Amid a revived government-spearheaded crusade to contest the registered charity status of pro-life non-profit organizations, Lisa Richmond said the Canadian philanthropic sector must repudiate the “disturbing trend” of politicization.

“We need to be careful that the charitable sector can flourish and that groups of Canadians can come together and decide that they want to contribute in a certain way,” said Richmond, the vice president of research for Cardus, a non-partisan Christian think tank. “I think everyone involved in the charitable sector needs to be aware of that rising tendency, and we need to seek to protect that sector from being politicized.”

Perhaps the best armour is robust quantitative data.

Upon Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government's proposed legislative changes in October that would result in charitable status being stripped from pregnancy care and reproductive support entities if they don’t meet certain new disclosure and referral criteria, Pregnancy Care Centre (PCC) countered with a statistically-driven rebuttal.

The national faith-based affiliation of 80 pregnancy care centres touted its intrinsic value by indicating that nearly 50,000 women and men received help in 2023 alone. Nearly 8,000 clients accessed vital supplies such as diapers, formula and clothing, and 1,500 were supported through parenting programs.

Additionally, the PCC declared that personnel do “not mislead or obstruct” a client’s wish for an abortion. Every visitor is provided with a limitation of services form that delineates that PCC-affiliated centres do not offer abortion referrals and that anyone interested in the procedure should consult an appropriate professional. The PCC directly called upon the Liberals to cease with the “false labels and mischaracterizations of the good work done daily across Canada at local pregnancy care centres and online”

In a similar vein to the PCC, Cardus has released a potent, numerically driven argument of its own. The subject of the think tank’s new report, however, centres on maintaining tax-exempt status for churches. Different local, provincial and federal politicians, secular activists and members of the media commentariat opposed to Canadian Catholic and Christian communities have all called for places of worship to be stripped of their nontaxable status.

Mike Wood Daly’s research paper Why Religious Tax Exemptions Benefit All Canadians found that religious congregations provide a net $16.5 billion in social and economic benefits.

Daly, a research director for Relèven, a Christian non-profit striving to preserve, restore and repurpose underutilized churches, calculated the “Halo Effect” for 64 different Canadian Christian congregations.

The Halo Effect originated from the scholarship of University of Pennsylvania researcher Ram Cnaan. He measured, in dollars, the contributions made by parishes to their local communities.

In a Canadian context, the Halo Effect is tabulated by accruing the value of the following:

• the church space provided, often for no charge or below-market rate, for community groups to host cultural, artistic, sporting, educational and other events;
• the congregation-driven food banks, addiction recovery programs, childcare services, immigration and settlement supports, educational campaigns, etc.;
• direct spending contributions to the economy;
• “magnet effect” of the money spent by visitors at local restaurants, bars, hotels and retail establishments as a result of arriving for a wedding, funeral or bar/bat mitzvahs;
• providing open space, which “provides environmental and recreational value.”

Daly (who was unavailable to comment on the report), a research fellow with Ambrose University’s Flourishing Congregations Institute, found that “congregations’ Halo Effect is 10.47 times the value of the tax exemptions and credits.” He also found that “for every dollar that a typical Canadian congregation spends, the local community receives on average $3.39 in socio-economic benefit.”

Responding to the findings of Daly’s paper, Richmond declared that “if you want to argue that religious communities should no longer be tax exempt, trying to (make that case) through an economic argument is going to lead to failure based on what we lay out in this paper.”

While suggesting that more intensive research is required to outline the consequences and potential domino effect of forcing churches to pay taxes, this report does take a stab at a theorization if the Halo Effect drops 10 per cent.

“Some of the income that the congregation receives through donations would need to go towards paying taxes,” said Richmond. “There would be less money available to go into these other purposes. Many of the things that go into the Halo impact would go down. Perhaps, to some degree, donations would go down. Most people don’t give to their parish primarily because they get a receipt they could use against their taxes, but to some extent, it is an incentive.”  

Richmond’s advice for individual parish communities is that if they catch wind of an effort to repeal their church’s tax-exempt status, they should fashion a localized Halo Effect report to bolster their defence.

“If you are arguing against tax exemption for Christian churches because you say it is an unfair subsidy, the data does not support that,” said Richmond. “It’s not just my perspective against yours. In our day and age, having data based on which certain arguments are made is very useful."

Read the full report at https://www.cardus.ca/research/spirited-citizenship/reports/why-religious-tax-exemptions-benefit-all-canadians/#the-rationale-for-tax-exemption-of-registered-charities.