Religion in Canada

I was shocked at a few facts that I found out while looking at some data from the 2001 census. I was doing some research for my project on gentrification and urban sprawl in Montreal when I stumbled on these religion numbers. Of course, being the curious person that I am, I couldn't help but make a few calculations. Here are a few facts of interest.

-17% of Canadians declared themselves to be "non religious" in 2001, which is either atheist, agnostic or some variant of those
-This group was the 2nd largest single group after Roman Catholics, which had 43% of the population.
-Atheists rose by 43% in ten years, the only other groups to increase quicker were religious minority groups such as muslims, due to the influx of immigrants to the country

Here's where it gets really interesting. I had always made the assumption that Quebec would have a rather large percentage of atheists compared to the rest of Canada. I assumed that the Quiet Revolution had changed the religious landscape so much that it would be reflected in the data. Wrong. In Quebec, only 6% of people declared themselves to be either atheist or agnostic. While rural communities are certainly a factor in this data, the majority of the province's population is concentrated to a few large cities, where I would have assumed a large percentage of people to have been affected by Quebec's secularism and relatively liberal values. For reference, 84% of the population declared themselves to be Roman Catholics. Even Alberta has a higher percentage of atheists, at 23%, above the national average.

The real shocker for me was looking at British Columbia's results. Atheists and agnostics actually make up a plurality of the population with 35%, far above the national average. In contrast, Roman Catholics are at 17.2%. That's it, I'm moving out to BC!