Colby Cosh: Charge churches property tax? It's a lot better than burning them
Colby Cosh 12 hrs ago

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© Provided by National Post A firefighter douses the remains of St. Jean Baptiste Parish church in Morinville, Alta., which burned to the ground on June 30, 2021.


Late last month, the mayor of Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital city, had a bright idea. Kenny Bell had been appalled by the discoveries — or rediscoveries — of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential schools in the Canadian West. He wondered what he could do, as the non-Indigenous mayor of an Indigenous community, to “help where I can and stand with Indigenous people.” Curiously, he didn’t decide, as a few others seem to have, that arson was the obvious answer to his question.

Instead, he announced that he intends to introduce a motion at city council to remove the property tax exemption enjoyed by churches in Iqaluit, as they are almost everywhere else in Canada. Bell was quoted by the Nunatsqiaq News as saying that “We’re not retaliating against [churches]; they killed literally thousands of children.”

One can’t help feeling that this semicolon may conceal a desire to, in fact, retaliate against churches. But the loss of the property tax exemption would strike at some churches that were never powerful enough to co-ordinate with the Canadian state in a program of racial assimilation — the city has Baptist and Pentecostal missions, as well as a mosque — and Mayor Bell says he doesn’t intend to discriminate among the tax-exempt buildings. The next council meeting takes place on July 13.

Now, the mayor’s idea may have been a little impulsive. CBC News did not have trouble finding Iqaluit church volunteers who abhor the thought that churches facing new tax bills would lose the ability to provide counselling and addiction services. (Maybe the city could pay for some more of those if there weren’t so many tax-exempt buildings around?) Bell brushed off the CBC but mentioned that “many Inuit are happy” with the idea behind his motion; another interviewee, however, said she had spoken to some elders and their reaction was more or less “Welp, the white folks are at it again.” Bell admitted in an earlier interview that he had not canvassed fellow councillors to get a sense of how the vote might go.

This doesn’t sound, on an overview of the news coverage, like the ideal way to go about what is intended to be a gesture of reconciliation. But, then again, it’s not arson. Since Mayor Bell launched his trial balloon, the country has experienced an apparent pogrom against Catholic churches, with two Anglican ones in B.C. joining the party on Canada Day. Most Indigenous spokesmen have denounced the rash of church fires, but it’s not hard to find white progressives celebrating them on social media. If you try posting something like “Hey, arson is bad, you guys,” you’ll probably flush some out in a few seconds.

So why is it that we’re having a progressive-led bien-pensant conversation about whether church arsons are good and not a progressive-led bien-pensant conversation about statutory tax exemptions for churches? Is the answer that destructive measures against the crushing dead hand of the church are to be actively preferred to ordinary politics? Is it that taking away the exemptions would be an exercise in democracy, and thereby provides no fuel for the imaginations of pyromaniac cosplay revolutionaries? Is it that changing provincial and municipal statutes might take a great deal of advocacy work, work which might lead to little or nothing, and that it’s much easier just to commit a loathsome, possibly murderous crime in the dead of night?

The radical left has mostly not thought ahead that far, and the non-radical left in this country is pretty churchy. It is only atheists per se, whatever their political stripe, who have ever made much noise about the various tax exemptions churches enjoy because of our deep legal tradition. From the militant atheist’s point of view, it is readily apparent that the old common-law status of churches as beneficial in themselves, whatever their metaphysical bona fides, is exactly the same attitude that allowed for the creation of state-licensed and church-run residential schools themselves. (These schools sometimes put students to work on lucrative farming operations — a commercial aspect that was politely overlooked for the same reasons.)

Removing the property tax exemption from churches would actually create revenue that could be devoted explicitly to reconciliation-flavoured government programs. The idea probably wouldn’t be popular enough to succeed anywhere, any more than it is likely to in Iqaluit. But it ought to be more popular than a wave of arson that the combined efforts of our political class (and police) have failed to stop, and left-wing enthusiasts of reconciliation might be asked why they aren’t getting behind Mayor Bell’s idea.

Do they still believe that religion is a force for social good in itself? If this is to remain an operating principle of our civilization, in spite of all those unmarked cemeteries, the time to say so would be at a moment when sincere Catholic and Anglican believers are waiting in terror to see whether their church is the next to be added to the great bonfire. As an atheist, I believe churches should be answerable to the law, not excluded from it and subjected to random destruction.