How is our government amplifying Matching Funds for Lebanon Relief Efforts?
As the crisis in Lebanon continues to escalate, there is one week left in our campaign to match donations to Lebanon relief efforts through the Red Cross and Humanitarian Coalition.
We have committed to match up to $6 million for all donations made between September 24 and November 3, allowing each dollar donated to be doubled. The appeal will go towards providing life-saving essentials—including food, water, shelter, medicine, and health services to children and families in Lebanon.
Donate today: 
https://give.redcross.ca/page/LHNA
How is our government making communities safer?
This week, we announced that on November 1, 2024, our government will expand the National Crime Prevention Strategy. We are making:
- $35.5M available for the Youth Gang Prevention Fund (YGPF)
- $4.6M available for the Crime Prevention Action Fund (CPAF); and,
- $84M available for the Northern and Indigenous Crime Prevention Fund (NICPF).
Organized crime is increasingly targeting and recruiting youth. We’re putting an end to that by investing in prevention, protecting young Canadians, and stopping gangs from getting to them.
How are we protecting taxpayers’ sensitive information?
In today’s increasingly digital world, safeguarding sensitive information against constantly evolving threats is critical for every organization, including the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). The protection of taxpayer information remains one of our highest priorities. Recognizing our robust security controls, we, like many large organizations, are not immune to privacy breaches, and we recognize the worry and frustration this can cause for those affected.
We want to reassure Canadians that we are continually enhancing our security measures, technologies, processes and controls to ensure the security of taxpayer information. Indeed, the CRA has implemented security measures to protect the personal information of Canadians, including multi-factor authentication throughout CRA login services, and proactively revoking user IDs and passwords that may have been obtained by unauthorized third parties through a variety of external sources.
We have made strategic investments to proactively detect, report, and address external fraud and the unauthorized use of taxpayer information by a third party (UUTP). These UUTP breaches often involve personal information, in most cases obtained from external sources, used to help bypass existing security measures to access or modify taxpayer information.
Protecting taxpayer accounts
When we suspect an account is the target of an external threat actor, we take swift and immediate precautionary measures on the taxpayer’s account such as locking it to prevent transactions, conducting in‑depth reviews, and contacting the individuals. If a privacy breach is confirmed, the CRA formally notifies the affected individuals and provides credit protection, where warranted, at no cost to them.
Taxpayers who are confirmed victims of identity theft are not held responsible for any money paid out to scammers nor penalties or interest related to fraudulent claims. The CRA remains dedicated to resolving these incidents.
Reporting privacy breaches
The CRA reports all material privacy breaches to Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC). For more details, please refer to the accompanying information sheet.
We are committed to full transparency in addressing privacy breaches, including retroactively reporting all confirmed breaches to the OPC, as noted in the OPC’s February 2024 report. In our response to the OPC’s report, we committed to becoming fully compliant with TBS policy and retroactively reporting all confirmed privacy breaches to their office; this was completed in May 2024.
Recognizing these delays in reporting, the CRA’s top priority has always been to directly notify affected individuals and protect their accounts oftentimes as investigations were underway.
In addition to the mandatory privacy breach reporting requirements to TBS and the OPC, we report on privacy breaches at the completion of each fiscal year in our Annual Report to Parliament on the administration of the Privacy Act.
I want to wish everyone celebrating a Happy Halloween!
