It’s been an incredibly busy and exciting season of growth for the CFIC Ottawa Branch.
In August, CFIC hosted a weekend-long showcase room for various organizations at the 2026 World Humanist Congress (WHC) at The Westin Ottawa. This included a dedicated CFIC table staffed by local ambassadors, with CFIC President Edan Tasca and Past-President Seanna Watson both in attendance as delegates. A CFIC volunteer also drafted the script for the Humanist Ottawa (HO) Walking Tour for congress delegates, and CFIC purchased portable amplifiers for the tour guides.
Beyond our monthly Skeptics in the Pub, which we co-host with HO on the first Tuesday of every month, we’ve brought back Skeptics in the Park by popular demand. To complement our weekly Online Secular Chat based in Ottawa West, we also held the first of what we hope will become a regular in-person Secular Brunch. CFIC volunteers even helped run the HO booth at the Capital Pride Street Festival.
As mentioned in the previous article, CFIC is now cooperating with Recovering from Religion (RfR) to help find volunteers and launch their first support meetings in Ottawa this fall. To help spread the word, CFIC and RfR have printed business cards and are designing a new retractable roll-up stand to promote the shared Secular Groups in Ottawa website, which we proudly co-sponsor.
Here’s what we have coming up in September on Meetup so far:
- Skeptics in the Pub, Tuesday, Sept 1, at 7:00 PM at The Lieutenant’s Pump.
- Online Secular Chat, every Wednesday from 6:30-8:00 PM EDT.
- Progressive Walking Tour of Ottawa, on Saturday, Sept 5 from 12:30-2:30 PM, based on the HO walking tour from the WHC, and free to anyone who joins the mailing list for our Critical Links newsletter by that day.
- Skeptics in the Park, on Saturday, Sept 5 from 3:00-5:00 PM at Minto Park, immediately following the walking tour.
- Secular Brunch, on Sunday, Sept 19 from 12:00-2:00 PM at The Lieutenant’s Pump.
- Recovering from Religion Zoom meeting for potential Ottawa volunteers (Date TBD)
We’re actively building up our community in the National Capital Region with more in-person meetings, and we want you to be a part of it!