Canada is religiously diverse and increasingly unaffiliated, with the most recent national census recording Christians, split between Catholic and various Protestant denominations, at just over half the population, religiously unaffiliated Canadians forming the second largest group at over a third, and Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Jewish communities each in the low single digits, figures broadly reflected in Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020.
French Catholic colonization of Quebec from the early seventeenth century and British Protestant settlement of the remaining colonies produced Canada's foundational Catholic-Protestant divide, formalized constitutionally through provisions protecting denominational school rights at Confederation in 1867, a compromise designed specifically to protect the Catholic minority outside Quebec and the Protestant minority within it.
Indigenous First Nations, Metis and Inuit spiritual traditions, encompassing enormous diversity across the country's many distinct peoples and generally centered on relationships with land, animals and ancestral or spirit beings, were subjected to sustained suppression through the Canadian residential school system, operated substantially by Catholic and Protestant churches under government mandate from the 1880s until the last school closed in 1996, a system whose documented abuses a 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission characterized as cultural genocide.