Before addressing the volunteer firefighter tax credit, CRA addressed whether amounts received by a part-time firefighter with modest remuneration might be exempt on general principles, stating:
Generally, a volunteer is defined as someone who does something without being remunerated and without being required to do so. In that situation, the volunteer is involved willingly and for the satisfaction of serving his or her community. As a result, it is quite common for a volunteer to be neither an employee nor a contractor serving an organization.
However, many volunteer acts are no longer done entirely without remuneration. Some volunteers receive modest amounts of money, gift certificates, goods or services as compensation. Those payments are not very representative of the amount of work done or the quality of the services rendered.
They are not in themselves real motivators for volunteers to get involved and do not reflect the fair market value of services rendered. Therefore, those payments are not taxable.
However, the volunteer firefighters to which we were referred are not necessarily volunteers as defined above. If that had been the case, the $1,000 exemption and the volunteer firefighter tax credit would be meaningless as they only apply to taxable income.