Eleven self-represented litigants who’ve been fighting to keep tax credits they received for donating to an “abusive” tax shelter scheme have all hit a legal roadblock following a court decision earlier this year.

In March, Tax Court of Canada Justice David Graham ruled that the 11 people, who all participated in the Global Learning and Gifting Initiative (GLGI), would need to prove their appeals weren’t abuses of process, or have their cases struck.

GLGI gave participants tax receipts valued at up to eight times their actual donations, and some estimates suggest as many as 60,000 Canadians received artificially inflated tax credits through the program. The Tax Court definitively ruled in 2015 that the scheme was a “sham.” The Canada Revenue Agency has called setups like this “abusive tax shelter gifting arrangements.”

Since the 2015 decision, the court has dealt with thousands of GLGI appeals that have eaten up weeks on end of court time, without a single successful challenge.

11 years and thousands of cases later, courts still dealing with fallout from ‘sham’ charity scheme

“The facts in the appeals are identical. The issues are identical. They have been extensively litigated. There is nothing left to litigate,” Graham wrote in his decision this spring.

He gave the 11 appellants until April 24 to file documents showing they will be raising new facts or valid arguments showing they had true “donative intent,” meaning that they made gifts through GLGI without expecting anything in return.

All 11 people covered by Graham’s order have now all failed or declined to meet that bar.

One has conceded that he was not entitled to any tax benefits for donating through GLGI. One missed the April deadline for filing submissions and has had his case struck. One has withdrawn his appeal, and the file was officially closed this week.

Another eight filed documents claiming their cases should be heard, but the judge rejected each one.

“They simply made the same stale arguments that have failed in this court time and again — arguments that it would be an abuse of this court’s process to allow to proceed,” Graham wrote in the most recent decision in June.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean these taxpayers have hit a dead end. Tax Court decisions can be appealed, and at least one of the 11 has already filed a challenge with the Federal Court of Appeal.

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