When Andrew Gulevich was asked to pray at the swearing in-ceremony for the mayor and city council of Parksville, British Columbia last year, he admits to feeling some trepidation.
He knew praying at the meeting could be controversial.
Parksville, a city of 31,000 that’s known as a retirement community, had asked Gulevich, a youth pastor, to pray after the lead pastor at his church was unavailable. Gulevich says he viewed it like accepting any other invitation. “The government of our city made the decision to have a prayer.”
Prayers at Parksville and other city council meetings concern the British Columbia Humanist Association. The prayers violate the Saguenay decision, a 2015 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that said a Christian prayer at Saguenay, Quebec’s council meetings violated the government’s duty of religious neutrality.
“Far from requiring separation, true neutrality requires that the state neither favour nor hinder any religion, and that it abstain from taking any position on this subject,” the court’s unanimous decision said.
This means no prayer at city council meetings, says Teale Phelps Bondaroff, research co-ordinator for the provincial humanist association and co-author of its report, We Yelled at Them Until They Stopped, released last week.
The report found that seven BC municipalities — Vancouver, West Kelowna, Delta, Tumbler Ridge, Colwood, Belcarra and Parksville — had prayer at inaugural city council meetings in 2022. Each had a Christian prayer. Only Vancouver, where Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant and Sikh faith leaders prayed, had non-Christian prayers.
Prayers at city council meetings can make non-religious people feel excluded, says Phelps Bondaroff, who is also a councillor in Saanich, BC, a city near Victoria.
A multi-faith prayer like Vancouver’s “doubles down on discriminating against non-religious people,” he said. “Because now what you’re saying is that we think religion is important in and of itself. And we’re going to invite five representatives of different religious faith traditions to deliver a prayer. This reinforces religion over non-religion.”
State neutrality
This is the organization’s fourth report about prayer at city council meetings since the Saguenay decision. Past reports looked at prayer at BC, Manitoba and Ontario’s inaugural city council meetings in 2018.
The goal of the research is to ensure that “the state remains neutral on these matters” and doesn’t bias a particular religion or non-religious tradition, says Phelps Bondaroff.
In 2018, 26 BC municipalities included prayer at inaugural city council meetings. Phelps Bondaroff said he was “happy” about the decrease. The organization wrote letters to remind municipalities not to include prayer. Some, like Terrace and Langley, stopped having prayer because of this, he said.
The report details how Terrace, BC stopped having prayer at its inaugural meeting after the humanist association contacted them. Terrace also voluntarily stopped having a nativity scene in front of city hall. The communities of Trail, Langley and Spallumcheen also said they would stop having prayer after the organization wrote to them, the report says.
Parksville did not respond to Canadian Affairs’ questions about why inaugural city council meetings include prayer or if it plans to change the practice. The city confirmed regular city council meetings do not include prayer.
Canadian Affairs contacted each faith group represented at Vancouver’s inaugural council meeting in 2022.
Rabbi Dan Moskovitz, from Temple Sholom, said it was an “honour” to be asked to pray. He suggested the group give one prayer, with each leader reading different parts, instead of there being five different prayers.
The faith leaders prayed for peace and unity in Vancouver. Everyone can support that, he said. Moskovitz doesn’t think the prayer favoured a particular religion, or religion in general.
“This was an acknowledgment that there are people with faith in the room,” he said. “We should not be excluding people of faith from the conversation, because they are people of faith,” he said.
The other religious leaders weren’t available for interviews before deadline.
Vancouver confirmed that the 2022 inaugural council meeting was the first to have prayer in at least 15 years. No decisions have been made about the next inaugural council meeting, and there’s no prayer at regular council meetings, the city said.
There is a “danger to a too rigid attachment to secularism,” said David Seljak, a religious studies professor at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. Many immigrants to Canada come from countries where religion is intertwined with culture.
“Are we really a multicultural Canada if we say, ‘You are welcome here with all of your various cultural practices. But when you walk into a public space, please leave your religion at the door’?” he said.
‘Counter to reconciliation’
Indigenous spiritual practices also need to be considered, Seljak says.
Indigenous content at city council meetings has increased, the British Columbia Humanist Association report says. Sometimes it was a land recognition. Other city council meetings included Indigenous drumming or prayers.
“We don’t really have a definitive answer,” Phelps Bondaroff said, when asked what makes Indigenous spiritual practices different from the prayers that the report says violate the Saguenay decision. That wasn’t the goal of the research, he says.
Indigenous content is a positive step towards reconciliation, he says. “It would be kind of counter to reconciliation to invite someone and then tell them what to do.”
The Saguenay decision is “consistently misapplied,” said Rev. Dr. Andrew Bennett, director of faith communities at Cardus, a Christian think tank that studies religion in public life.
Religious neutrality does not mean “defaulting” to no religion, he says.
Public spaces need to be places “where people of different religious traditions are able to express their religious traditions, whether they’re theistic or nontheistic,” he said.
Atheists and nonreligious people can’t impose their beliefs on the whole society, just as religious people can’t, he says.
When Gulevich prayed in Parksville in 2022, he tried to respect the limits of a city council meeting. His prayer was short. He asked that the city’s government respond wisely to concerns about housing and addiction. He included the name of Jesus, but it wasn’t a sermon, he said.
“It would have been wrong if I took that opportunity to go beyond what I was invited to do,” he said. “I have the opportunity to preach every week at our church.”
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