Quebec: an unholy mess of secularism and regulation

Mountainside United Church and St. Stephen’s Anglican Church, both in Westmount QC (above), recently sold and are to be converted into condos.

The announcement that Quebec Premier François Legault was preparing a bill for the fall legislative session forbidding prayers in public spaces may have come as a shock to many, but for Christian churches in Quebec it’s only the tip of the iceberg, and just the latest in a long list of measures that are increasingly making ministry difficult in the province. As is the case with the proposed prayer ban, many of the other municipal and provincial measures that are hindering churches have come as responses to outlier situations.

In Quebec, the municipal tax exemption on religious buildings – including churches, manses and monasteries – is governed by a provincial law that is enforced by municipal authorities who have been applying it increasingly stringently because of perceived abuses in the system. To qualify for the exemption of municipal and school tax exemptions, the building must be owned by a recognized religious organization and must be actively used for ministry. There are additional restrictions with manses. The law stipulates that each congregation can only claim a single manse exemption for the home where its principal clergy resides and must provide proof that religious activity is carried out at that location: prayer, counseling, small group Bible studies, sermon preparation, etc.

About a decade ago, several apostolic congregations in the northeast of the city were discovered to have claimed dozens of manse exemptions for each church, citing their theology that many members held apostolic office. The exemptions office used that abuse to tighten restrictions and increase its policing of the application. Instead of simply justifying the manse exemption the first time it is claimed, congregations must now refile the onerous exemption application every two years. In addition, the exemptions office holds that to properly own property, a congregation must be legally incorporated. Since most Quebec congregations are not incorporated and simply own their property through their trustees, this is disqualifying an increasing number of smaller evangelical churches from a benefit historically given to most Roman Catholic and mainline congregations whose manses are typically attached to the church building and part of the same real estate unit.

The exemptions office has also applied the “active religious use” clause increasingly stringently. If a clergy person retires on June 3, but his replacement does not move into the manse until Sept. 1, the office calculates a per diem rate and charges all applicable municipal taxes and school taxes for the number of days when the manse was vacant.

A series of perceived abuses of church building tax exemptions also sent the exemptions office into overdrive to claw back what they perceived as lost tax revenue on the actual church buildings. Again, the prompting events were several outlier cases. A large Roman Catholic cathedral in the heart of the city was generating a quarter of a million dollars a year by renting spaces to business and commercial clients in its downtown parking lot from Monday to Saturday. They continued to claim a religious use tax exemption for the parking lot because parishioners parked there for Sunday services. The exemptions office moved to separate the parking lot from the church building, asking for a change to commercial zoning and asking the church to obtain a permit to operate a commercial parking lot, along with the full payment of applicable business taxes. Several other congregations were found to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in rental revenue from their buildings, with only a few thousand dollars in offerings from Sunday services. The city has argued that these entities are no longer churches that raise a little revenue on the side with rentals, but more like commercial landlords that generate most of their revenues from rent, while hosting a little prayer service on Sunday mornings. (Incidentally, there have been worrying signals that the CRA is also proposing reconsidering the tax status of religious institutions raising considerably more in business income than donations.)

In response to these perceived abuses, in 2015, inspectors from the tax exemptions visited (by their own admission) more than 800 of the 1,189 tax exempt religious properties in the greater Montreal area, camera in hand to document the use made of each room in the building to see what proportion of the building was actually used for religious purposes. Square foot calculations sought to estimate what proportions of the building were primarily used to generate rental revenues or for purposes other than religious activities. The proposal was to calculate the non-religious use proportion of each church building that should be charged municipal taxes. Churches and community groups strongly objected that the spaces in church buildings used by Scouts, AA meetings, community choirs, foodbanks and other activities might not be overtly religious in nature and might in some cases yield small amounts of rent, but they were being used for the good of the wider community. The proportioned municipal tax bills based on those calculations have never been instituted, but the increasing pressure towards secularization is making the religious use municipal tax exemption an increasingly hot potato that gets bantered about at each municipal election, including the one scheduled for November 2025. (Parenthetically, the city of Montreal has calculated that if each one of the 1,189 religious properties on the island were fully taxed at the appropriate business value, the revenues generated would add about $34 million to an annual budget that is already well over $2 billion.)

This new proposal of banning public prayers is just a further step in the ongoing process of state secularism, but there is a feeling that a line has now been crossed.

While the proportional use tax calculation is still just an idea, the City of Montreal has already enacted several other changes in its application of the tax exemptions legislation that have already made it much more difficult for congregations to purchase or rent places of worship.

During the economic depression of the 1990s and the early 2000s, dozens of congregations that could not find suitable places of worship elsewhere, seized the opportunity to purchase unused commercial and industrial buildings in the Montreal North borough of the city at rock bottom prices. At first the borough was glad to see derelict buildings being rehabilitated and getting a second life, but this has now created a problem. Several small stretches of streets in the borough now have six or seven large churches in close proximity to one another, and to which people come from all over the rest of the city. For two or three hours each Sunday morning traffic and parking are horrendous as thousands of cars from other areas of the city descend on several city blocks, but the area is a ghost town the rest of the week. In response to these crisis areas, and the perceived continued loss of tax revenue, the city administration has placed a moratorium on any new places of worship on the island.

