On June 21, Liberal MP Paul Steckle (Huron-Bruce, Ont.) introduced Bill C-338, an Act to Amend the Criminal Code (procuring a miscarriage after 20 weeks of gestation), in the House of Commons. In doing so, Steckle noted that Canada is one of the few countries that have absolutely no legal protection for the unborn. Steckle’s bill would restrict abortion after 20 weeks’ [...]
In a press conference at the Ottawa Hospital June 27, doctors announced the first-ever non-heart beating organ donation (NHBD) procedure preformed in Canada. The procedure, also known as donation after cardiac death (DCD), typically involves a person who requires a ventilator and, although he has measurable brain function, is determined to have no hope of recovery. The doctors remove the ventilator from [...]
Many stories come across the desk (and computer) that make their way into this paper. Many, many more don’t. It is a difficult decision sometimes figuring out what gets substantial coverage, what deserves analysis or commentary or an editorial, what gets a news brief and what ends up as a sentence or two in the Bits ‘n’ Pieces section on page two. [...]
Interim editor Paul Tuns’s article last month, “Chipping away at abortion,” explained the logic of pro-life incremental strategies in the battle against abortion. The article brings to mind constantly resurfacing, bitter and unsupportable charges by some individuals that the nation’s pro-life organizations have opposed such strategies and persistently followed a self-defeating “all-or-nothing” approach. This, they say, has resulted in the deaths of [...]
Interim Staff On July 17, almost 5,000 young people gathered in the nation’s capital for a Christian youth rally, Cry2. CRY stands for Canada’s Revived Youth. The event was organized by the evangelical youth group 4 My Canada (Motivated Young People for a Strong Canada). The throng on the Hill heard speeches on the sanctity of life and the family, prayed for [...]
A prominent fertility doctor, who provides sex-selection of tourists’ embryos, considers himself to be working in “the happiest field in medicine, where we’re basically helping couples achieve dreams that otherwise they might not be able to achieve.” For the past five years, Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg’s Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles and Las Vegas have offered pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for the purpose [...]
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has announced that it will allow the creation of living human embryos specifically for research purposes. Although pro-life advocates working to kill the Liberal government’s 2002 Assisted Reproduction Act predicted that embryonic stem cell research with “fresh embryos” would be the next move, even though the bill purported to protect against this type of research, [...]
Interim story on Roy McMurtry leads to Canadian Judicial Council complaint The shocking news that Ontario Appeal Court Chief Justice Roy McMurtry may have had a major conflict of interest when hearing a landmark homosexual marriage case in 2003 has stunned the legal community across Ontario. The province’s top judge, who personally took on the politically charged case and hand-picked two other [...]
Compromises needed to get necessary support Interim Staff Raising the age at which children can legally consent to sex, from the current 14 years of age, is something Conservative MPs, such as former Calgary police detective Art Hanger, have been pushing for since many of them came to Ottawa as Reformers in 1993. Right now, adults 30, 40 or 50 years old [...]
On July 19, 2006 days, George W. Bush used his veto power for the first time. The issue on which he finally took out his pen to thwart the excesses of Congress was important: embryonic stem cell research. After the House of Representatives passed a bill that would have mandated federal funding of stem cell research - which requires the killing of [...]
It is hardly surprising that after 35 years of abortion, contraception, and no-fault divorce, marriage is no longer the norm or even the ideal. Hence, the same-sex “marriage†lobby has been successful for the same reason that many of those who defend traditional marriage have failed - the definition of marriage has been lost. To give an adequate defence of marriage, it [...]
Vietnamese pro-lifers become active HO CHI MINH CITY - Vietnam's high abortion rate - 74,000 in Ho Chi Minh City alone in 2005 - has led to the development of an indigenous pro-life movement. Local pro-lifers have set up a cemetery where aborted babies are buried, with more than 400 burials from January to March. Also, more than 1,000 pro-lifers attended a [...]
Canada A Leger Marketing poll has found that the gender gap on the question of opposition to abortion is small: 35 per cent of men and 33 per cent of women say abortion is immoral ...Sue Wilkinsonand Celia Kitzinger, a lesbian couple in England who married in Canada in 2003, want the British government to recognize their marriage. Britain High Court has [...]
Editor-in-chief Paul Tuns interviewed Against Judicial Activism author and Interim columnist Rory Leishman via e-mail The Interim: What is judicial activism and how did it get started? Rory Leishman: Judges engage in judicial activism when they presume to change the law from the bench, rather than exercise judicial restraint by fulfilling their sworn duty as judges to uphold the law as found [...]
Against Judicial Activism: The Decline of Freedom and Democracy in Canada by Rory Leishman (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. 310 pp.) Conservative M.P. Maurice Vellacott found himself in the middle of a storm of controversy after he suggested this past spring that Supreme Court justices play god with the law. He told CBC-TV that, “Beverley McLachlin herself actually said that when (Supreme Court [...]