Liberal abortion tax vow challenged
Policy would target churches, group says
A socially conservative lobby group is campaigning against the federal government's vow to deny anti-abortion organizations charitable status, claiming the proposed policy could apply not only to pregnancy crisis centres — which are specifically targeted in the Liberal platform — but churches and camps as well.
“If it is enacted, (it) would affect far more than just crisis pregnancy centres, I think it would impact churches and camps and ministries,” said David Cooke, national campaign manager with Campaign Life Coalition. “It's a dangerous precedent if it does go through.”
For the Liberals, protecting abortion rights has been a key political issue.
In its 2021 election platform, the Liberal Party claimed that Erin O'toole's Conservative party wanted to “roll back abortion access” and vowed that if the Liberals formed government, they would “no longer provide” charitable status to anti-abortion groups “that provide dishonest counselling to women about their rights and about the options available to them at all stages of the pregnancy.”
It's not clear if the Liberals would revoke charitable status, or prevent organizations in the future from seeking charitable status. While the platform specifically singled out crisis pregnancy centres as the sort of organization that would be targeted, some have wondered about the language, and what could be classified as an anti-abortion organization.
“What is an anti-abortion group? Is it a place of worship that opposes abortion? Is it a group that focuses most of its resources on pregnancy-related issues?” wrote lawyer Mark Blumberg on his law office website.
Adam Aptowitzer, a charity and tax lawyer with Drache LLP, said the idea that religious organizations should lose charitable status comes up intermittently in Canada, and that parliamentarians have been loath to actually tackle questions about what constitutes a charity.
“I don't see how they could come along and say, `If you hold this particular opinion you no longer qualify as a charity' without, again, reopening this debate that Parliament for 80 years has stayed away from,” Aptowitzer said. “How in the world do they expect to do this?”
In response to fears for the future of crisis pregnancy centres, Campaign Life Coalition has launched a petition against the Liberal promise.
“Whenever charitable status is revoked, donations go down,” said Cooke in an interview. “If they don't have tax-exempt status they're going to have to start paying property tax, and that property tax will just kill them, it's just going to shut them down.”
The National Post sought comment from the federal government on a number of issues raised by this promise, including whether or not churches could lose tax-exempt status and by what metric the Canada Revenue Agency would determine whether or not information provided by such an organization constituted “dishonest” counselling.
Jessica Eritou, a spokesperson with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland's office, responded with an email that restated the promise in the Liberal platform, but did not address the Post's questions. A spokesperson from the Department of Finance said “information on this will be released in due course.”
Crisis pregnancy centres are found all around Canada — one adoption website lists more than 180 different crisis pregnancy centres. They're often religious — Pregnancy Care Canada, a network of such centres, describes itself as “Christ-centred” — and say their purpose is to provide information about adoption, parenting and abortion, in addition to goods such as diapers or infant formula.
“(They're) simply places where people can go to get help with an unplanned, unexpected pregnancy,” said Cooke. “These pregnancy centres, crisis pregnancy centres, they are, in terms of their philosophy, they affirm the life of the child, the value of the child, and they don't make any bones about that.”
The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, which has authored a number of reports into crisis pregnancy centres, argues they purport to offer support and information to pregnant women, but this is a guise “to attract unsuspecting and vulnerable women” and then counsel them against getting an abortion. In a 2016 report, the coalition said they identified 180 crisis pregnancy centres in Canada, and that 68 per cent were tax exempt.
“(They) are anti-choice agencies that present themselves as unbiased medical clinics or counselling centres, and whose ostensible goal is to provide women with non-judgmental information on all their options when faced with an unintended pregnancy,” says a 2016 paper from the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada.
It wouldn't be the first time the Liberals have targeted anti-abortion groups.
In 2017, the government required groups seeking funding for summer student jobs had to declare they were not anti-abortion, which disqualified a number of organizations — many of them religious — across Canada from receiving the Canada Summer Jobs subsidy.