Pregnancy centres' charitable status appears safe

A Department of Finance statement failed to clarify whether Budget 2026 will adopt a proposed measure targeting the charitable status of pro-life pregnancy centres. 

However, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC), the group advocating for this provision in the pre-budget consultation report that it filed to the Standing Committee on Finance, anticipates it won’t get what it wants when the budget drops Nov. 5

Recommendation 65 for the federal budget, as listed in the Standing Committee on Finance’s report, advocated for amendments to the Income Tax Act requiring “greater transparency from anti-abortion pregnancy centres in order to mitigate harm to clients and prevent the misuse of charitable status.” 

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The other half of this recommendation is to “update and expand the Abortion in Canada web portal at Health Canada on at least an annual basis to ensure that Canadians have access to current and comprehensive information.”

A Department of Finance spokesperson would not go further than “the Department cannot speculate on what may or may not be included in Budget 2026” in an email to the Register.

Erin Quevillon, the press secretary for Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE), was a bit more forthcoming speaking to the Investigative Journalism Foundation, saying “we do not currently have plans to reintroduce” amendments intended to crack down on crisis pregnancy centres. 

The ARCC responded to Quevillon’s comment with a Facebook post decrying how “this non-action is a betrayal of WAGE’s gender equality mandate” and imploring supporters to “push harder.” 

Conversely, the Campaign Life Coalition, the political arm of the Canadian pro-life movement, is also mobilizing its network of grassroots supporters across the country in an effort to once again demand that the government to abandon a proposed course deemed hostile to pro-life pregnancy centres. 

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Campaign Life has had to wage this fight on several occasions since 2021. That year’s federal election included a Liberal Party pledge to “no longer provide charity status to anti-abortion organizations” that provide “dishonest counselling” to women about their rights and options throughout the different stages of pregnancy. 

Late 2024 saw the Justin Trudeau government table legislation that proposed stripping the charitable status of these centres if their public-facing communications did not visibly state whether or not they provided abortion or birth control prescriptions. Trudeau’s prorogation and resignation in January 2025 terminated the bill. 

And one year ago there was a recommendation (429) for the 2025 budget to “no longer provide charitable status to anti-abortion centres.” The pro-life community was kept in suspense until the Nov. 4 unveiling of the budget, which did not include such a stipulation.

David Cooke, Campaign Life’s campaigns manager, said “the weight of public opinion and outrage” over these attempts “had repeatedly caused them to backtrack and delay. I have no doubt that they would like to put this in, and intend to as long as there's not enough outcry against it.”

He said Campaign Life supporters are rallying because “this is an issue of great importance” as crisis pregnancy centres “are vital for women, babies and people in the lowest of income brackets who are in need, who are in desperate situations. They rely on these organizations.”

Jakki Jeffs, executive director of Alliance for Life Ontario, is also pushing back. She declared in an open letter to the finance committee that recommendation 65 “violates the fundamental principle of tax neutrality, creates unnecessary legislative redundancies over an already robust Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) framework, and poses severe constitutional risks under the Canadian Charter.”

Mark Blumberg, a nonprofit lawyer who guides the legal resource Canadian Charity Law, wrote in an Oct. 1 blog post that Mark Carney’s government evidently abandoning the Trudeau agenda here is “the preferable approach." 

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“Canadian registered charities should not deliberately deceive the public or disseminate misinformation or disinformation,” wrote Blumberg. “But that principle should apply across the charitable sector, rather than through special rules directed at one relatively small category of charities because of the particular views or services associated with them.”

The Register asked the finance department if the measures proposed in recommendation 65 should and would, if passed, apply equally to a group such as the pro-euthanasia advocacy organization Dying With Dignity Canada. The department chose not to engage with that query.

(Amundson is an associate editor and writer for The Catholic Register.)