Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of them Admirable George Weigel (Ignatius, $24, 221 pages) George Weigel, the popular Catholic writer and biographer of Pope John Paul II, has collected more than 60 columns, essays and eulogies on (mostly) famous people Weigel knew, sometimes personally, occasionally far afar, who have died. Many of the names [...]
Rory Leishman In an attempt to justify their new, multi-billion dollar, “Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Plan,” the Trudeau Liberals maintain that infants and toddlers generally thrive better under the care and guidance of professional child-care workers than their own parents. Is that right? The Department of Finance claims: “Studies by Canadians Dr. Fraser Mustard and the Honourable Margaret McCain have [...]
Interim Staff After convincing every public school board in Ontario to fly the rainbow pride flag -- the universal emblem of LGBTQ+ rights -- on board and school properties, gay activists focused their attention on the publicly funded Catholic school boards. After the separate boards in Waterloo and Thunder Bay voted earlier this year to begin flying the pride flag in June, [...]
Paul Tuns For the second consecutive year, the National March for Life in Ottawa was affected by the pandemic, although this year they were able to hold a smaller event and march as approximately 500 people attended in-person to hear a smaller program of speakers before marching through the streets in the nation’s capital. Campaign Life Coalition, which was forced to provide [...]
Paul Tuns British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Sandra Wilkinson ruled on April 26 that the name of a second mother must be included as one of three legal parents on the birth certificate of a two-year-old boy, finding that the provincial legislature “did not contemplate polyamorous families” when it amended the Family Law Act (FLA) in 2011. Wilkinson said all three members [...]
Andrea Mrozek Laying out plans for a national daycare system is one thing. Dealing with the reality of implementing those plans is quite another. The federal government is staring down a shocking reality check on both the costs and complexities of a daycare system. The federal government wants to spend $30 billion over five years on a daycare system – landing on [...]
Paul Tuns A new report from the Cardus think tank, “Look Before You Leap,” says the federal government of Justin Trudeau is dramatically underestimating the cost of creating a national daycare plan modeled on Quebec’s $10-a-day plan, leaving provinces on the hook for a much larger share than federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland suggests might be the case. The authors conclude, “the [...]
Harley Price With the death in February of Tom Bethell (1936 – 2021), the refuseniks of what Orwell called the “smelly little orthodoxies contending for our souls” have lost an eloquent and redoubtable champion. Over the course of Bethell’s five decades as a writer (of seven books and hundreds of essays), the malodorous certitudes of political correctness have been piling up to [...]
Abortion advocates exploit pandemic There is a saying “don’t let a crisis go to waste,” which in today’s parlance is commonly applied to economic and diplomatic crises that can be exploited to advance a political agenda. Nowhere is this truer than during our present pandemic and to no organization is it truer than to Planned Parenthood. In addition to the millions of [...]
Do Girls and Women Know They Don’t Have to Go to Planned Parenthood?” Kathryn Jean Lopez National Review Online (April 13) I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a fan of the approach of some — every once in a while I’ll encounter someone shouting about people going to hell and babies being butchered. I definitely favor the hope approach. [...]
Jim Hughes Editor Paul Tuns received the following email from Joe in the middle of April. Hi Paul This is one of the most difficult e-mails I’ve had to write. The time has come, and may be well past the due date, when I must retire as an Interim columnist. I turned 92 in January and am feeling my age increasingly. Too [...]
Paul Tuns From the editor's desk Last month was Joe Campbell’s last as a regular columnist. This month, Jim Hughes, president emeritus of Campaign Life Coalition, writes about Joe’s long-time involvement in the pro-life movement and what his writing has meant to so many. There are many privileges of editing this newspaper, but my greatest pleasure has been to read [...]
William Gairdner Special to The Interim It’s deeply ironic that while our predecessors thought the most important use of human will was to escape slavery to our own harmful appetites and judgements, “choice” is now cited as the most important moral authority for whatever is chosen. It’s as if personal choice makes something good, despite the obvious fact we may choose something [...]
By Paul Tuns On March 4, Manitoba MLA Nahanni Fontaine (NDP, St. John’s) introduced for the third time in six years a private member’s bill, No. 207, The Abortion Protest Buffer Zone Act, which, if passed, would make the province the seventh in Canada to restrict the free speech rights of pro-lifers within the vicinity of an abortion facility. Fontaine told the [...]
Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey By Josie Luetke Is your neighbour’s teenage son going to shoot up a school because he plays violent video games? Short Answer: No. Long Answer: Still no. Is he going to join a gang because he listens to rap? No. The entertainment we consume doesn’t deterministically dictate our path. Piercings, tattoos, and dyed hair [...]