Case studies · Halifax
The Atlantic hub.
Four ridings around the harbour, and the Atlantic region's institutions. 880 charities that filed a 2024 return, read from the public record.
The region’s institutions and its smallest boards share one harbour.
What the sector looks like here.
The four ridings of the Halifax Regional Municipality, HRM, have 880 registered charities, and the sector is heavy at the top. The universities, the hospital foundations, and the regional agencies for the whole of Atlantic Canada are registered here, and 125 organizations run on over $2 million. The median charity runs on $206,000.
Beneath the institutions, most organizations are small. Forty-five per cent run on under $150,000, 154 on under $25,000, and eighteen per cent of boards have three members or fewer. Community benefit is the largest group, ahead of religion. Education and relief of poverty are large groups too, and the province's food banks have seen use rise by two thirds since 2021.
The Halifax riding, the peninsula and its edges, has nearly half of the charities; Dartmouth across the harbour, Sackville and Bedford, and the western suburbs have the rest. HRM passed half a million people in 2025, and its growth then fell by more than half in a year as the students and temporary residents who had driven it stopped coming.
By annual revenue
By charitable purpose
Purpose is the category head on the CRA return. Median revenue here is $206,000; the median board has 7 members.
What the record shows about strain.
The model flags eighty-two charities, nine per cent, which is Canada's rate. A flag means only that an organization's filings over several years resemble those of charities that later lost their registration. Thirty-eight of the eighty-two run on under $150,000, and sixteen have the stronger flag.
Fifteen registrations were revoked between 2022 and 2025, under two in a hundred over four years; the split between chosen and unchosen is too small to print. The city's strain this year came from the province instead: a budget that cut $130 million in grants to 287 organizations, then gave back about $53 million of it when the province heard from the people it had cut. The organizations that made up the difference for a season are the ones this case study is about.
The filings also show a layer of directors who sit everywhere. Two hundred and two people sit on two or more boards, and one sits on forty. The record does not say who they are; a fair guess is the professional and the retired senior public servant who serve on the foundation, the gallery, and the shelter at once, and that is a kind of capacity the region's smallest organizations rarely see.
What an ending looks like here.
HRM has everything a closure needs within a few blocks: counsel who do this work, accountants who know the sector, successors of every size, and a community foundation. The city has used them in public this year. Two Catholic parishes closed in 2024 on the Archdiocese's decision, and on 1 July 2026 three of the peninsula's United congregations, St. Matthew's, St. Andrew's, and Fort Massey, became one church by their own vote. Both were decided in order by people who knew how.
What the record suggests HRM lacks is the connection between the top of the sector and the bottom. The forty-board director and the three-member board of a neighbourhood food bank are in the same riding and the same data. As far as the filings show, they do not sit on any of the same boards.
Who sits on the boards.
Two hundred and seventy-two organizations share a director with another, through 202 people. The large dots are the city's serial directors; move the slider up and the sector collapses to a few dozen people who sit on its institutions.
Bubbles are organizations, coloured by purpose and sized by revenue band. Dots are people who sit on two or more of these boards. Drag to move, scroll to zoom, click to see one organization's connections, click the background to clear. No one is named: the shape is public, the people are not.
The work
What we would do here.
In HRM, closing together would mean boards from the four ridings, and from beyond them, working from one Toolkit, with counsel, accountants, and successors a few blocks away.
A host charity, usually a healthy one with a meeting room and a small budget for lunch, invites the boards from the four ridings and beyond that have decided to close, or are deciding, to close together. Each organization that joins passes a board motion naming a coordinator from its own community and takes its own Toolkit licence, at no cost where the board has already decided to wind down. Public Benefit brings the method, the binder, the training, and support by phone. HRM keeps the method, and the rest of the region can borrow it.
The congregations named in this case study ended or joined by their own decision and said so in public, and are named for that. We do not use the model to approach anyone. A board that recognizes itself here can start the conversation.
Roundtables · the community of practice, in one room
Come and correct us.
A day or an evening in Halifax, hosted by a local charity.
The public record only shows so much. A roundtable brings six to twenty community leaders in Halifax together for a day or an evening to go over this case study, correct it, and work out what the charities near them are facing. It is hosted by a healthy local charity with a meeting room and a small budget for lunch, and a sponsor helps defray the cost. Within the month we send a report in the room's own words, and the corrections this case study owes are made and dated in the correction log. How a roundtable works, and who provides what.
What we will ask at the roundtable.
- The province cut $130 million in grants to 287 organizations this spring and restored about $53 million after the outcry. Which of HRM's small organizations are still absorbing the cut, and which of them have a board that has talked about what happens if it is not restored?
- Sixteen organizations here have the stronger flag. Which of the region's funders would know them from the description, and have they been asked what they need?
- Three downtown United congregations became one on 1 July 2026, and the Archdiocese closed two parishes in 2024. Which of the peninsula's other congregations are deciding the same thing this year, and who is advising them?
- One person here sits on forty boards. What does the region's board class know about closing an organization that the three-member board of a Dartmouth food bank does not, and how would the two meet?
- Food bank use in the province is up two thirds since 2021. Which of the organizations carrying that load have a plan for the year the money stops?
The Critical Path
Closing an organization in Nova Scotia.
A charity in Nova Scotia closes twice: once under the Societies Act, which governs the corporation, and once under the Income Tax Act, which governs the registration. The two have an order, and no government page sets it out.
The Critical Path, Nova Scotia edition, is that order on one folded sheet: 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. This case study is printed inside it. It will come as part of Foundations, with the Guide and access to the Foundations Course. Foundations is in development.
How this case study was made.
Public data, and math. The full method brief.
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.
A mailing address is not a service area, and 22 of Canada's 343 ridings are not yet in the postal-code 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: CBC on the province's $130 million grant reductions, 2026; CBC on the grants reinstated after the budget reversal; CTV on two Halifax Catholic parishes closing, 2024; CBC on Feed Nova Scotia and food bank use; Halifax Partnership, the Halifax Index on population.
Sources: CRA List of Charities and T3010 returns, 2011 to 2024; Canada Gazette, Part I, revocations 2022 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.