On Monday, BC Humanist Association Executive Director Ian Bushfield appeared before the Legislative Assembly's Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services as part of its consultations for Budget 2026.
As part of our presentation, Bushfield made three requests:
- End the automatic property tax exemption for places of public worship, allowing municipalities to determine whether and under what conditions to grant exemptions
- Phase out public funding to elite and religious private schools
- Ensure that government spending goes to secular and inclusive programming.
Banner credit: Wikimedia/themightyquill
Transcript of our remarks, via Hansard Blues.
Thank you so much, Chair and members of the committee, for your time this afternoon. I’ll quickly introduce myself and our organization before walking you through our three recommendations for Budget 2026.
My name is Ian Bushfield. I’m the executive director of the B.C. Humanist Association. Our organization was founded over 40 years ago to provide a community and a voice for the 52 percent of British Columbians who are humanist or non-religious. We promote progressive and secular values and challenge religious privilege.
Our first recommendation is to end the statutory property tax exemptions for places of worship. Presently, municipalities are required by law to exempt a place of public worship from property taxes. We’ve estimated that for 2019, the statutory exempted amounted to almost $46 million in foregone revenue that had to be paid by homeowners and local businesses.
Additional property owned by religious groups — for example, parking lots, thrift shops or even vacant land — can also be exempted at council’s discretion through a permissive exemption, costing an additional about $12.5 million. In other words, every British Columbian is required to indirectly tithe $12 to support local religious groups, disproportionately benefiting long-established Christian congregations who hold prime real estate.
Were our organization so privileged as to own property in B.C., there’s no equivalent statutory exemption available to us, and we’d be on the hook for the full property taxes unless a local government were so generous as to grant us a permissive exemption as a charity, which are much less commonly granted.
Given the type fiscal constraints many municipalities operate under, we’ve seen an uptick in recent years of councils re-evaluating their permissive tax exemption policies. For example, some have denied requests, while others are capping the total amount of exemptions they are willing to grant.
Given municipalities can already grant permissive exemptions for charities, we recommend removing the special statutory and permissive exemptions granted to places of public worship in the Vancouver and community charters. This would empower local communities to make these decisions directly and on equal footing with other secular organizations that provide benefits to their community.
Our second recommendation is to phase out faith-based and elite private school funding. The province of B.C. contributes over half a billion dollars annually to independent schools. We calculated that almost 70 percent of this funding goes to faith-based schools, almost all of which are Christian. And while it’s true that some secular independent schools provide educational opportunities for students with special needs, they receive the smallest portion of this funding, with even elite secular schools receiving more funding.
Taken together, private school subsidies segregate our society along religious and class lines. We have documented publicly funded private schools that exclude 2SLGBTQ students staff, as well as schools that teach creationism as science. Amid growing concerns about antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia and other hate as well as to try to ensure British Columbia remains economically competitive, we recommend no longer supporting this two-tiered education system.
Polls overwhelmingly show British Columbians do not support public funding going to private religious schools. It’s only a small, ideologically motivated lobby that pushes this myth of school choice to deprive our public system of much-needed resources.
Our final recommendation is much more broad. It’s to just generally ensure that government spending goes to secular and inclusive programming. Canada is no longer a Christian nation, if it ever were one. Instead, this is a vibrant, multicultural democracy where the Charter requires the government maintain religious neutrality. However, that duty is undermined when government partners with faith-based non-profits to provide social services.
The most egregious example is the billion dollars in public funding that goes annually to Catholic health care providers in this province that refuse to provide care even when it violates the orthodoxy of the bishops and nuns who are in charge of those facilities, namely abortion, contraceptives and undermined when government partners with faith-based non-profits to provide social services. The most egregious example is the billion dollars in public funding that goes annually to Catholic health care providers in this province that refuse to provide care when it violates the orthodoxy of the bishops and nuns who are in charge of those facilities, namely abortion, contraceptives and Medical Assistance in Dying.
Similarly, when it was elected, this government admirably committed to universal $10-a-day child care by 2027, but we have seen public funding going to evangelical daycares such as Kamloops Christian School and Christian Life Children’s Centre, meaning public funds are subsidizing religion and religious education directly.
The same story is true for affordable housing projects and addiction treatment programs, where some of our most vulnerable neighbours are at risk of publicly subsidized religious coercion. We need strict rules to ensure that public money does not go to organizations that proselytize or discriminate on protected grounds.
With that, I’ll happily hear your questions.