The First Half of 2018 for the Humanist Movement in British Columbia
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/05/30
Ian Bushfield, M.Sc., is the Executive Director of the British Columbia Humanist Association (BCHA). The BCHA has been working to have humanist marriages on the same plane as other marriages in the province. Here we talk about recent updates from the view of the BCHA.
Bushfield and I talked several months ago, but I had not caught up with him. So, I decided to follow up with him on the updates from the non-religious, and the humanist more particularly, the landscape in Canada, especially in British Columbia.
Since he leads one of the more prominent humanist organizations in Canada, I wanted to see what was new, up, and all around in the air for the humanist movement in the province.
I asked about the general trends to open the conversation with Bushfield. He described the lack of regular data, saying, “I can only speak broadly, as we don’t get a lot of regular data on the religious and nonreligious make-up of British Columbia. What we do know is that over the past few decades, BC has become increasingly secular where most metrics show a majority of people in the province identify as having no religion and as few as one-in-ten regularly attend religious services.”
As a secular hotbed of activity, but lack of identifiable and rich data for description and extrapolation, this makes the trend finding difficult for the humanist community here in little ol’ British Columbia.
“Within the BC Humanist Association, we’ve continued to see growth throughout 2017 and 2018. Some of our biggest growths in membership and support have come in the past year and we’re really excited to continue that trend through 2018,” Bushfield continued.
In terms of the recent past, as in 2018 so far or the first five months, he noted some developments. There has been an interaction with the British Columbia Government for several months now.
“Some of it has been promising, like their commitment and consultation around rebuilding the province’s Human Rights Commission, while other issues have been a bit more disappointing,” Bushfield explained, “like the continued funding of religious independent schools, possible expansion of faith-based care facilities in Comox and lack of movement on permitting Humanist marriages.”
It seems like a set of positive developments in a democratic fashion for the non-religious. Bushfield remains optimistic about the progress for the non-religious community in British Columbia in coordination, and in a way negotiation, with the Government of British Columbia.
In terms of the campaigns, prominent ones, ongoing for 2018, Bushfield talked about the Supreme Court Decision around the Trinity Western University law school case.
“We intervened at the Court to argue that organizations shouldn’t be able to claim religious exemptions under Canadian law. If the Court adopts our arguments that will be a big defence in Canadian law against the excesses we’re seeing in the USA following Hobby Lobby,” Bushfield stated, “We are also continuing to follow a number of issues such as access to reproductive healthcare and medical assistance in dying and the pushback by religious fundamentalists to improved sexual and gender education in BC schools.”
In other words, these amount to progressive endeavours for secularism in education, women’s rights, reproductive rights, and the right to die as one wishes. For 2018 and 2019, there are a series of projects and campaigns in particular.
The first Bushfield and company are looking to advance are the approximately CAD0.5 billion handed to the private schools in this province alone. The majority of the schools teach in a faith-based setting, which means a religious context – “faith-based” means “religion” as religion got a bad rap.
They “proudly mix creation in their science classrooms,” many of them. “Overall, these schools segregate students by class and religion, which is antithetical to Humanist values,” Bushfield notes.
He continued, “Second, we’re starting to do some work on looking at how BC municipalities treat religious property tax exemptions. They have some latitude in how they treat these exemptions and we know that not all towns simply give a blanket exemption to all churches.”
The final campaign is to look into the overdose crisis and the government responsiveness to it. That the best available evidence is taken into account while respecting individual citizens’ religious, or non-religious in this context, freedoms and rights.
That is a start.
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