its own.

Each organization in this case study is incorporated in a province or territory, or federally, and it closes under that statute first and under the Income Tax Act second. The two have an order, and no government page sets it out.

The Critical Path is that order on one folded sheet, one edition per jurisdiction: each step from the first hard conversation to the last filing, who decides it, and the document it files, with its regulator, its fee, and a specimen of its first page. Each edition will come as part of Foundations, with the Guide and access to the Foundations Course. Foundations is in development.

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The counts are arithmetic on three public files: the Canada Revenue Agency's list of charities and their annual returns, 2011 to 2024; the Canada Gazette's notices of revocation; and Elections Canada's postal code file, which places a mailing address in a riding. A "flag" is the mark our model, Canary v3 / Distress v3, puts on a charity whose filings over several years resemble those of charities that later lost registration. It is a weak signal and we say so: about 1.4 in a hundred charities lose their registration within three years, about 2.9 in a hundred flagged ones do, and the rest carry on. We use flags to count, never to approach anyone.

This body's registrations are picked out by name. A few without the words in their legal name are missed, and unrelated bodies that share them are excluded by hand, so the count is close but not exact. Regions follow the riding of the mailing address, and 22 of Canada's 343 ridings are not yet in the crosswalk. Where a count is under five, we print "fewer than five", so that no organization can be picked out of it. The method brief has the model's validation, the counting rules, and the limits in full.

Local record, as reported: Agricultural and Horticultural Organizations Act, RSO 1990, c A.9 (ss 19, 20, 26); Agricultural Societies Act, RSA 2000, c A-11 (ss 4, 5, 28, 36 to 42); The Agricultural Societies Act, CCSM c A30, Manitoba (ss 26, 28); Ontario Association of Agricultural Societies, history of agricultural fairs; Canadian Association of Fairs and Exhibitions, about (743 fair and exhibition organizations); Wellington Advertiser on the Mount Forest Agricultural Society's decision to dissolve, 2023; Alberta, Agricultural Societies Grant Program.

Sources: CRA List of Charities and T3010 returns, 2011 to 2024; Canada Gazette, Part I, revocations 2019 to 2025; Elections Canada, 2023 representation order. Model: Canary v3 / Distress v3, 1 July 2026; out-of-time AUC 0.68; flag precision 2.5 to 3.3 per cent. Counting script: case-study.py; the riding-level counts it produces: case-studies-aggregate.csv. The organization-level score file is available to a reviewer under a data agreement, and the method paper on request. If you find an error in the counting, write to info@publicbenefit.ca; we will correct the case study and record it in the correction log.