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Episode 2 - “Putting A Number on the Cost of Religion”
80 Plays9 months ago
In Today’s Episode, “Putting A Number on the Cost of Religion”, We are very excited to partner with our affiliates at BC Humanist Association and the Center for Inquiry Canada to bring you this important and lively discussion on the many ways Canada still tangibly privileges religion and its institutions over similar non-theistic organizations; costing Canadians Billions of dollars each year.
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Transcript
Introduction to Humanist Canada Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to the Voice of Canadian Humanism, the official podcast of Humanist Canada. Join us as we delve into thought-provoking discussions, explore critical issues, and celebrate the values of reason, compassion, and secularism through the Humanist lens.
The Financial Cost of Religion in Canada
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to The Conversation. I'm Jared W. Clegg. In today's episode, Putting a Number on the Cost of Religion, we are very excited to partner with our affiliates at BC Humanist Association and the Centre for Inquiry Canada to bring you this important and lively discussion on the many ways Canada still tangibly privileges religion and its institutions over similar, non-theistic organizations.
00:00:53
Speaker
costing Canadians billions of dollars each year.
Meet the Experts
00:00:57
Speaker
Let's begin. Let me introduce our speakers. Ian Bushfield. Ian is the executive director of the British Columbia Humanist Association. And they're in the same part of our world as Ian is Teal Phelps Bondaroff, the research coordinator at BCHA.
00:01:18
Speaker
And with us representing the Centre for Inquiry Canada is Leslie Rosenblud. Leslie is a member of CFIC and hosts their podcast for inquiry.
00:01:31
Speaker
And we are launching our poll tonight that came out to you this morning, so you could give it some thought. Please look for its center screen and we will share the results later in our session. We will take questions at the end by hand or by chat. Leslie will start us off.
00:01:52
Speaker
Okay, well, thank you everybody for joining. It's wonderful to see so many people here tonight. And I wanted to tell you why we undertook this research.
Unveiling Religious Subsidies
00:02:02
Speaker
So this is what I'm going to be sharing with you today is based on original research done by the Centre for Inquiry Canada. And there's lots of talk about the social costs of religion. And there's lots of examples of that, that religion enhances in-group amity,
00:02:19
Speaker
but it also enhances out-group enmity. People can believe that prayers are a substitute for action, thoughts and prayers anyone. People with a religious bent may perpetrate crimes against children and then spend decades covering up those crimes against children, taking strong stands against reproductive rights for women, opposing equal rights for the LGBT community, and much, much more. We're not going to talk about any of those things today.
00:02:46
Speaker
Today, we're going to talk about money, cold hard cash, and quantify the cost of religion in Canada with specific dollars amounts based on rigorous research conducted by CFIC. So I want to start with the headline figure. Just a few policy choices by various levels of government has resulted in direct and indirect subsidies of over $5.5 billion.
00:03:15
Speaker
That's billion with a B each and every year. And we're going to spend the rest of our time this evening going through how we came up with that number.
00:03:27
Speaker
So, but yeah, I think that's a good place to pause and just set the stage for tonight's conversation. So Betty Anne has started the poll and we just want to test your knowledge about a few things and we want to see if you're going to learn something
Exploring Clergy Residence Deductions
00:03:49
Speaker
tonight. So let's see how much everyone knows.
00:03:52
Speaker
as we start the conversation and then we can compare that with what we're going to be sharing with you this evening. I think maybe that's a good point with that poll question to go into the clergy residence deduction which is actually where the BC Humanist Association has contributed to this broader project in question which CFIC has done some fantastic work summarizing and doing the kind of top level and we looked at a couple specific examples.
00:04:17
Speaker
The clergy residence deduction is one of these things that kind of always bothered me, because when I do my income taxes I go through and there's just like, you'll sometimes see it it's buried in there among the you know check all of these different forms off, and you can get all these deductions maybe you were a volunteer firefighter maybe you had post secondary.
00:04:34
Speaker
education credits, those kind of things, charitable donations, things we're all used to buried in there is the clergy residence deduction. And this is a write off for members of the clergy and other religious ministers to deduct their housing expenses from their income taxes.
00:04:52
Speaker
This we looked into the records was introduced in the 1950s actually by late 1940s by MPs who thought that there should be exemptions for the good work that the clergy do. MP Gordon Graydon said we would not have a nation worth the name if we did not have our churches.
00:05:14
Speaker
Other MPs questioned whether this was a valuable use of tax dollars, but they still said that churches were fantastic. It's just, you know, if we start exempting clergy residences, what are we going to do next? Let people deduct their union fees and professional fees, which ended up happening. So unfortunate for that guy that tax code became quite complex.
00:05:38
Speaker
The policy changed over the years. In the 1950s, we added a functions test because it seemed like it was starting to balloon as teachers at religious colleges started to apply for it and they narrowed that down.
00:05:51
Speaker
And then more recently, they've updated the language a little bit, so it's not just available to clergymen, but all clergy and all religious professionals. Using the federal estimates, we found that this does cost $100 million a year to the federal treasury. It was about $95 million officially in 2017, which was the last year we had numbers for.
00:06:14
Speaker
and was estimated to go over $100 million in the following years. There's about 27,000 clergy who get this deduction. It lets them deduct $394 million off of taxable income, and that works out to $14,000 in savings per clergy member. We did in our report some analysis that shows how much you could save if you were a clergy member, and it's about a third of your income taxes for the average clergy person. So it's not a small amount.
00:06:45
Speaker
It's a very interesting one, and it hasn't been tested a lot. And the big thing that we question with this, and I think that Leslie will get into and Teal will get into, is the opportunity cost of all of this. By subsidizing religion in all of these ways, we are not necessarily able to fund other social programs.
00:07:04
Speaker
or reduce your taxes depending on your economic outlook in this. This requires all of us to bear the burden. When they were introducing the clergy residence deduction, one of the MPs actually said, I don't think anyone would care about carrying this extra burden to help our clergy members. And I think the people on this call would disagree. So I'll turn it back to Leslie to go a little bit more into some of the other numbers.
Understanding Property Tax Exemptions
00:07:30
Speaker
All right, so there's another interesting exemption given to religious institutions, and that is what's known as the property tax exemption. So if you own a condominium or a house, you know that wherever it is that you happen to live, you have to pay property taxes.
00:07:52
Speaker
But if you're building or if the land is owned or has on it a house of worship, so it's no longer just a church but a house of worship, then you are exempt from property taxes across Canada, all 10 provinces and all three territories.
00:08:08
Speaker
Now, as I said before, we wanted to be specific. We want to talk to quantify the costs of religion and not just give a list of exemptions. This is the exemption that was hardest to quantify because there's a lot of complexity involved with that. First of all, every municipality has their own tax rate. So if we wanted to get right down and get very specific, we would have to go into every municipality in Canada
00:08:36
Speaker
and calculate the value of that exemption and then sum it up across for the nation. But there's a second complexity involved with that, and that is religious organizations, when they submit their taxes, I'm going to get into this a little bit more later on,
00:08:57
Speaker
they give the purchase value of the land, not the market value of the land. So the numbers that we have are different than the numbers that are used when calculating the property taxes. And the current market value of the land that houses of worship are on is simply not available in a public way, systematically across Canada.
