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Hello everyone,

I hope you are well and enjoying the merry month of July.

I am reaching out regarding the World Humanist Congress 2026, which will be held in Ottawa from August 7–9, 2026. The Congress organizers are asking secular friends in the Ottawa area to organize and lead a series of short walking tours for attendees from around the world.

This promises to be a remarkable event. We are expecting participants from more than 40 countries, and over 425 people have already purchased tickets.

—URGENT APPEAL—

We are currently looking for volunteers to serve as walking tour guides. The tour script is being prepared, so guides do not need to be historians or experts on Ottawa. What we are looking for are friendly, enthusiastic people who can serve as warm ambassadors for Ottawa and Canada.

The tours will last approximately one hour and fifteen minutes. We also plan to offer a shorter, more accessible route for participants who may find longer walks challenging.

The walking tours will take place on Friday, August 7. They will highlight some of Ottawa’s best-known landmarks and attractions, including Parliament Hill, the National War Memorial, the Rideau Canal locks, the National Gallery, and the Human Rights Monument. The tours will depart in groups beginning at 1:00 p.m., with the final tour leaving at 5:00 p.m. Any assistance you could offer would be greatly appreciated.

If you are interested in volunteering, please RSVP as soon as possible. Friends and family members who would like to assist are also very welcome.

We are also exploring the possibility of recruiting high school students who require volunteer service hours for graduation. If you have experience with this process or know how it works, please get in touch. This may be another excellent source of volunteers.

Thank you for your consideration and support. We look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Richard Thain
rglthain@gmail.com
613-851-8337

Rise and shine, critical thinkers! ☀️ Happy Summer Solstice! On the longest day of the year and the first of summer, we hope that your day is filled with warmth and light. Not only is today the Summer Solstice; it is also World Humanist Day, a great moment to pause and reflect on what the Centre for Inquiry Canada (CFIC) has recently accomplished for humanism.

CFIC advocates for critical thinking, secularism, and science. None of this is possible without your support.

• CFIC has joined with BC Humanist Association and Humanist Canada to encourage the government to uphold religious neutrality and protect the MAiD policy.
• Members of CFIC and Humanist Ottawa participated in the counter-protest during the annual National March for Life on Parliament Hill, advocating that reproductive rights are healthcare, which is a human right. 
• CFIC encourages Canadians to report “no religion” on the 2026 census to encourage fairer public policies on funding, education, and healthcare.
• CFIC provides a diverse offering of programs — Living Without Religion, Skeptics in the Pub, Secular Community Network / Secular Chat, Non-Fiction Book Club, Town Hall Meetings, CFIC Toronto Hangouts, and many webinars and discussions with experts and guest speakers — to keep our community active and free of religious obligations and entanglements.

This is thanks to the hard work and dedication of our members and volunteers. CFIC will continue promoting inquiry. It is our mission to spread the light of critical thinking and evidence-based public policy.

If you haven’t yet joined us as a CFIC member, donor, or volunteer, we warmly invite you to get involved. Help us expand our impact. Every hour and every dollar matters to us more than you know.

Thank you for helping us shine. 

Sincerely,

Edan Tasca
President, Centre for Inquiry Canada

Sandra Dunham

I first learned of CFIC when I saw an advertisement for the position of “Executive Director of Development” in the early summer of 2017. I had just left full-time employment to pursue a better work-life balance and set up a small business to work with non-profits and charities to help them achieve their goals. I made a commitment to do work that was meaningful to me. 

At that time, I had never heard the term humanist. But as I read the ad and researched The Centre for Inquiry Canada, I became increasingly aware that I was a humanist and that the goals of CFIC were very closely aligned with my own. I began work as a contractor for CFIC in the fall of 2017, and through that experience, I have learned an amazing number of things and met some truly exceptional people.  

Now, it is time for me to move on to the next phase of life – retirement. I will while away my hours on the many hobbies that my flexible working life has allowed me to pursue; playing bridge (if you enjoy games and like constant mental stimulation, I recommend you find lessons and see whether you also enjoy the game), practicing yoga, curling, riding my bike, and participating in a myriad of other outdoor winter and summer activities.

It saddens me to leave CFIC. When I am working with others at CFIC, I am sure to have interesting, candid conversations that are always engaging and allow me to grow.  I am sure that I will continue to follow CFIC, and I hope to continue to contribute articles to Critical Links, as I simply have too much to say to stay quiet. However, I shall be stepping down as a paid contractor.

What are my best memories and favourite projects of CFIC? (Note that these can change on a daily basis.)

• In the summer of 2021, I participated in a meeting of the communications committee from a campsite on PEI. There, the idea of a podcast arose (thanks to Lee Shields, who nudged us in this direction). Always over-cautious, I demanded that we have a pilot project and that we not launch the podcast until we had 6 episodes recorded. I was SURE that we would run out of topics and people to interview. Now, 5 years later, Podcast for Inquiry (PFI) is always interesting and informative. Way to go, Leslie and team!
• The Cost of Religion in Canada was a multi-year, multi-article investigation into the financial cost of religious privilege in Canada. As a “numbers nerd,” I was fascinated to quantify the cost. I admit, I also learned a tremendous amount about manipulating a massive data set in Excel. 
• The evolution of Critical Links has been great to be involved with as well. I especially enjoyed changing our platform from one long-running newsletter (which ran until October 2020) to a series of articles with links to our website, which began in November of the same year. Not only did this make Critical Links easier to read, but it also means that each separate article can be found using our search engine.
• Being a part of CFIC during the pandemic was a rewarding experience. We were able to provide lots of information about COVID-19 and to offer people webinars and entertainment that helped us fill our days. I especially enjoyed our “Magical Solstice Celebration 2020” featuring our own James Alan.

