Leaving a gift to charity in your will

About one Canadian will in twenty includes a charitable gift. They are simple to do well and easy to do badly — most failures come down to naming.

Name the charity so a stranger can find it

Your executor may not know that “the cancer charity” meant the Canadian Cancer Society and not the BC Cancer Foundation. Charities merge, rebrand and dissolve; local chapters are often separate legal entities from national bodies. A gift that cannot be matched to a legal entity invites a court application — or fails.

The fix is mechanical. Look the charity up on the CRA’s public list of registered charities and record two things in the will: the exact legal name and the CRA registration number (the format is 123456789RR0001). Our questionnaire asks for both. Add a fallback: “if this charity no longer exists, to a registered charity with similar purposes chosen by my executor” — standard wording that saves the gift from dissolution or merger.

Fixed amount or percentage?

A fixed amount ($25,000 to the food bank) is predictable but silently changes weight as your estate grows or shrinks — in a shrunken estate it can crowd out family, and gifts are paid before residue.

A percentage of the residue (5% to the food bank) scales with reality and is what we generally recommend for gifts meant to be proportionate. Both are supported; mixing is fine.

The tax side is genuinely good

Charitable gifts by will earn a donation tax credit on your final return — federally and provincially, roughly 40–50 cents on the dollar at the margins that apply to most estates. Donations at death can be claimed against up to 100% of income in the year of death and the prior year (versus 75% in life), and the estate, as a graduated rate estate, has flexibility about which return claims the credit.

This matters because death itself is a tax event: deemed disposition of capital property plus full inclusion of registered accounts often makes the final return the largest of your life. A charitable gift lands exactly where that bill does.

A word on pressure

Legacy-giving campaigns are a big industry, and some platforms are funded by charity partnerships. We have none: no charity pays us, and the questionnaire treats a charitable gift as exactly as optional as any other. If you want one, name it properly; if you do not, skip the screen.