00:09:18
Speaker
But there is something that we did find, and that is the province of New Brunswick, as part of a wide-ranging study to look at ways that they could essentially save some money, examined its expenditures and the costs of the various tax credits that it had. And within that, they
00:09:40
Speaker
they published the cost of the property tax exemption to the coffers of the province. So we were able to take that and we were able to determine that based on the stated value of the
00:09:58
Speaker
of the sorry the purchase value of the land that houses of worship have and the lost revenue we were able to say that we were able to determine that it's about 3.3 percent of the of the purchase value of the land is the cost of the annual cost of lost revenue to the provinces so we extrapolated that across Canada we said we did have the purchase value of the land for all of the houses of worship in Canada
00:10:24
Speaker
We were able to get that some apply a value of 3.3% to that and then we come to 900 just under $900 million 881 million dollars is is.
00:10:39
Speaker
basically being taken away from municipal treasuries across Canada every year because the governments of Canada have decided that houses of worship don't need to pay property taxes despite the fact that churches, temples, mosques, and so on are often on prime real estate in the center of the city.
00:11:05
Speaker
I might jump in here, Leslie, if I may, because we've also done similar research on this and we've kind of taken a slightly more narrow focus with some of the just the BC approach. So just building what Leslie was saying, these different provinces have different ways of adjudicating tax exemptions as they relate to places of worship. Ian and I have mostly focused on BC for this area, so we're very grateful for some of the national work.
00:11:27
Speaker
One of the things that we did was we looked at the distinction between permissive and statutory tax exemptions. So those of you whose eyes are brought to glaze over, I'll try to make this as exciting a description as possible. But basically, there's different types of tax exemptions. So we've heard of the clergy residency exemption, and then there's a sort of general tax exemption for places of worship. But you can break it down here in British Columbia, and it may be different in different jurisdictions. So please check your local province and municipality. But it's broken down here in statutory and permissive tax exemptions.
00:11:55
Speaker
Statutory ones are the ones that are automatically applied by the province. If you are a place of worship, you automatically get this. And the permissive ones, when it's in the name, are permissible. The municipality can grant them if they want to. And what we found when we did an analysis of every municipality in British Columbia was that there's considerable diversity in those.
00:12:13
Speaker
So just to explain the different types of tax exemptions, because Leslie was doing a really good job talking about the overall property value, what we have in British Columbia here is if you have a place of worship, the building itself is statutorily, the place where the worship takes place is statutorily exempt. So if you can imagine my square here as a
00:12:34
Speaker
as a property. And then this little square right here is the actual place of worship. This part of the land is exempt. But the rest of the land may or may not be exempt, and it could apply for a statutory exemption. So the property value of the building is exempt, and that can be, as we just heard, hundreds of millions of dollars. And then the land around it can be included in that. And what we found was that there was considerable diversity of approaches that municipalities had. Some automatically granted it, like, congratulations, your entire land is tax exempt without any kind of oversight.
00:13:04
Speaker
Some would have some mechanisms like you had to apply or maybe not. And then some of them would have what we call the benefits test, which would be like, hey, we're giving you a tax exemption. The purpose of this tax exemption is, as my colleagues have already mentioned, to support work that benefits the community. If that's the case, maybe you should demonstrate that you have community benefit rather than assuming it. And by contrast, if you look at how the tax assumptions work here in British Columbia,
00:13:28
Speaker
If you have like a Boys and Girls Club or Children's Rowing Society or a group that's dedicated to feeding people experiencing homelessness, those groups tend to have to apply for their tax exemption every 10 years or often more often than that. Whereas once a place of worship is granted a tax exempt status, it is in perpetuity unless the building changes hands. So even if it changes between different sects of a religion, one that's open to the public, one that's not, that doesn't matter, it's automatically exempt.
00:13:54
Speaker
Whereas if my rowing club went from rowing to kayaking, we would have to reapply and we'd have to reapply every few years as well. And what we did here was sort of, I think really a good sort of parallel project to what TFI was doing, which was we went through the
00:14:09
Speaker
So for the permissive tax exemptions, because they were granted by municipalities, they had to report on that. So we went through the month, the annual reports of every single municipality in British Columbia and extracted the reported value for their permissive tax exemptions and came up with a number which is a bit lower, but it's sort of the ones that were reported on by municipalities. And this is from 2019. And what we found was 12.5 million in permissive tax exemptions across British Columbia. And then when you look at statutory tax exemptions, it was 45.9 million.
00:14:38
Speaker
challenge you ran into is similar to what Leslie was describing which was we don't have a baseline so you have a place of worship and do you compare it to another not-for-profit use? Do you compare it to if it was housing? Do you compare it to if it was industrial use, light industrial use, maximal possible use? One of the challenges you get in there now is that a lot of these tax exemptions for places of worship when we're trying to do the math are already very low for other reasons.
00:15:03
Speaker
and then they're already being granted automatically. So there's some challenges there. I have a lot more to talk about on this topic as well, but I think I might get to pass along to our wonderful moderator to maybe direct us with some questions. But just for folks who are following along, what we've kind of seen is a wide range of different ways in which religious organizations, institutions, and places of worship can receive tax exempt status. And one of the things that I found most frustrating, and I'm now finding more frustrating, I'm now a city council in the district of Santa, so I find it even more frustrating,
00:15:31
Speaker
is these things are automatic. So it's not like a municipal government or local or provincial government can decide if they want to grant that tax exempt status. It's automatically granted. And that takes away considerable amount of autonomy that municipal governments would normally have. And a lot of these tax exemptions, as my friends already mentioned, they were put in place to help support groups that provide the benefit to the community.
00:15:54
Speaker
And of course, there's a task assumption that places of worship and religious institutions do provide the benefits of the community. But that's something that we would like to see demonstrated and we would probably challenge in some cases because what we found in some of our research, and I can point to examples in a bit, was that sometimes they're not. And in fact, their actions are actually providing adverse impacts.
00:16:11
Speaker
And so municipalities can't even decide how to best spend their tax exempt status. They're just giving away money automatically and sometimes quite easily without a lot of oversight. And that becomes problematic when you have challenging perspectives that say, hey, maybe we shouldn't be investing in a group that discriminates against people, is running commercial operations, is a private members club, or has a host of other challenges.
00:16:33
Speaker
But Leslie, we haven't talked about the big number yet that you calculate. In that case, I kind of jumped the shark there. So Leslie, why don't you tell us, let's go a step even further,
Defining Charity and Religion in Canada
00:16:43
Speaker
please. All right. So there's a lot there that I'd love to build on, on Teal. But the big numbers. So what we've talked about are our two policies so far. We've talked about the clergy residence exemption and the property, municipal property tax exemption.
00:17:01
Speaker
So those are two distinct policies, both from the federal level, one at the federal level, one on the provincial or territorial level. But there's one other policy that Canada has, and this one is huge, and there are multiple facets to it. So I'm going to take it to different aspects. But the one policy is, what is a charity?
00:17:23
Speaker
And according to the Canada Revenue Agency, if you're going to be a charity, you have to achieve one of four goals, and you have to declare one of them. So what they are are the relief of poverty, the advancement of education, other purposes beneficial to the community, or advancement of religion. And so,
00:17:50
Speaker
there is this presumption, that Teal said, that an advancement of religion is beneficial to society. And this, while you may question that, is something that is actually a fairly widely held belief, because as part of another organization that I'm a part of, the Canadian Secular Alliance,
00:18:12
Speaker
We got a letter from then finance minister Jim Flaherty, and this is about about a decade ago, and he wrote that that advancement of religion is
00:18:25
Speaker
Based on the presumption that it provides a moral and ethical foundation and is beneficial to society and I mean, I'll leave it to you to make up your own mind But I for one would challenge that presumption, but I promised to talk to you about about cold hard numbers So I'm going to do that so what what the Center for inquiry did was we
00:18:53
Speaker
filed a Freedom of Information request and we got a list of all of the charities that declared that their primary purpose was to advance religion. And then of that we took the subset of those charitable institutions and according to their own self-declared activities
00:19:14
Speaker
We filtered out so that we looked at those that did nothing but advance religion. So these were not churches or gurdwadwas that have a food bank or a soup kitchen. These are not houses of worship that provide English as a second language.