Mostly, however, I enjoyed meeting and hearing from the people who make up CFIC. You are an amazing group to have a “real” conversation with, to explore meaningful topics with and to share in our goal of making Canada a better place to live. Thank you.

Richard G. L. Thain, DDS

Centre for Inquiry Canada (CFIC) is seeking volunteers to assist during the upcoming World Humanist Congress.

We are looking for volunteers to serve as walking tour guides on Friday, August 7. This is an excellent opportunity to act as Canadian secular ambassadors and welcome our international colleagues attending the Congress.

Volunteers do not need to be historians or prepare their own presentations. We will provide background text, talking points, route maps, and suggested commentary for the tours.

The walking tours will be approximately one hour in length, with the possibility of offering a shorter version for participants with limited mobility.

Tours are expected to run between 2:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. (ET) on Friday, August 7.

Centre for Inquiry Canada is also seeking volunteers to assist at the CFIC display table during the Congress.

If you, or someone you know, would like to participate in this interesting volunteer opportunity, please contact us as soon as possible.

For more information or to volunteer, please contact CFIC. You may also contact Humanists Ottawa at contact@humanistottawa.ca.

We look forward to hearing from you, and thank you for your support.

Leslie Rosenblood

Religion on census needs a rework, group says 

Humanist organization argues question’s framing leads to an overestimation of the number of religious Canadians.

JOHN LONGHURST 

DID you get the long form of the census? If you did, then you are among the 25 percent of Canadians who had a chance to tell the government about your religious identity. 

The federal government has been collecting information about religion in Canada since 1871; it’s one of the oldest efforts to track religion in the world. 

Since that time, the religious landscape in Canada has changed a lot. Up until the 1960s, the country was mainly Christian, with small numbers of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist Canadians. 

The 2026 census lists over 200 religious groups, just over half of them Protestant and Catholic. The rest are from a wide variety of other religious traditions, including six streams of Buddhism, 10 different Jewish groups, seven kinds of Islam and five different forms of Indigenous spirituality. People can also choose from Wiccan, Satanist, Rastafarian and New Age groups, among others. 

Until this year, the census included a question about religion every 10 years. 

But it was included in the 2026 census for the first time. Why the change? One reason is the rapid growth of minority religions. The number of Canadians who are Muslim, Sikh and Hindu was six per cent of the population in 2011; by the 2021 census, the last time it was measured, it was over nine per cent. That figure is expected to be much higher now due to immigration. 

Another reason is the dramatic rise in the number of Canadians who say they have no religion on the census — the so-called “nones.” They made up more than 29 percent of Canadians in 2011 and more than 34 percent 10 years later in 2021. Scholars who study religion in Canada think that the number could be as high as 40 percent now. 

That change will be of interest to religious leaders and to scholars who study religion. But who else cares if increasing numbers of Canadians are leaving religion? 

One sector that cares is the charitable sector. Research in Canada consistently shows that the more religious someone is, the more they volunteer and give to charity. Any decrease in the number of people who say they are religious will impact groups that serve the most vulnerable in Canada and around the world — a downturn in donations will, in turn, affect governments that are increasingly relying on charities to provide services to people in need. 

While the religion question has been around for a long time, and provides a snapshot about changes to the religious landscape over the decades, not everyone is happy with the way it is framed. That includes the Centre for Inquiry, one of Canada’s leading humanist organizations. 

The way the long form census poses the question is like this:

“What is this person’s religion? Indicate a specific denomination or religion, even if this person is not currently a practising member of that group.” 

The centre thinks the second half of the question skews the answer, resulting in an overestimation of how many people in Canada are actually religious. 

If you aren’t actually practising a religion, the centre says — if you aren’t attending a place of worship, for example, or donating to help others because of your faith or following religious tenets in other practical ways — can you really say you are religious? 

That’s the view of Leslie Rosenblood, the secular chair for the centre. If someone isn’t actually practising a religion, “they should say they have no religion” when answering that question, he said. Otherwise, they are just choosing the religion they were raised in, instead of representing their current status as a non-religious person. 

Because of the way the question is written, Rosenblood said we don’t really know how many non-religious people there are in Canada. “It could be by a million people, or 10 million people,” he said, adding that the wording of the question means that “membership in religious groups is overstated.” 

Rosenblood isn’t advocating for the question to be eliminated. He understands why it is important for governments and researchers to use the same query in order to compare results decade over decade. He would just like it to be more accurate. 

And that, he said, can be accomplished by changing the question to reflect a person’s current state. For example, it could ask if they currently identify with a religion, or just simply replace the phrase “even if this person is not currently a practising member” with another question: “Are you currently a practising member of whatever you selected?” 

Rosenblood hopes the 2031 census will reflect that change. In the meantime, they hope people who filled it out this year answered it truthfully. “If people are non-practising of any faith or denomination, we hope they were honest,” he said. “If you haven’t been inside a temple or mosque or church in years, I hope they chose no religion.” 

But what’s the advantage of having a more accurate idea about how many people in Canada are religious? 

“If the number of religious people is exaggerated because of the language used in this question, decisions will continue to be made that favour religiosity,” Rosenblood said, noting the government and businesses use the census data to create policy, plan programs, and make business decisions. 

At the same time, accurately reflecting the extent of non-belief in Canada “will give atheist, agnostic, non-believing, freethinking and spiritual- but-not-religious Canadians the representation they deserve to influence public policy and decision making in the coming decade,” he added. 

faith@freepress.mb.ca

Members of the Manitoba Sikh community celebrate at the Nagar Kirtan parade in downtown Winnipeg on Sunday, September 3, 2023. The number of Canadians who are Sikh, Muslim or Hindu has grown rapidly in the past decade. 

JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS FILES 

Copyright (c)2026 Winnipeg Free Press, Edition 5/30/2026