The effect of this moratorium has been compounded by several other measures.

It used to be that when a congregation closed, as seems to be happening more often as mainline Protestant congregations dissolve and Roman Catholic parishes are consolidated, the place of worship status was kept on the building until it was actually sold for another use. In other words, an empty church was still deemed to be an empty church until it was actually sold to a developer to be turned into condos, a shopping mall or a parking lot. This would give the church an extended window of time to negotiate with other congregations or with community groups to keep the building in the non profit sector. Churches and community groups are typically not ready and flush with financing and typically need to get board approvals and congregational votes that can slow the process when they seek to purchase a new building.

However, the tax exemptions office has now decided that as soon as the congregation dissolves and stops holding services, since the building is no longer actively used for religious purposes, it becomes a fully taxable property: property taxes, business taxes, school taxes, etc. Since financial constraints are often a key part of the reason for the closure, the remnants of the dissolved congregation, the Presbytery or the Diocese, need to sell the building as quickly as possible to avoid the impending immediate tax bill. This typically means that the buildings of dissolved congregations are quickly sold to the first developer with an open chequebook and forever lost to the community sector or to church use. Once that building loses its place of worship status, the moratorium means that it is not replaced and the total number of worship locations available on the island continues to decrease each year.

All these compounding effects mean that there are now literally hundreds of churches on the island of Montreal that have little hope of ever owning a building zoned as a place or worship. They resort to renting facilities.

Unfortunately, the many provincial secularism legislations already enacted prohibit religious events from taking place in public schools and in municipal facilities like arenas, libraries and parks. Concert style venues, auditoriums and convention centers that get any public funding at all are also forbidden from renting for religious purposes. This prohibits local churches in Quebec from renting virtually any of the properties that have suitable meeting space. (In 2024, a religious organization that had rented the convention center in Quebec City saw the contract cancelled several days before the event started when the provincial government realized their stance on abortion and the religious nature of the organization.)

With such a shortage of space, just about every available place of worship on the island now houses multiple congregations, trying to make the most of tight meeting space and juggling often difficult Sunday and Saturday schedules with multiple congregations overlapping as they leave and arrive. Worse yet, since the only available meeting space for congregations is in the existing church buildings in older parts of the city, it is virtually impossible to plant new churches in new housing developments and new neighbourhoods close to the people that need to be reached.

But finding a suitable place of worship, to buy or to rent, is now only half the battle. Up until very recently, if a congregation had a building zoned as a place of worship, it was at least free to use it as it saw fit for services, within reasonable respect for the neighbourhood. In recent years more Montreal boroughs have been tightening parking regulations on side streets and imposing noise restrictions. Meter parking in Montreal had historically been free on Sunday mornings until 1 p.m. in recognition that many people were parking at that time to go to church, but that is beginning to change as Sunday increasingly becomes just another shopping day for the city to generate parking revenues.

We continue to invite our brothers and sisters across the country to stand with us in prayer, both private – and public!

And noise restrictions are now seeing many boroughs requiring permits for concerts, drama presentations and other events held on church property. This was brought to a head on July 26, 2025 when the concert by American artist Sean Feucht was blocked from several venues and eventually hosted in a local church. The church was asked by the city to cancel the event and then issued a fine of $2,500 for holding a concert without a permit. Worried about the precedent created, churches have complained to the city administration that they have been holding religious concerts in their church buildings for years without the need for a permit. The city administration has underlined the unusualness of the event, but the fact remains that a significant precedent has now been set. Will special Christmas concerts, Easter cantatas or other events that draw a crowd larger than the average Sunday morning attendance and are held on another evening of the week now need a permit? The mayor of Montreal’s explanation that her administration principally objected to the message being communicated by Feucht is hardly any more comforting. Churches are now wondering which member of the city administration staff needs to vet the contents of the music used at special events held in their buildings.

So in one sense, to many Christians in the province, this new proposal of banning public prayers is just a further step in the ongoing process of state secularism, but there is a feeling that a line has now been crossed. Several groups have already strongly opposed the ban, including the Catholic Archbishop of Montreal who has described it as an affront to fundamental freedoms. It is clear that the ban would make illegal a number of traditional Roman Catholic public events, including the annual Marche du pardon (the pilgrimage of forgiveness) that winds its way through the streets of Montreal each Easter with prayers and hymns following the stations of the cross. It would also outlaw the many Remembrance Day services held at cenotaphs in public parks across the city which often include Scripture readings, hymns and prayers. There is a general understanding that this proposed ban, which came in response to Muslim demonstrations that have repeatedly blocked downtown streets with prayer vigils, is a political move by a provincial government that is headed into an electoral period with a major deficit in the opinion polls and looking to score brownie points with its traditional base.

The increasingly secularist context of the province is making life increasingly challenging for existing congregations in Montreal, and in the province of Quebec as a whole, and as we have seen, it is making it well nigh impossible to plant the new congregations that would be needed to effectively reach new neighbourhoods with the Gospel. We continue to invite our brothers and sisters across the country to stand with us in prayer, both private – and public!