00:19:33
Speaker
classes for refugees. These are organizations that, according to their own filings, do nothing but advance religion. They proselytize, they evangelize, like they prepare the roof on their church. Whatever it is they do, they are simply advancing religion.
00:19:51
Speaker
And why is this a big deal? Well, that's an excellent question. The biggest benefit to being a registered charity is the ability to issue tax receipts. So if you donate $100 to a nonprofit organization, well, you may get the warm and fuzzy feelings inside. But at the end of the day, there's $100 left. Your bank account is debited by $100. But if you donate that $100 to a charity,
00:20:20
Speaker
then you get a tax receipt. And when it's tax time, you get part of that back depending on your income. So if you make, say, 30 or $40,000 a year, you donate $100, and you might get 30 or $40 back at tax time. If you make $30 million a year, you donate $100, you'll probably get 50, $55 back. So the more money you make, the more the government tax credit is.
00:20:47
Speaker
Well, Canadians are a generous bunch, so they donated over $18 billion to charities of all stripes in 2018, and almost $7.5 billion of that, or over 40% of the total, were to religious charities. And by my definition here, when I say religious charities, I mean those charities whose primary purpose is to advance religion and according to their filings with Canada Revenue Agency did nothing but advance religion.
00:21:17
Speaker
So.
00:21:20
Speaker
We were able to calculate, using very conservative assumptions, that Canadians enjoyed $3.2 billion in tax relief in 2018 alone by donations to religious charities. Based on those very conservative assumptions that we made, in principle, the actual number could be lower. In reality, the true subsidy for evangelism and proselytizing is much, much higher than that.
00:21:50
Speaker
But wait, there's more. So should I proceed or do we want to talk about that a little bit more? Were there some questions there, Betty Ann? Did you want to bring up for us? Yeah, I've got some questions in the chat from Paul Sparks. Do all charitable organizations receive an exemption for property tax?
00:22:12
Speaker
No, so the property tax exemption is not related to being a charity. That is something that is specific to being a house of worship.
00:22:24
Speaker
But I should note that some charitable organizations that have property can apply for a tax exemption through sometimes similar or adjacent mechanisms. So in some jurisdictions, your local children's boat club can also apply for a tax exempt status for their building. Sometimes it's not allocated in an equitable way. But yeah, you tends to be a difference between some some not for profits don't own property. And so it would be a different category based on your ownership of property.
00:22:52
Speaker
From Jill, does this tax exemption apply to home churches that are common among the evangelical sects?
00:22:59
Speaker
If that's recognized as a house of worship by the government, then yes, if it's like an underground and it's just happened, if it's a personal home, if the primary purpose of the building is as a personal residence that also hosts Sunday services, then no. It depends on how, basically it depends on how it's classified by the government. Yeah. What about private islands, Ian?
00:23:25
Speaker
Yeah, there was a good case here in British Columbia recently where someone's island just off of the Swartz Bay Ferry Terminal were $13 million. They wanted to set up a Shinto shrine there, but they also had a vacation home that it clearly looked like a vacation home from the water.
00:23:45
Speaker
There's two tests that you legally have to pass to be a place of worship for property tax purposes in BC. One is the invitation test. So it's not just that you have to be a place of worship, you have to be a place of public worship. So you have to be obviously inviting people from the public without discrimination to your church or island or wherever you're doing your worship. And then the principal use test says that it has to be
00:24:09
Speaker
primarily for worship. And that's why your basement church wouldn't apply. Because even if you invite all of the public to your basement church, 80% of the time, you're still using it as your house. So it wouldn't be a place of public worship for that purpose. Each province will treat these a little bit differently. And that's what makes the property tax thing particularly confusing. I noticed you had some questions about strategy and advocacy. I think I'll maybe put a pin in those for later on. Sorry, Beth, go ahead.
00:24:38
Speaker
No, I just want to say, Ian, is that why you see church is not often used for other reasons, even if it could be a source of income for them or to the benefit of the community?
Non-Religious Use of Church Properties
00:24:49
Speaker
That's a good question. I know in B.C. they have to be a place of worship for I believe it's. I wanted to say 150 days a year, but that seems high. It does have to be a principal use as a place of worship.
00:25:07
Speaker
They can't sell alcohol in BC. It has like one weird specific rule on them. And they do. Yeah. They can't. It doesn't want them to be used as a commercial venue, basically, because otherwise you move a little bit away from that.
00:25:27
Speaker
And this can become, this is fuzzy often when it comes to bookings. So like, a lot of times places of worship will be completely empty and unutilized for large periods of time as opposed to like weekend worship or whenever their religious day happens to be. Some places will rent the spaces out. And then as Ian was intimating, there's a difference between like renting out at cost or recovery for asset depreciation and staff time and making a profit off of it. And one of the things that we found with our risk of tax exempt status
00:25:54
Speaker
was a lot of places may have actually been operating commercial operations and making a profit. There was a first Baptist church in downtown Victoria that was successfully operating a parking structure and making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue. And when they were challenged on this, they said, well, of course we need to make the revenue so we can pay for our security guy and our team to maintain the parking garage. And the response is like, yeah, but that's still a commercial operation. You're running a business. And so sometimes there's a very fuzzy
00:26:20
Speaker
area between what constitutes a commercial operation and what constitutes like legitimately allowing your space to be rented by community groups. Not to mention what Leslie was already mentioning, which is sometimes these organizations will only rent to certain types of community groups. So if the local Satanist club wants to get together and have a colouring book fun with Satan, they may prohibit people from renting a space as opposed to some groups might be more welcome than others as it were. And that's another level of potential discrimination which can often be parsed out in a little more detail.
00:26:49
Speaker
Right, right. Ellen's getting creative here. If humanist organizations were recognized and then granted charitable status, would they be exempt from property taxes? There's layers to that one.
00:27:05
Speaker
Well, great question. Do you want to take it, Leslie? Well, I'll do the first pass. And that is, even if humanist organizations that are currently nonprofits were to be recognized as charitable institutions, because their social centers, their community centers are not houses of worship, they would get the benefits of being a charity, but they would not get the property tax exemption.
00:27:34
Speaker
Now, so that's very specific. I think, although I want to be fair, and you probably are asking a broader philosophical question, and that is, what if we granted charitable status to everybody? And so we're not just favoring religion. And a strict reading of secularist principles, which is that you should neither
00:27:58
Speaker
You should neither support nor suppress religious expression. You don't discriminate one way or the other. Giving charitable status to everybody would meet that condition. But that kind of dilutes, in my opinion, the definition of charity. If anybody doing anything can be a charity, then charity kind of loses its
00:28:19
Speaker
its meaning. And I really want to keep the meaning of charity to be you are doing things that are beneficial to the community. And I fully support freedom of religion. I think everyone is entitled to whatever faith it is that they believe in or want to believe in. And I also with equal fervor believe in freedom from religion.
