Religious groups can relax: the federal government is not planning to remove their charitable tax status.

Not that it ever planned to do that. But now we have an official word from the office of Liberal MP Karina Gould, chair of the House of Commons Finance Committee, that it’s not going to happen.

In an email to Al Postma, the Canadian executive director of the Christian Reformed Church (a copy of which I have seen), her office stated there is no plan to remove religion as a charitable purpose from the Canadian Income Tax Act.

Charitable status for religious organizations “is not under review, and this government has no plans to change that,” her office said. “Any suggestion otherwise is false.”

As we near the end of the year, here are two stories about the Canadian government and religion that didn’t get much media attention — starting with an unusual decision by Statistics Canada.

Since 1871, the federal government has asked Canadians about their religious affiliation every 10 years through the census. It’s one of the oldest national efforts to track religion in the world.

That will change in 2026, when Statistics Canada will ask that question just five years after the last census in 2021.

The reason for the change is the growth in minority religions and the dramatic rise in the number of Canadians who say they are not affiliated with any religion, said Simon-Pierre Lacasse, an analyst at the Centre for Population and Social Statistics for Statistics Canada.

Garry Gutting was an American professor of philosophy who used to write The Stone, a regular feature in the New York Times. In an April 2016 column, Gutting — who died in 2019 — mused about the government’s role in limiting religious hate and violence.

“At certain points in their histories, both Christianity and Islam have been intolerant of other religions, often of each other, even to the point of violence,” Gutting said. For Christians in Europe in previous centuries, this included the persecution of Jews, the Spanish Inquisition and the persecution of Anabaptists.

Today, Christians and Muslims see killing of people who disagree with them as wrong. And why is that? Not because they received new revelation from God, according to Gutting. It was because governments enacted laws that said it was wrong to kill someone who believed differently from you.

It was a slow process, but over time governments in Europe accomplished this through toleration acts and by giving legal recognition to other forms of religious belief. They also abolished penalties for heresy, blasphemy and apostasy, and moved in the direction of freedom of conscience and worship.

In the Psalms, lament is seen as a way to express sorrow, pain, and frustration to God while maintaining an underlying trust in God’s character and promises.

In that respect, then Struck Down, Not Destroyed, a new book by 31-year-old Vatican correspondent Colleen Dulle, is a book of lament.

That’s the view of Jesuit priest and author James Martin. In his preface to Dulle’s book, Martin said that “her account of her work as a conscientious and faithful reporter in the Catholic Church that has been roiled by scandal and stained by sin has more than a hint of the biblical practice of lament running throughout it.”

Despite those scandals, and the cover-ups that accompanied them, Dulle managed to keep her faith — while at the same time recognizing “the injustices and unjust structures that often belie our claim to be the people of God,” he added.

It was just over a decade ago that the Winnipeg “cradle to grave” social service agency, Jewish Child and Family Service, launched its comprehensive addiction-services program and hired its first ever addiction-services co-ordinator.

In the years since, those services have expanded, evolved and offered support to numerous individuals and families struggling with addictions and hoping for healing.

The program takes place within the confines of safe and nurturing environments committed to the idea that Jewish spirituality, values and teachings have a critical role to play in recovery.

The annual Serenity Shabbat — which takes place today, following National Addictions Awareness Week — is part of this program.

The Rainbow Resource Centre has developed a new anti-hate policy after concerns were raised by members of the Jewish LGBTTQ+ community.

The need for such a policy arose after what the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg called “painful experiences” for Jews who attended the 2024 Pride parade in Winnipeg and an event sponsored by the centre.

That included Jewish participants being subjected to “a barrage of antisemitic and anti-Zionist chants and messages,” at the parade, the federation said, adding some were asked to remove symbols of their Jewish identity.

At a separate Pride event hosted by the centre, anti-Zionist statements were shared from the stage, the federation reported; one performer unfurled a giant banner with the words “No pride in genocide” and rallied the crowd “with vocal anti-Israel chants.”