By Chloë Arneson, News Writer
In Canada, we’ve created a subsidy for an institution that carried out a genocide on our soil. A subsidy for an institution that, when more and more evidence of that genocide is uncovered, has to be coerced into making an apology — an apology that’s not even made on the ground on which that evidence was found. That institution is the Catholic Church, and every year, Canadians lose out on taxable revenue from this political organization. We need to recognize the group’s role as a political, rather than charitable, institution and strip the organization of its tax-exempt status.
Between the 1880s and 1996, over 150,000 Indigenous children were estimated to have been taken to attend residential schools. In 2021, archaeologists unearthed 200 unmarked graves at a former residential school in Kamloops. Since then, over 1,000 children’s bodies have been found in unmarked graves, some of them being as young as three years old. It has reanimated the debate around holding perpetrators responsible for this unimaginable crime.
Let’s tax the groups responsible, starting with the Catholic Church. Other perpetrators of genocide through residential schools, including the Anglican, United, and Presbyterian churches, had issued apologies before 1996. Meanwhile, until April, the Catholic Church stood alone in its resistance to accepting responsibility. It wasn’t until this year that we see the Pope apologize for the residential school system in Canada. It’s not enough. So, let’s skip over the apology and tax them as an organization that’s standing in the way of progress on reconciliation.
There’s a huge reservoir of untaxed money in Catholic organizations. In order to be considered exempt from paying taxes, these churches are considered charities in the eyes of the government. Except The Globe and Mail analyzed the finances of the Catholic Church and found they had a combined profit of $110 million after expenditures.
Their assets, totaling $4.1 billion, inflate the Church’s potential taxable value to Canadians. The think-tank Charity Intelligence Canada considered this number to be an underestimation when considering the accuracy of each church’s self-reporting on the value of their property. Case in point, the Archdiocese of Toronto was audited to reveal assets priced at $940 million, despite the organization reporting just $2. The assets and profits of these institutions have operated, since their inception, as completely tax exempt. Canadians get no financial remuneration for their presence.
It’s not just my opinion. There are voices within Canada’s Indigenous community speaking out against the Church’s tax-exempt status. Iqaluit mayor Kenny Bell spoke against local tax exemptions for religious institutions across Iqaluit — religious institutions that are currently not required to pay taxes on the land they occupy. “This is a small symbolic step. The tax on them is not going to kill the church by any means. It’s not meant to. It’s meant to show that we want the apology. We want the church to acknowledge what they did and move forward,” Bell said.
He’s right. Ending the Church’s special tax-exempt status could provide funds for the ongoing reconciliation effort. A quick scroll down the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action reveal a laundry list of potential programs to fund to support Indigenous communities across the country. From supporting a broken foster care system, to bringing clean water to reserves, to bolstering Indigenous mental health care, there are any number of programs that could use the tax revenue from a multi-million dollar institution.
Whether or not the Catholic Church steps in to pay reparations for genocide, residential schools, or sexual assault cases, it is time to recognize that their role in Canadian politics transcends that of a “charity,” Let’s tax the stuffing out of them.