00:28:41
Speaker
because I do not want to be subject to the taboos and the restrictions of your belief system. Essentially, if you're on a diet, that doesn't mean I can't eat a donut.
00:28:55
Speaker
So I would prefer that if you want to advance religion by all means, go ahead, but you shouldn't be getting government subsidies to do so. And being recognized as a charitable organization is a government subsidy. Notably, I was going to say.
00:29:14
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to say notably Centre for Inquiry Canada, Humanist Canada and BC Humanist Association are all registered charities, but none of us are registered to advance religion.
Legal Challenges in Defining Religion
00:29:25
Speaker
Our purposes are educational and or advancing human rights generally, at least for my purpose, I believe that's the same for both of you. Centre for Inquiry is a national educational charity. Yeah, and one of the challenges with
00:29:39
Speaker
the religion approaching Canada is our case law and our bureaucrats view religion as requiring an element of theistic worship. That's official CRA policy and that's in the policy of the BC assessment that does places of worship here. It's in an obscure section of the tax code. We probably won't talk about that. I discovered today that deals with income taxes for Hutterites, where they have to have an element of theistic worship.
00:30:08
Speaker
or belief in a supreme being and this theistic requirement for religion is an extra layer of discrimination where even if you said you know what advancing conscience and religion which is what the charter says in 2a is the freedom of conscience and religion
00:30:25
Speaker
should be charitable and should be viewed as beneficial, we are only promoting theistic beliefs. The UK, for example, England and Wales has changed its charitable law and actually has a charity law, I should say, to recognize that advancement of religion can involve belief in one or more gods or belief in no gods. So atheist charities like Humanist UK
00:30:46
Speaker
can be a registered religious charity. Teal put a link to a church of atheism case in Canada, where one guy in central Ontario started a church of atheism and tried to get charitable status. And he didn't get a lawyer. And my first advice is to always get a lawyer if you're going to go to court and start a constitutional challenge. And he lost his case because they said you don't believe in God. And he said, well, there's Buddhists who don't believe in God who have charitable status. And the court went, well, too bad.
00:31:14
Speaker
And that's why you need a lawyer. If this is you call us, like we have people on standby because there was a lot of potential. And as Ian points out, like it's actually overtly discriminatory to non-theistic religions. But like, yeah, this person clearly was trying, but they didn't quite have the legal structure. If this is you or this is you in the future, please get in touch. But yeah, there was a question about summer camps. I was wondering, Ian, you were a bit more versed on this when we were exploring some of our work.
00:31:38
Speaker
around summer camps. I was wondering if I might pitch that one to you, because there are other categories. Like when you're looking at the tax code, there's the places of worship, but there's also religious summer camps. And we had a scandal out here recently on the West Coast where a, or somewhere in British Columbia, rather, where you had a religious camp that was not hiring LGBTQ plus staff people. And they were still applying and received after some kerfuffle, a tactics and status in the local municipality. And this was of course controversial because in a sense,
00:32:05
Speaker
you have a government entity who's beholden to the Charter directly subsizing a group that is violating said Charter, and that becomes problematic. Ian, I don't know if you want to add anything else on summer camps. Yeah, I know there was a case in BC law a number of years ago where a young life Christian camp tried to get the place of public worship exemption for their property.
00:32:26
Speaker
And that one actually set a lot of the nuance around what is a place of public worship and what isn't. And they kind of decided that that didn't meet the principal use test I mentioned because it was more about doing the summer camp with worship than that. And they tried, I think they ultimately went a different way. And like you mentioned, there are other categories of property tax exemptions, but not many are as automatic as place of public worship.
00:32:53
Speaker
There are a couple, I think like cemeteries and government buildings are often exempt from taxes, but it varies by province as well. But I know we have lots more to discuss. So Doug Thomas is asking, interestingly enough, this is interesting, the Cambridge Ontario Scientology Centre was denied property tax exemption because they did not offer wedding services. Unmask myself. I would just
00:33:23
Speaker
That's a bandwidth thing. It's not a privacy thing. Um, yeah, it was, it was kind of an unusual local decision. The regional, uh, or the Cambridge city council said, you, you, you can't have taxes because you know a lot from wedding services. Now that may have changed. They may offer those now, but it was kind of a strange, I thought a rather strange qualifier. Um, I'm not sure. Well, I guess.
00:33:50
Speaker
Technically speaking, Scientology is a religion, but it was, it's a big, by the way, it's a big center. It would be a major tax, piece of tax revenue. So I thought it would be an interesting opportunity for us to open a humanist center of some kind, which we're not about to do, and offer weddings, which of course we do because we have humanist officiants in our area. That is very strange.
00:34:20
Speaker
By the way, SCS has constantly said that charitable status bias is unfair. And we've talked to the CRA about that. In fact, when we formed our group, now 13 years ago, we actually applied for charitable status mostly to test the water.
00:34:47
Speaker
And we gave them three goals. One was to act as a nexus for secular humanists in Canada. The other was to lobby the government to change legislation, this kind of legislation we're talking about tonight. And the third one was to represent Canadian humanism internationally as a voting member of Humanist International, for example. And they came back and said, okay, on the nexus part,
00:35:12
Speaker
No, you can't have charitable status if you're going to lobby the government. Can't do that. That was pretty obvious to us anyway. But the one that really raised their eyebrows, and I've got lots of room to do that, was that they said, you cannot be a charitable entity in Canada and have voting representatives on an international body. And we immediately, and it was a six page report, by the way, explain that. So we responded and said, well, okay,
00:35:43
Speaker
How then does the Roman Catholic Church get to send bishops or cardinals to Rome to vote for the Pope? Or how does the Anglican Church of Canada get to go to the Church of England sinner than vote if they've got charitable status as because they're religions? Shortly thereafter, by the way, Humanist Canada became a voting member of Humanist International, which they hadn't been able to do before. So we have always wondered is that
00:36:11
Speaker
that we have some influence on that. Of course, we can't claim it, but it's a judgment call on the part of the CRA and they base everything on court decisions from the past. So if you want to change that, we almost have to go to court to the Supreme Court of Canada and get them to rule, to change it.
00:36:38
Speaker
Getting the government to change it doesn't seem to have any traction. You're kind of getting into what I was going to talk about, Doug, which was some of the challenges around advocacy and changing legislation. I might be getting ahead of ourselves here. One thing I wanted to build on what Doug was saying, though, was we don't really have a functional definition of what constitutes a religion in Canada. Ian and I have hit this with our work time and time again. If you dig into the CRA records, you have this kind of
00:37:01
Speaker
fuzzy definition around like theistic worship but that obviously doesn't work and obviously excludes some faith traditions that don't meet those criteria that are obviously religions and we don't really have a set definition and the government seems quite happy to operate in that space. One thing it's worth noting though the government and CRA aren't as excited about granting tax exempt status and treating as religion
00:37:22
Speaker
satirical religions. Whereas in the United States, groups like, you know, secular Satanists and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Noodle Monster, they will have like legal standing in the context of they can be recognized as faith traditions. In Canada, that's not really a thing. It's harder to make the case for satirical religious. I know Ian has more experience with this. We've shared about this in the past. But yeah, if you want to register your own religion, it becomes more challenging. And so often there's other mechanisms that people can pull as opposed to trying to
00:37:50
Speaker
opposing the policy rather than playing the game in a sort of a more satirical kind of challenging way.
