Finally! Colour me surprised/impressed those first to act are in Quebec! Well done!
NOW that the Church in Quebec is on its last legs and there’s no real money to be had? NOW they tax the churches?
Genius.
Why is that so surprising? In Mexico, the church is not permitted to own any property of the type that would be taxable if privately owned. Although there is current favor in the Mexican government for relaxing the 70-year old law. In Mexico, churches are also banned from being involved in the education process, with parochial schools prohibited.
Sounds like more of closing a loophole when a church is running a business under the guise of it being a church. From the above link:
Which seems how it should be, how it was intended when churches were set to be tax free, so while it may disappoint churches to be taxed on the non-church part’s of their church, it really is getting back to the orginal intent of a church as a house of worship.
The exemption is ridiculous and has nothing at all to do with separation of church and state.
When I worked at WWL-TV, the Channel 4 CBS affiliate in New Orleans, I discovered that my employment there did not quality me for unemployment benefits, because WWL is owned by the Catholic Church, and does not have to contribute to the Unemployment Insurance Fund.
So, the other three network affiliated TV stations in this major market have to pay taxes, one of the gets a pass, because they are a church-owned income property competing in the private sector.
(In the years since, I believe this status of WWL has changed, so the above may no longer be the case)
In the US, it would presumably be a violation of the Free Exercise clause to put a special burden on churches by taxing them more heavily than other non-profit entities (which generally do not pay property taxes).
Again, it depends. If a Catholic church happens to own a large plot of land that is NOT being used for worship services or any other explicitly religious purpose, that land can and will be subject to property taxes.
MAYBE that’s all that’s happening in Quebec. I am unfamiliar with the details.
Funny, but I never saw anything about this in the paper, nor heard about it in the news.
But what about a church that is used for worship, but sometimes rented to outside groups. For example, the Montreal Chamber Music Festival (of which I am a patron) has in the past rented churches, a facility of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (actually a converted church complete with stained glass windows) and this year in a concert hall belonging to McGill University. Presumably none of these venues pays taxes.
This is incorrect. There are parochial schools throughout the country.
This is not true. For example, Yale owns a great deal of the buildings in New Haven and leases them to stores. Yale pays property taxes on those buildings which are not used for its primary educational and research purposes. In fact it is the fifth largest single payer of property tax in the city paying $4.5 million. (It also makes a voluntary payment in lieu of taxes currently more than $8 million, but I guess that’s beside the point.)
I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure this is generally true of all universities in the U.S.; that is, they are taxed on non-academic properties. I don’t see how taxing churches for properties not used for its primary purpose puts a special burden on them. I suspect most other non-profits don’t own much non-purpose property.
This is incorrect. According to Wiki, while religion is banned from oublic schools, religious institutions are free to open private schools.
Sorry, i didnt see your post.
I surmise that you watched the CTV news clip link, at the very least. I have heard it mentioned, but on local news. Montreal is not Canada, not even Quebec.
Agreed, churches can be taxed on activities unrelated to their non-profit identity to the same extent as other non-profit entities. If that’s all that’s happening here, then it’s a far cry from “taxing churches.”
I should also point out that churches can own private property. Not always the case but is now allowed through a change in the Consitution.
If you read less ideological media pieces than the one originally linked (such as link below), it’s not ‘taxing churches’ overall, but it’s not a complete non-story either. It seems city inspectors are making more strict inspections and counting as exempt from property tax only spaces on a religious property specifically actively used for religious purposes. So for example a meeting hall at a church lent out to the Scouts, or Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, or a space for a food bank would losing its property tax exempt status, just those spaces.
That’s still confusing in that a registered non-religious, non-profit org running spaces specifically dedicated to holding AA meetings, a food bank etc would presumably not owe property tax on spaces devoted to those purposes. At least in the US they would not.
And it seems the ‘secular humanist’ blog linked would actually want the opposite, that spaces used for specifically religious purposes (‘superstition’ in their view) would be the ones they would not want to get a property tax exemption.
Yes, posting from a different Canadian province, not surprised by the story. It’s not something new. It’s just the places of public worship which are tax-exempt, not everything owned by a church.
Sounds like the Montreal tax enforcement agency is going to take a more critical approach to enforcing the rules.
You and the article say “lent” but if you read further it says “usually at very little cost” which means they’re not being lent but rented out. I suspect that’s the problem; that would appear to be running a business out of the property.
I did see that phrase but at least the way the article was written it didn’t seem to say that was the key point, the collection of any revenue. Which in any case would render almost any non-profit religious or not ‘a business’. All non-profits one way or another collect money to offset their costs. It’s hard to see how non-profits could exist if you required them to be non revenues. There is some cost to heat, light, maintain etc a structure. It doesn’t make it ‘a business’ to offset any of that cost by collecting some rent. It would make it a business to collect a profit making market level of rent, but it says ‘very little’.
But I’m not saying your take is necessarily altogether wrong. The OP linked article is overflowing with its own ideological take on the topic to the point of being useless except to vaguely refer to the existence of the story. The one I linked from Google news is not as badly written but still not entirely clear IMO.
My question also remains why a religious org would be taxed on property used for eg. a food bank when a secular run-for-the-purpose food bank’s property was exempt from property tax. Maybe in Montreal the secular non-profit food bank would be subject to property tax and that’s the answer: they are trying to treat all food bank etc properties equally. But in the US the secular non profit’s food bank property would not be subject to property tax. And Ontario’s law comes up easily online and various charitable org’s properties are listed there as not subject to property tax.
I wish this would happen in my city ! A church needed a new steeple and the city gave the church taxpayers money to rebuild a new steeple ! I was BULLSHIT that my money was used to fix a church and it had been the temple I would had felt the same way.