A humanist group has declared British Columbia's municipal councils "prayer-free" after receiving assurances from a lone holdout community on Vancouver Island. Lawyers for the City of Parksville told the B.C. Humanist Association that Mayor Doug O'Brien has pledged not to include religious prayers in his next inaugural council meeting, should he be re-elected in 2026.

"It is important that everyone feels welcome at municipal council meetings," Dr. Teale Phelps Bondaroff of the BCHA said in a news release. "When a municipality opens a meeting with prayer, it elevates some religions over others and sends the message that religion is more important than non-religion."

The association previously asked Vancouver staff for a commitment to stop allowing prayers at council, but was initially told the plans for inauguration ceremonies are decided by the incoming mayor.

The City of Parksville says it has no plans to include prayers at its inaugural council meeting after the next municipal election in 2026. Its statement Tuesday follows a public threat of legal action from the B.C. Humanist Society over the issue. The city included prayers in its inaugural meetings in 2018 and 2022.

Seven B.C. municipalities have been identified by a secular organization for allowing prayer at a council meeting in contravention of a Supreme Court of Canada (SCOC) ruling.

A report by the BC Humanist Association (BCHA) states prayers were offered at inaugural council meetings of Vancouver, Delta, Colwood, West Kelowna, Parksville, Tumbler Ridge, and Belcarra in Nov. 2022 following municipal elections in Oct.

Vancouver was one of seven municipalities called out by the B.C. Humanist Association this week for invoking prayers in their inaugural 2022 meetings in violation of the state’s “duty” of religious neutrality. The other cities were Delta, West Kelowna, Belcarra, Colwood, Parksville and Tumbler Ridge. Ian Bushfield, the association’s executive-director, said while the city’s inaugural ceremony involved leaders from multiple faiths, that approach “still failed to meet the diversity of the city.”

A new study of crisis pregnancy centres in Canada has found they have hidden anti-abortion agendas. The study was created by the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC) and the BC Humanist Association (BCHA). The Canada-wide study looked at the websites of nearly 150 crisis pregnancy centres (CPC) and looked for misleading information.

Newmarket and other Ontario municipalities earned scorn in a new report calling for an end to prayers at municipal council meetings. The B.C. Humanist Society released a report analyzing the 2018 inaugural council meetings and found that 156 municipalities (47.6 per cent), including Newmarket, have still maintained the practice. The organization said this runs contrary to a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that found prayers at council meetings to breach a municipality's duty of neutrality.  

“It was disappointing to see so few MPs actively engaging in the substance of the issue and standing up to support the separation of religion and government,” said BCHA Research Coordinator Dr. Teale Phelps Bondaroff. “Instead of taking the opportunity to reflect on the duty of religious neutrality and how to ensure that Parliament is a welcoming and inclusive space that reflects the diversity of Canadians, they chose to chastise the Bloc for using their opposition day to present a perfectly valid motion.”

For his continued and wide-ranging work making Canada—and the world—a better, more humanist place, for his research combating Christian hegemony and furthering secularism, and for his success in making real change happen even in the usually unyielding halls of power… Dr. Teale Phelps Bondaroff, you are Canadian Atheist’s 2021 person of the year.

Starting a municipal council meeting with prayer was ruled unconstitutional in a 2015 Supreme Court decision.

Municipalities across the country have had a few years to stop the inclusion of prayer in their meetings and change procedures, according to a new report from the BC Humanist Association, ‘Duty of Neutrality Beyond Saguenay.’

Chilliwack, Langley, and White Rock were among the 23 municipalities found by researchers to have violated the “duty of religious neutrality” in 2018 by beginning their inaugural council meetings with prayers.

British Columbia’s Legislature has changed its rules to formally allow “reflections” to open proceedings each day, in addition to prayer, amid a debate about the place of religion in Canadian assemblies....

​

The formal change follows criticism from organizations such as the B.C. Humanist Association, that the practice of legislative prayer “discriminates against non-believers and violates the state’s duty of religious neutrality.”