00:37:55
Speaker
It's not even just that Canada doesn't define religion in law. It's that we don't define charity in law. What a charity is in Canada is based on the Magna Carta. It's formally based on the four categories Leslie mentioned that were written in the pencil case of the House of Lords in the late 19th century. And it pulled those from like the introduction of the Elizabethan statutes in the 1700s. This is why this all feels so antiquated because it is.
00:38:23
Speaker
We're the only Commonwealth country that doesn't have a Charities Act. We're the only Commonwealth country that has not defined this in law, and that's why we're still relying on these absurd historical precedents. And you know, the only place that religion is really mentioned in our constitutions, not in the Constitution Act of 1867, or any other, just religions is not there.
00:38:47
Speaker
It's assumed to be the default position in 1867 all the way through now. The only place that's really mentioned specifically is Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and it says that one of the fundamental rights is the right to freedom of conscience and religion, which the Supreme Court of Canada in 1984 interpreted to include freedom from religion.
00:39:11
Speaker
as well as freedom of religion. But that's the only thing, and there had been some opinion lately, legal opinion lately, that it really only applies directly to government. So if I go to the local mall, as I've done, and object to them having Christmas music, but then denying us the right to have a free space, which they used to offer to charities, and say that's discrimination,
00:39:41
Speaker
Basically, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not really protect that for me. It's mostly focused according to this recent opinion. It's really only if a government discriminates against you. That's not a recent opinion. The Human Rights Code of your province would protect you from discrimination by a private entity. That's how it's been since the Charter was brought in. Yeah, that's right. I think let's get back to the numbers. Sure. All right.
00:40:09
Speaker
So there is more. I did promise you that there was more, but I gave you the big number. So 3.2 billion at a minimum, and probably significantly more than that, because these institutions, again, by their own self-declared activities, do nothing but advance religion. People get $3.2 billion in tax credits as a result of
00:40:35
Speaker
being able to as a result of being recognized as a charity. So there's also something that for reasons that make sense only to a particular kind of government bureaucrat, there's something called the public service body rebate.
00:40:51
Speaker
And what that is, essentially, is that if you are a charity, you buy things, and you have to pay GST or HST depending on your province or territory on the things that you buy. If you are a charity, you get about half of that HST or GST back from the federal government when you file your annual taxes.
00:41:14
Speaker
And that's called a public service body rebate open to all charities in Canada, including those that do nothing but evangelize. And that subsidy is worth $318 million per year for religious charities alone in Canada for getting the public service body rebate. And there's more.
00:41:38
Speaker
So governments, for various reasons, just give money. So not tax credits, not refunds, not rebates. You can pay less than you would otherwise. They just give money.
00:41:52
Speaker
to various charities and the federal government does it and they do it at least in 2018 to the tune of $140 million. Provincial governments do it and summing across the provinces and territories, three quarters of a billion dollars just in 2018. And so do municipal governments, again, to the tune of $217 million.
00:42:22
Speaker
I think you may be wondering who's getting these funds, right? That's an entirely fair question. So there were 2,536 religious charities that got direct cash transfers from at least one of the three levels of government, and I don't have the time to
00:42:45
Speaker
enumerate all of them. But what I will do is I'll tell you about the largest federal grant in 2018. It was $20,198,383 to be exact, and it was to the Kelowna Christian Center Society. This is a recurring and consistently growing subsidy. It started with $13.7 million in 2013, and it grew to over $22 million in 2019. So
00:43:14
Speaker
You're probably wondering, what do they do? Well, they offer programs such as weekly church services, Christian education, K through 12 through a campus school and online, Christian preschool, Christian outreach, local, provincial, national, and international pastoral care programs for the development of families from children through senior adults, and Christian daycare.
00:43:40
Speaker
The Kelowna Christian Center's tagline is, where people belong and Jesus matters. And their vision is to raise up and influence the world around us by creating a space to know God, find freedom, discover purpose, and make a difference through Bible-based and Jesus-centered living.
00:44:05
Speaker
So that's where the federal, that's the largest single donation or transfer, excuse me, from the federal government. But as large as that is, over $20 million, it's dwarfed by what Ontario and Saskatchewan give to Christian horizons. Now you may be wondering how much does Christian horizons receive?
00:44:28
Speaker
It's a staggering $163.4 million in 2018 alone. And I'm going to tell you who they are. And so that you don't think that I'm summarizing or paraphrasing or representing them unfairly or inaccurately, I'm going to quote them directly.
00:44:47
Speaker
So Christian Horizons is, and this is a direct quotation, a Christian organization to support families who experience developmental disabilities with an ongoing commitment to innovative faith-based service options. Their mission, as an expression of Christian faith, we work together with people who experience disabilities to accomplish their goals and nurture communities where everybody belongs.
00:45:14
Speaker
their vision. People who experience disabilities belong to communities in which their God-given gifts are valued and respected, their values. Christians, Christian horizons,
00:45:26
Speaker
Values arise from our belief that every person is loved by God and created in his image. Because of this, we strive to honor God and value people in all we do and with all our resources. So those are the facts. I'll leave it to you to decide whether these organizations should receive direct transfers from our governments.
00:45:48
Speaker
So I think that's a lot of information all at once. And I think I'll pause here if Ian or Teal want to jump in with some insight or analysis.
Selling Religious Properties: Tax Implications
00:45:58
Speaker
I mostly wanted to jump in with sort of the next steps because I always feel when I see these numbers like I know some of you I see as male has a question as well so I want to go to their question, but I always find that these numbers are big. And when we break them down to smaller chunks we can find examples of who that's interesting maybe we can do some advocacy there so I was really keen to talk about like next steps and how we can
00:46:18
Speaker
really try to change these things. Because otherwise, I find I get very frustrated when I see these huge numbers, like we could be spending on literally anything. So I might just pitch to Ian if he has any thoughts before we dive in. I mean, I just wanted to emphasize some of the numbers we've missed so far, because there's a lot more out there. Like even just here in BC, we know that three provinces in this country fully fund separate Catholic school systems, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta,
00:46:46
Speaker
Ontario, it's somewhere between $9 and $10 billion goes to fund that school system. Alberta's about $1.3 billion. Saskatchewan, about $600 million to those systems. Now, you can't just eliminate that funding and be like, wow, we've cut funding to religion, because you'd leave a lot of students without schools. But there's definitely efficiencies to be made when you are running two schools side by side in every district in those three provinces and funding them both and having
00:47:14
Speaker
administrators in both. It's a lot of overhead that could be cut and a lot of busing. Yeah, there was a study done if we closed zero schools, but merged the public and separate school systems, it would save $1.5 billion every year in Ontario. So yeah, $9 billion or $10 billion spent on the system, save $1.5 billion annually by merging them.
00:47:37
Speaker
I also wanted to highlight something that like just building on Leslie's comment was that a lot of the work that that he's been working on is focused on like the very narrow definition about concerts or religious charity and there's a whole bunch of other ones that are very adjacent when you were talking about some of the ones in
00:47:52
Speaker
in the interior here in British Columbia. I was just recalling, I saw Joyce on the call here. I've been working with the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada research team and we've been looking at crisis pregnancy centers, right? So those wouldn't register in the criteria that CFI has been using because they are there to provide care for people experiencing unplanned pregnancies. What's wrong with that, right? But when you peek into the, when you lift the curtain as you were on those, you find out that there are deeply religious organizations that are deeply anti-choice that are manipulating people through deception and misinformation.
