(LifeSiteNews) – Canadian Conservative pro-life MP Leslyn Lewis said a plan supported by Mark Carney’s Liberal government that calls for pro-life and religious groups to be stripped of their tax charity status should be an election issue as it’s an “assault” on people’s faith.
“The Liberal plan to revoke the charitable status of religious organizations is an assault on people of faith across Canada,” Lewis wrote on X last week.
Lewis linked her post to an opinion piece published in the Niagara Independent by Lee Harding with the headline “Canada’s sleeper election issue: the loss of charitable status for religious organizations.”
Harding observed that the “potential loss of charitable status for religious charities might be the biggest sleeper issue in the federal election.”
“The Liberal government proposed the change and only Conservatives opposed,” Harding said.
Lewis noted that 40 percent of the 85,600 charities in Canada are religious organizations.
“These are organizations that feed the hungry, support the elderly, rally around people in crisis, provide addiction recovery services – and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” she wrote.
“It is quite honestly disgusting that the Liberals would try to sneak in this unconscionable attack in a Finance Committee report, just before Parliament prorogued.”
She noted how a recent Cardus study shows that if these charities lose their tax status “Canadians would lose $16.5B in services.”
Canadians will head to the polls on April 28. Harding noted how “One needn’t be religious to see the harm in such uncharitable changes to Canada’s charitable sector.”
“Fortunately, Canadians can vote down this misguided attack on religious charities. Whether they do so is up to them.”
Last month, the Conservative Party of Canada launched a petition blasting a recent finance committee recommendation supported by Carney that calls for pro-life and religious groups to have their charity tax status revoked.
The Finance Committee’s pre-budget report proposal released in December 2024 by the all-party Finance Committee suggested that legislation is needed to strip pro-life pregnancy centers and religious groups of their charitable status.
The legislation would amend the Income Tax Act and Income Tax. Section 429 of the proposed legislation recommends the government “no longer provide charitable status to anti-abortion organizations.”
All federal parties except for the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre support the finance report’s recommendation.
Canada’s Catholic bishops have blasted the report’s recommendations and have urged the Liberal federal government to not proceed with any legislation that would target pro-life groups of religious organizations’ charity tax status.
The good news is that in light of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s shutting of Parliament in order to step down from office, already planned legislation to strip pro-life pregnancy centers of charity status is on pause, at least for now.
Despite the reality that Poilievre is also pro-abortion, the former Trudeau now Carney Liberal government has in recent months ramped up his abortion rhetoric on social media in a seeming bid to rally its base, consistently boasting about his government’s desire to make killing a child in the womb easier than ever. Trudeau also repeatedly bragged about his pro-abortion record in the House of Commons.
