Minister Lumsden, RE: https:…

Minister Lumsden,

RE: https://ero.ontario.ca/notice/019-7684

The Trinity Centres Foundation is Canada’s leading registered charity working on national strategy for the adaptive re-use of places of worship. Our staff are regular writers and conference speakers for the architectural, planning, heritage, urbanism and religious sectors which touch upon the significant shifts in Canadian religious land ownership.

Given our connection to this sector, we begin our comment by express both surprise and dismay that such a proposal would reach this stage of Parliamentary proposal, without any apparent wider consultation.

The proposed legislative change permitting changes to religious buildings in favour of Indigenous religious requirements, is overly limited. The proposal does not take into account the equally important changes in heritage buildings required by urgent community needs such as diverse, equitable and inclusive access to these sites by community projects touching upon emergency and other forms of housing, food security, refugee support, arts and local conference activities. Whilst we applaud the initiative for its focus on Indigenous use, it is our Foundation’s experience that Indigenous use of existing religious properties is a significantly less common concern than that of wider community use. Whilst not in any way diminishing the importance of the existing proposal, we highlight the need for similar permission, for wider uses also.

We at the Trinity Centres Foundation are participating in consultations with various other levels of Municipal, Provincial and Federal Government departments at this time. We welcome a conversation on this proposal, with your legislative team and/or Members of Parliament.

In the meantime, we do formally express our concern at what seems like an isolated amendment and one which could miss an important opportunity to address wider matters along the same theme, but to the benefit of far more Ontarians.

Yours sincerely,
Graham Singh, CEO