00:48:20
Speaker
to try to convince them not to have an abortion, and they're doing so in the name of their religion. So they wouldn't even fall into that category. So when Ian says like, education institutions, we can go even steps further and look at religion adjacent organizations that are furthering specific aims that stem from religion, and that number gets bigger. And just things that we're not counting. There's
00:48:41
Speaker
Charities don't have to report or pay capital gains. So religious charities had over $47 billion in assets in 2018. Some of that is going to be invested. Some of that is going to be sold at some point. Some of that is going to be sold at a profit. At $47 billion, we're probably talking about several billion dollars in capital gains every year.
00:49:04
Speaker
of which is tax-free. If you had a few billion dollars in capital gains, you'd have a substantial tax bill, but it not if you are a religious charity. Well, I want to get a step further on what Leslie is saying here, because here in Saanich and across other places in British Columbia, when you look at permissive tax exemptions, one thing you have to realize is, let's say a place of worship sells off their property to a developer to build housing.
00:49:26
Speaker
We want housing. We're in a housing crisis. I can't speak to the rest of the country. I'm pretty sure you're in a housing crisis too. And so this property is being sold off and the place of worship, the religious institution is pocketing several million dollars. But the local government has been subsidizing that property for decades in free tax exemptions. Now, it gets really complicated because we want to encourage housing to be built, but at the same time,
00:49:49
Speaker
Here's someone who has literally been developing massive capital gains and even more so because they haven't been paying taxes on it. So there's multiple levels. I just wanted to yes Andrew on that one Leslie. There is however, this is an area where there's policy work that can be done, which is when a property is sold, when an institutional property is sold that has received tax exempt status in the past,
00:50:08
Speaker
you can talk to your local government about recovering some of that tax revenue. Not all of it, because that would be, you know, the whole thing we liquidated probably to cover 50 years of free taxes. But you can work on the formula that allows the local government to recover some money. And I see some potential here because local governments want money and are desperate for money. And so it's if there is an avenue there to get some to make some progress. Ian, I cut you off. I'm sorry, you wanted to add some? No, it's okay. I was just thinking more about
00:50:33
Speaker
You know, school funding here in B.C., we don't fund Catholic schools fully in the same way, but we do fund private schools at 50 percent of the amount we fund public schools.
Funding Disparities in Religious Institutions
00:50:42
Speaker
And when we counted up all of the 370 private schools in B.C., 70 percent of them are religious and they get about three three hundred and fifty million dollars. Probably they're getting about five hundred million dollars for all private schools this year.
00:50:57
Speaker
and most of those are religious. And the ones that aren't are generally targeted at the wealthiest students. There's only a small number that kind of cater towards people with high needs that are often trotted out as the defense of this system. Alberta has a similar system that gives $255 million to private schools, and Saskatchewan also gives $11 million to private schools. I didn't get the numbers from Manitoba.
00:51:22
Speaker
And hospitals also, we have Catholic and religious run hospitals here in BC. They get a billion dollars. Alberta gets about $800 million. At least I know Ontario has these. And again, this is another situation where if we cut funding, we're not going to close St. Paul's Hospital in downtown Vancouver. We're going to have to transfer that to Vancouver Coastal Health. But that would mean then people's choices respected in those facilities, their choice of reproductive health care, their choice of end of life health care.
00:51:49
Speaker
things that are not respected right now. And we just saw in Quebec a court case where Quebec has said all hospices, all palliative care facilities in Quebec, government funded or not, have to provide medical assistance in dying as an option to patients on site. A Catholic hospice fought it and lost with the judge saying there's a public interest in the patient's rights trumping the infringement on the organizational religious freedom here.
00:52:17
Speaker
So, yeah. And Ian, I had a diatribe about Catholic hospitals because they are subject to the Catholic Health Ethics Guide. And I actually read it. And so I'm just going to put that in the chat.
00:52:34
Speaker
And if anyone that's interested can listen to about a 10-minute rant on the contents of the Health Ethics Guide. But Ian Teal, you said, what do we do? And I want to move our conversation to that because I think that that is important. And basically, what I would like to do is to see the government change three regulations. And these are tax code regulations. It's not even law. This is something that can be done administratively.
00:52:59
Speaker
And one is to remove advancement of religion as a charitable purpose. If all you do is proselytize, if all you do is advanced religion, you're not a charity. Now, we should be able to, as part of this, as a practical matter, allow charities that may have, once upon a time, advanced religion and don't anymore. One good example is that the YMCA of Toronto is a charity, and I think it deserves it. It does some wonderful things.
00:53:27
Speaker
but YMCA stands for Young Men's Christian Association, and when it initially became a charity, it declared it's to advance religion. It will make it very easy for them to say other charitable aspects. If your charity was founded as Advancement of Religion,
00:53:47
Speaker
will make it easy for you to do something else that or to declare as something else if in fact you do something else will also make it fairly straightforward to transfer it as a charity to a non-profit because if you are a charity if you are an organization that wants to just advance religion you should exist i'm not interested in shutting that down that would be terrible that's religious suppression and i'm against that very much so so we remove
00:54:14
Speaker
We remove advancement of religion as a charitable purpose. We make it easy for all of those existing charities to transfer to either a nonprofit status or to another charitable purpose that is actually charitable, and we move on. That's going to be $4 billion or so of benefit to Canadians. And then we make two other changes. We simply remove the clergy residence exemption from the tax code.
00:54:40
Speaker
As a practical matter, that's very easy to do. If you're a professor and you're being moved from university to university and you get housing, well, that housing is added to your income.
00:54:53
Speaker
and it's a taxable benefit. And that's fine. I think it should be. And if you're clergy and you're being moved from parish to parish and you get housing provided, that's fine, but that has value and it should be taxed as such. And so we simply remove that. It's an administrative act. And then we do the same for the property tax exemption.
00:55:11
Speaker
Again, that's just something written into the tax code. As a practical matter, it would be very easy to take it out. So how do we do that? Well, first of all, we're holding seminars like this. CFIC published a series of reports, and I will put the link in the notes if you want to dive deep into how we got the numbers. I'll put the link in the notes when I'm finished this little monologue.
00:55:38
Speaker
We need to raise awareness. That's why we're having this conversation. Then we need to bring this to government. Talk to your local representative. If you are based in Ottawa or know someone it is, make an appointment and speak to the relevant people in a Canada revenue agency and say,
00:55:55
Speaker
We're running record deficits.
Advocating for Tax Code Changes
00:55:57
Speaker
Here's money that shouldn't be leaving your coffers that we can bring in. If we put the pressure on, we can make it clear that expending the political capital would be worthwhile and we can create the political will to make these relatively straightforward
00:56:14
Speaker
straightforward changes. And then we can use that momentum to build on the larger projects that CFIC, BCHA, and Humanist Canada are working on. Just today, in fact, CFIC, working with several other organizations, submitted a petition to the Ontario legislature to stop funding the Catholic school system in Ontario. Now, this petition is not going to bring about that goal, but it is going to raise awareness
00:56:42
Speaker
And it is going to, we hope, start the ball rolling of raising awareness of just how much it costs Ontario. And that might be able to create that, but this is going to take a lot of effort. Similarly with Catholic health care, as Ian mentioned.
00:56:57
Speaker
We can do it one step at a time, but it requires our effort, our energy, and our activism to raise awareness, to generate outrage, and to make politicians aware that rather than lose votes by annoying or pissing off the religious folks that are getting the benefit of these exemptions, that there is a much larger constituency that doesn't want tax dollars wasted in these ways.
