Our Lady of the Assumption Parish in Iqaluit, Nunavut, has been granted 75-per-cent relief on its 2023 and 2024 property tax bills by city council.

Now, thanks to a reported $57,387 reduction approved unanimously by council, the two-year bill is now $19,129 instead of $76,516.

Pastor Fr. Barry Bercier stressed that paying the original amount “would have us bankrupt in three years.” This decision builds upon a December 2025 city council vote that exempted religious institutions from paying property taxes in 2026.

Advertisement

Soon after Bercier came to Iqaluit during the summer of 2023, the Assumptionist from Connecticut began speaking out against a controversial 2022 city bylaw that terminated religious institutions’ tax-exempt status. He asked Bishop Anthony Krótki, O.W.I, the spiritual shepherd of the Churchill-Hudson Bay diocese, for advice about the tax bill.

“He simply said, ‘don't pay,’ so I did not pay the tax,” said Bercier. “Instead, we met with the city council to ask for a resolution to the problem of the tax for two reasons. (One), the tax is insupportable by most of the churches here. And the second reason, it’s a bad law. It would be breaking the kind of precedent that marks the United States and Canada, that you don't tax church property. It's a threat to the separation of church and state.”

Ideally, for Bercier, the significant tax reduction, coupled with the 2026 mill rate of zero, will help build momentum towards the total repealing of the bylaw in the not-too-distant future. In the immediate term, when asked if he would pay the $19,129 sum, the priest said he would need to consult with Krótki.

Hours after Krotki spoke with Bercier on Feb. 2, the bishop informed The Catholic Register that he again advised Bercier not to pay the remaining amount owed for 2023 and 2024. 

"We have agreed that it is not right for the council to charge us for the previous two years," said Krotki. "They exempted us from 2025, but for 2024 and 2023 they want us to pay some money. I don't think it's right. All the churches in Canada, I believe, should be treated the same way and not be taxed.

"The decision is up to (the city) and we hope for kindness, mercy, understanding and fairness."

Advertisement

Even though forrmer pastor Fr. Daniel Perreault also denounced the removal of the tax exemption in 2022, he did submit a payment for that tax year. Bercier said Perreault was “under great stress at the time.”

Less than a month following the yet-to-be-proven discovery of 215 unmarked graves on the former site of Kamloops Indian Residential School on May 27, 2021, then Iqaluit Mayor Kenny Bell began publicly calling for churches to be taxed. One day before he started waging this campaign on June 25, Cowessess First Nation reported 751 unmarked graves near the Marieval Indian Residential School, another claim yet to be verified.

“We’re not retaliating against them, they literally killed thousands of children,” said Bell in an interview with Nunatsiaq News published on June 30, 2021. He added, “tax exemptions, as a whole, are supposed to be for groups that do the community good. It’s very clear that the Catholic Church hasn’t done the community any good.”

Bell, elected in 2019 for a four-year term, resigned from his position on Oct. 18, 2022, days after he engaged in evident misconduct. City administration had paid for him to fly to Reykjavik, Iceland, for the 2022 Arctic Circle Assembly from Oct. 13-16, where he was to represent Iqaluit as a delegate and speaker. He never attended a single session of the conference.

Bercier’s point about other religious communities finding the property taxes unendurable is accurate.

In December, it was reported that St. Jude’s Anglican Church — known as the Igloo church — could be lost because of its property tax debt of $64,000 and a $188,000 insurance bill. Insurance bills have been on the rise since dozens of churches began burning down in 202l in the wake of the Kamloops announcement.

The alarming headlines spurred the Iqaluit city council to approve a 2026 tax exemption for places of worship.

Ideally, whether the councillor is religiously oriented or not, Bercier would like to see lawmakers recognize the intrinsic good parishes bring to a community no matter the size, but especially in smaller, more isolated communities where “suicide rates tend to be very high, and there is (a lot of) drug use, domestic abuse and broken families.”

Advertisement

This difficult reality was particularly evident in the Nunavut hamlet of Igloolik, where Bercier served for three years starting in 2017. The Saint Stephen Foundation of the Roman Catholic Mission represented hope.

“They filled the church,” said Bercier. "They sang their hearts out. When there were funerals, the church was packed. The church provided real support for them in their current difficult situation. If the churches are taken away, I don't know what would be left for them.”