The taxpayers were participants in leveraged donation transactions which included gifts of courseware licences to a Canadian–resident Trust with a corporate trustee. Ostensibly, the licences then were distributed to the program participants such as the taxpayers after they had been added as capital beneficiaries, with the participants then donating them to CCA. The definition of a capital beneficiary included individuals (subject to specified exclusions) had made written application to the Trustee for consideration for inclusion as a Capital Beneficiary, had made charitable donations to one or more registered charities in the calendar year of such application and received receipts in prescribed form for such donations.
In finding that the Trust was void for lack of certainty of objects, Pizzitelli J stated (at para. 79):
[T]he class of beneficiaries is so hopelessly wide as to not form anything like a class. If "all the residents of London" were too wide a group to form anything like a class, as found in McPhail above, then I must agree that all Canadians who made a charitable donation and anyone else in the world who made a charitable donation entitling them to a prescribed tax receipt from Canadian registered charities is even wider.
See summary under s. 118.1 - total charitable gifts.