00:57:24
Speaker
There are other things that can be done, but I'll pause there. Ian, Teal, Betty Anne, feel free to build on that. Yeah, I mean, let's get Eshmail's question in there. I know he's been had his hand up for a while. Thank you. Yes, thank you. First of all, I really thanks for the report. It is absolutely wonderful eye opening. And my question was, you know, how we are going to when we are talking about
00:57:53
Speaker
us, it is one thing. When you were talking, working about the legal system, the courts is another front. But then there's another front of 32% of BC population have not defined any religion in their census reports.
00:58:15
Speaker
My question is, how are we going to read or how we are going to read that critical aspect? I mean, I understand it is wonderful to work through the legality, through the courts, through the legislative system. That is absolutely wonderful and it is necessary. But my question is, what is the strategy to read those 32% of the BC population who do not report any faith, any religion?
00:58:45
Speaker
in their sense of data. That is the critical issue. And how are you going to do that? Thank you. Eshmael, it's 52% in British Columbia. Yes, thank you. It's 32% nationally, I think, but that doesn't answer your question. Thank you.
00:59:03
Speaker
What we've tried to show, and this builds off of what I wanted to follow up with Leslie, is we focused a lot on municipal prayers here in British Columbia in our work at the BC Humanist Association. And we've done some work at the BC Legislature on this as well. And I have been asked, you know, why are you focused on this largely symbolic
00:59:22
Speaker
issue that doesn't like make the big difference that some of these big numbers that Leslie talked about. And the answer is because we can win them really quickly and we can start to rack up wins and headlines. And these help build our momentum. So, you know, we can write we wrote a threatening letter to the village of Belcarra of population 800. And within 48 hours, they held an emergency council meeting in camera, got legal advice and wrote past a motion that they would never do a prayer again.
00:59:53
Speaker
Uh, other councils weren't so responsive because that was impressive even to us that they went that far, but that kind of victory is something that's harder to get on all of these other issues that have so much inertia. And what we need is exactly what you talked about. Is getting the 52% who are non-religious as well as a big chunk of the 48% who are religious, but are pro secular on our side on these issues and to be speaking out.
01:00:20
Speaker
Because one of the challenges we face on every single issue we hear is we're facing an organized and vocal small organized group. If you're trying to take someone's benefit away, their privilege away, they are going to get mad about it, especially when they have churches to gather and complain about and networks.
01:00:42
Speaker
well-funded lobbying networks to fight back against. So we're chipping at the small easy things while also doing the research on some of the bigger things on some of these larger issues.
Mobilizing Public Support for Policy Changes
01:00:53
Speaker
And so we get your emails when you send emails to your local politicians using the tools on our website. And that helps helps us build the network. So instead of being a couple hundred people were a couple thousand people next this year will be ten thousand people. Next year will be one hundred thousand two hundred thousand in a few years.
01:01:12
Speaker
And then we have the mass and we can mobilize people. But it does take patience and it does take continuing to write emails to your politicians, get those meetings, banging your head against the wall, even though it seems like they don't want to move every single time, even if you click a form letter.
01:01:31
Speaker
It's not going to change it, but it is going to get counted by some assistant who will go, hey, there were 400 people who cared about this issue yesterday, and there weren't three days ago what's going on. And they start to pay attention when those numbers add up. So it's not quick.
01:01:46
Speaker
Uh, and we're getting there is all I can say right now. I wanted to build on what Ian was saying, because I have a lot more, I've now have direct experience on the other side as being the politician who receives those emails. And I mean, sometimes as many as 20 or 30 emails is enough, especially in a small jurisdiction to trigger like a massive review. I sit on the board of our local library. Um, and if we get one letter from the public complaining about something, like that's, that's on our board agenda because we don't get a lot of correspondence. Whereas, you know, obviously the prime minister gets a lot of letters.
01:02:13
Speaker
But the thing I want to build on what Ian was saying very briefly was the first was organizational disparity, which he's done a really good job explaining. You have organized religious groups that meet on a weekly basis, they can mobilize their members. So when I try to pitch a bylaw amendment to remove prints of tax exemptions from our bylaws, they show up to the meetings and the general public is sort of a shrug emoji like, well, it doesn't really, you know, it's like 2% of my taxes, whatever, whereas you have a group that's dedicated. So what Ian's talking about is that base organization, so we're able to mobilize people
01:02:41
Speaker
and actually counteract that. The other thing is jurisdictional arbitrage. One of the things I find is we have a lot of situations where some jurisdictions are more amenable to these kinds of changes than others. And in those situations, that's where we work. And so what Ian was describing with our municipal prayer approach was we basically had every single municipality in the province
01:02:58
Speaker
identified a set number that had problems and then approached them all, we were able to whittle it down to two municipalities that are digging in their heels. And we in the process found some municipalities that were really open to making change and receptive to the message we were sending. And one of the challenges I noticed as activists is sometimes some municipalities just, they're not on board and you could spend your entire life trying to convince that current government or you can move to the next jurisdiction and they're totally on board, they're two thumbs up and they're ready to pass it and the mayor's on board and he's writing the policy for you.
01:03:25
Speaker
So sometimes there's, it's as provincial and national and regional organizations, we can kind of just pick and choose where we operate. But the final thing I wanted to say is breaking these things down to small steps Ian talked about this really well which is you have these huge issues. And I find if you break them down to small chunks, it makes them more understandable and more like
01:03:43
Speaker
comprehensible to the general public, but you can also get wins. So, for example, when it comes to permissive tax exemptions specifically, one of the things that we've advocated for is a benefits test. And you can go and talk to your city councillors any day and be like, hey, do we give out tax exemptions to places of worship? Yes. Do we have any checks and balances on that? And even the most conservative politician is going to be like, wait a minute.
01:04:06
Speaker
We just gave out $2.5 million without an application form. Like I've applied for grants for considerably less money. The application for a $300 grant in my city is six pages. Whereas to get a $120,000 tax exam status, all you need to do is show that you're a church and you're good, right? That seems problematic.
01:04:23
Speaker
And so you can talk to your city councilors about a benefits test. The other one that Ian and I talked about recently with our permissive tax exemption is, hey, what percentage of our taxes are permissive tax exemptions? And if it's more than 2%, could we not put a cap on that? So everyone still gets the same tax exemption, but it's shared equally. And it's not going to become as too big of a percentage of our local municipal budget.
01:04:45
Speaker
And then the other ones would be some of these broader conversations about abolishing, and this is kind of what Leslie was saying, abolishing the automatic taxism status, the assumption that a group does, the presumption that a group does good because of a religious group or because spreading religion is seen as a good in and of itself.
01:05:00
Speaker
getting rid of statutory tax exemption and transferring into permissive tax exemptions which gives municipalities the ability to decide hey you know what actually this group is doing good as Leslie was pointing out this local group provides educational and physical activity opportunities for young people and that's great we don't have those in our municipality we wouldn't have them if they didn't provide them so two thumbs up
01:05:19
Speaker
Or hey, this insular religious group only rents its facility to its own members and refuses to let people in the door, let alone engage in the community. Maybe we don't give them a tax exemption that's designed to support groups that provide a benefit to the community. Just saying kind of thing.
01:05:34
Speaker
But the critical thing is I think taking these big almost insurmountable issues and breaking them down to small bite-sized chunks, I find that A and what Ian was saying is very true. It allows you to build momentum and it allows you to accrete growth and to create to build a foundation of little victories that you can then make larger victories upon.
