Church Property in Canada

Submitted by jay on 17 June, 2007 - 08:33

So I've done a little freeloading, using a directory at churchdirectory.ca. It is not an authoritative directory by any means, but at least it is fairly comprehensive. The site gives us an idea of the number of churches in Canada. Assuming that each Church is worth, on average, $100,000, not a large figure, I think it is overly conservative, the following table shows how much property churches hold in Canada:

# Churches $ Property Value Province
1904 $190.4 million Alberta
3479 $347.9 million British Columbia
1093 #109.3 million Manitoba
943 $94.3 million New Brunswick
478 $47.8 million Newfoundland
930 $93.0 million Nova Scotia
29 $2.9 million Northwest Territories
1 $0.1 million Nunavut
6930 $693 million Ontario
294 $29.4 million Prince Edward Island
2414 $241.4 million Quebec
1509 $150.9 million Saskatchewan
37 $3.7 million Yukon

Adding all those figures up, it looks like there are approximately 20041 churches in Canada (excluding mosques and synagogues). Those churches hold amongst them, approximately $2,004,100,000 or $2 billion worth of property, using my very low figure of a $100,000 average value.

Now double that to $4 billion if each church is worth on average $200,000. When you figure that the average house price in Canada in 2006 was $279,584, and in 2007 it is currently $305,542, you can see that my estimates are probably too low. But benefit of the doubt and all... Something devout churchgoers might want to consider sometime.

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Too funny

I hadn't noticed that the number of this node is 666, rather appropriate no? Moreover, it is the #1 ranked search term out of 1.6 million pages for church property canada in my favourite search engine. Hooray!

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