Sandra Dunham
Statistics Canada has released census data on Canadian diversity, including religion. As its name suggests, The Canadian census: A rich portrait of the country’s religious and ethnocultural diversity contains information about both ethnocultural and religious diversity in Canada. While members of CFIC are likely interested in all the data, CFIC has a particular interest in the data related to the level of religiosity.
A reminder to readers. The question on religion does not ask about whether a person is currently practicing a religion. Rather, it asks one to “report the specific denomination or religion with which they identify, even if they are not currently a practising member of that group. Persons who are members of a specific group within a larger religion should report the name of the specific group.” (Emphasis added.) This artificially lowers the number of people who identify in the “non-belief” category.
The current data release focuses on how immigration and ethnocultural diversity impacts the level of religiosity in Canada, but does not include tables on the levels of religiosity in Canada’s provinces. At a macro level, the data paints an interesting picture. In 2021, “approximately 12.6 million people, or more than one-third of Canada’s population, reported having no religious affiliation. The proportion of this population has more than doubled in 20 years, going from 16.5% in 2001 to 34.6% in 2021.”
Additionally, the number of people identifying as Christian is dwindling faster than all religions, declining from 77.1 percent of the population in 2001 to just over half (53.3 percent) in 2021, while the proportion of Canadians identifying as Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh has more than doubled in the past 20 years.
It is also interesting to note that in 2021, 2.8 million people indicated that they were Christian without providing a specific denomination. This is twice the number that did so in 2011.
With increasing religious diversity and a reduction in the number of people identifying as religious, it is imperative that society respect this diversity and that policymakers remain neutral on matters of religion. CFIC will continue to question government decisions that favour religious institutions (for example, please see our Cost of Religion reports).
CFIC will watch with interest as our governments and social institutions grapple with a changing Canada. We will continue to remind policymakers that good decisions are based on science and critical thinking and that dogma and magic have no place in good governance.
The article above clearly documents the ongoing official under-estimation of people with no religion. The Canadian Census asks you to give a nominal religious denomination, as described above. Where the rubber hits the road is when we discover what your de facto religious attitudes are. Since 1978, I have been ranting high and low that secularism is way under-estimated, because you have to look at one’s de facto behavior to properly determine how the world is really turning on this question. Regardless of the nominal religion Census results, I put the de facto non-religious population at over 85% of the population in Canada.
Alex’s discussion points out the methodological limitation of many surveys – they rely on self report. Doing otherwise is very expensive and time consuming, so there are trade offs to be made. Generally I’d guess also that self-report is less intrusive and privacy threatening.