01:05:56
Speaker
And sometimes the sort of more symbolic acts allow you to then use that as a springboard into bigger, more substantial change. But it is really challenging when you have organized groups that are organized. And we're just trying to be like, hey, let's be reasonable with our tax policy. It's difficult because you have differences of opinion when it comes to like preference. And every one of those victories is another news story for us is another especially in small town newspapers where they
01:06:20
Speaker
are desperate for content and will publish any news release you send them because they don't have many journalists left, unfortunately. But it means we can get a lot more news out there every time we go after one of these cities or earn these victories. And that helps put the issue out there, gets more people thinking about it. And so if you're thinking about prayer in your municipality or thinking about secularism, then we can start to talk to you about money. And it's a slow building process, but it can be frustratingly slow. We've all been at this for a long time, I know.
01:06:50
Speaker
And I'm just going, one last thing. What you can do, get involved. Join BCHA. Join Humanist Canada. Join the Centre for Inquiry Canada. If you can, donate to your favourite one of these organisations or even better, all three. Volunteer. Whatever it is that you can do, do it.
01:07:13
Speaker
Offer your time, your energy, your connections, your expertise, your organizational skills, whatever it is that you have to offer, offer it with us in concert together. Tell your friends. Tell your community. Don't just make this a humanist issue. Let's make it a Canadian issue.
Reallocating Funds from Religious Tax Privileges
01:07:30
Speaker
And we do it one person at a time, two people at a time. Tell your friends. Let them know that, hey, there's $5.5 billion just sitting there.
01:07:42
Speaker
Imagine what we can do with that. And there is so much that can be done with that, which we alluded to at the start of this talk.
01:07:50
Speaker
Very simply, we could reduce the debt or the deficit every year by five and a half billion dollars. We can fund all kinds of incredible programs. That would be more than enough to fund, for example, a basic income program across Canada. And there's so many other things that can be done. Education, health care, whatever it is that is important to you, well, here's a way that we can actually do it.
01:08:15
Speaker
So there's very practical steps that we can take. We've talked about that. But the most important thing is that you join, support, and volunteer people like Ian, people like Martin and Betty Ann, people like Teal, and
01:08:34
Speaker
If you still have time left over, okay, fine, people like me at the Centre for Inquiry Canada. But that's what you can do. And it is going to be together that we do make a difference. It doesn't matter how much effort Ian and Teal and Martin and Betty Anne put forth. We need your help. We need your support because if it's just a few individuals making these arguments, we're easily ignored.
01:08:59
Speaker
But if it's all of us together in a concerted effort, making a demand that Canada be a secular nation, Canada be a country that does not favour one faith over another, or belief in general over non-belief, it's going to be because
01:09:16
Speaker
We demand it because institutional inertia is very difficult to overcome, but it can be done. We have already repealed Canada's blasphemy law. We have won two major cases at the Supreme Court of Canada.
01:09:34
Speaker
We are winning the demographic battle. Every generation is far more secular than the one before. And that's not automatic and these can be reversed. But if we keep up the efforts, we will persevere and we can overcome the disadvantages that we face.
01:09:53
Speaker
So please help us out and thank you. I wanted to build on Leslie's comments so I didn't properly introduce myself friends. I'm the research coordinator for the BC Humanists and we have a research team of volunteers and a lot of the work that you saw that we put links to in the chat is research that's been done by our volunteer team. And so we'll actually have volunteers that will you might your job might just be hunting down
01:10:16
Speaker
annual reports for municipalities and reading them. It might be helping us find information through government websites, through archives. It might be writing reports, it might be doing interviews, all sorts of different things. And so we have a research team that's actually spread across the country, but a lot of times the work is whatever you need to do. Right now we're looking for people to help us transcribe prayers from Ontario Municipal Council meetings and to dive through and wade into school district policies relating to
01:10:43
Speaker
dress codes, religion, and LGBTQ plus issues. So if you're interested, get in touch. Our research team is sort of drop in when you can and based on your skill level experience and interest in doing different things.
01:10:55
Speaker
So one of the things you can do is share this video. And so we're going to end the recording. I'm going to ask Martin Frith to speak to us. But first, all of our speakers have agreed to stay on. They're going to take this pause to look at your questions. They're going to stay on. But Martin will end the video with our poll. But please share the video. It will be available on all of our platforms. Martin?
01:11:22
Speaker
Okay, well, let me pop up the final poll and then we can speak to the results of the first poll.
01:11:32
Speaker
This is really a chest of how well you've been listening and is there any comment from our speakers on on those three items? All right so the it's only about a third of people caught that it's the provincial government that uh provincial governments rather that transfer the most money to the uh to religious charities
01:11:53
Speaker
But over three quarters, we're paying attention and know that the public service rebate is a partial refund of HST or GST given by registered charities. I don't know about any of you, but before I did this research, I had never even heard of a public service body rebate. And yeah, over 90% of people caught that houses of worship are exempt from municipal property taxes. Well done. Okay, and the clergy tax exemption.
01:12:23
Speaker
Yeah, that one's just 100 million a year. People went a little higher on their guesses there, but I can see why. This one's interesting. I think it might, the reason why I find this one quite fascinating is it's more insidious in so far as you really, fewer people have heard of this one. I mean, a lot of people know that churches and places of worship will be tax exempt, but this was one that really got me scratching my head because I thought, surely not.
01:12:46
Speaker
And there's a bunch of other ones. One thing we had our research team do a couple summers ago was compile a list of special religious exemptions in all Canadian law. And the list is, it varies from sumptuary regulations as it relates to clothing choices, to tax exempt status for residencies, to a whole bunch of other really interesting aspects. So the amount of research we have, at least there's a long list of work to do. Fun topics to dive into.
01:13:10
Speaker
There we go. Absolutely. So listen, as a final wrap up to all of this, I want to thank our panelists for putting together just such an amazing wealth of information. I think if you go to sleep tonight angry, that's probably a good thing, but wake up tomorrow being glad you're a humanist and facing the world.
01:13:31
Speaker
So thank you, Leslie Rosenbud, for all the research that CFI has done. Ian Bushfield in Teal helps for Bonderoff for all of the great research. And for Betty Annie Hedges from Humanist Canada for hosting tonight's event.
01:13:51
Speaker
The great takeaway for me is the importance of knowledge and research. What you've provided us is a wealth of resources. And rather than getting burdened by the numbers, it certainly is a reminder that data makes a difference in moving forward. And I think that to reasonable people and rational people, data makes a difference. So this is such an incredible and important beginning.
01:14:19
Speaker
to the work that the secular connection has done. Doug Thomas, you know, in this area, there are so many people who are doing remarkable work. And that's the great reminder that we can't do this alone, but together, and hence the bringing together of important organizations tonight,
01:14:42
Speaker
is a reminder that we are looking at this with a focused vision and look forward to ongoing collaboration. So with that being said, thank you to our speakers. And as Betty Ann has mentioned, they'll stay on to do some follow-up. But this ends the formal presentation for the evening.
01:15:08
Speaker
Thank you for listening to The Voice of Canadian Humanism. We would like to especially thank our members and donors who make our work possible. If you feel that this is the type of programming that belongs in the public conversation, please visit us at HumanistCanada.ca and become a member and or donate. You can also like and subscribe to us on social media at Humanist Canada. We'll see you next time.