Paul Tuns: Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland tabled the federal budget on April 7 and most media coverage focused on the size of the deficit, measures to address the housing affordability crisis, new defense spending and a new dental program, and tax increases for large businesses and the wealthy. But there are a number of anti-life and anti-family initiatives in the budget that [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements I’m sure it’s not just because I have COVID as I write this, but I’ve found it hard to escape the sensation that modern life – society, culture, whatever you want to call it – is a lot less fun that it used to be, even if the circumstances of the last two [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey The Canadian government, in consultation with “experts,” is presently determining “how MAID can be provided safely to those whose only medical condition is a mental illness.” In less than a year, on March17, 2023, they will become eligible for euthanasia, deceptively referred to as “medical assistance in dying,” even though the only [...]
Paul Tuns In February 2021, the British Columbia Ministry of Health defunded the Delta Hospice Society (DHS) and expropriated its ten-bed hospice building because it refused to participate in euthanasia killing. The Delta Health Authority took over its premises at the Irene Thomas Hospice in order to provide medicalized end-of-life killing last year, with NDP Health Minister Adrian Dix insisting it was [...]
Review: Jacob Mchangama (Basic Books, $40, 514 pages) Jacob Mchangama’s massive but readable and spirited defense of Free Speech is a must-read for anyone interested in this important and increasingly contentious topic. Mcchangama notes that free speech’s origins go back further than the U.S. First Amendment or the Enlightenment. Rather, they have roots in antiquity. Pericles, he notes, extolled the virtues of [...]
From the editor’s desk: You probably saw that during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, she refused to answer what a woman is. Joe Biden appointed Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court because she was a black woman, the sole qualification Biden outlined for his first Supreme Court appointment when he was running for president. Asked if she agreed with the late Justice [...]
Jed Perl (Knopf, $27, 161 pages): Long-time critic Jed Perl (The New York Review of Books, The New Republic) has slim new volume, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts that is being described in many reviews as a salvo against relevancy. Perl, say these reviewers, defends art-for -art’s sake. Up to a point that this is true. Roger Scruton says [...]
Paul Tuns Review: Roger Scruton, an English philosopher who died in 2020, wrote more than 50 books on topics such as art, politics, and philosophy. He started a serious intellectual journal (The Salisbury Review), and established underground academic networks in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. He was knighted in 2016, received three awards of distinction in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and [...]
Canadian Conservatives and Ontario voters will have the opportunity to do something heroic in the next few months: defend preborn children. As we report on page two, there could be as many as four pro-life candidates seeking the Conservative Party of Canada leadership. On the same page we report on another positive development, the rise of two new Ontario parties led by [...]
Interim Staff : Under the “Better Regulations for British Columbia” initiative, provincial bureaucrats in B.C. are obligated to take an annual inventory of government regulations to excise any instances of “gendered language.” After removing more than 600 such terms in 2021, it excised 741 more “instances of outdated gendered language” in 138 regulations this year. The changes took effect on March 30. [...]
Paul Tuns: Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland tabled the federal budget on April 7 and most media coverage focused on the size of the deficit, measures to address the housing affordability crisis, new defense spending and a new dental program, and tax increases for large businesses and the wealthy. But there are a number of anti-life and anti-family initiatives in the budget that [...]
Paul Tuns: Ontario Premier Doug Ford signed a deal with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to become the last province to join the federal government’s plan for $10-a-day daycare. While seven provinces and territories inked deals before the September 2021 federal election and all were signed onto it before the end of the year except Ontario, Ford was waiting to announce his province’s agreement [...]
Paul Tuns: The 43rd Ontario general election will be held June 2, and Ontario pro-lifers may have more choice in supportable candidates than they’ve had since the height of the Family Coalition Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In an eblast to supporters in early January, Campaign Life Coalition director of political operations Jack Fonseca said there could be three [...]
Seventy-five years ago, an English poet described what he called “the modern problem:” that is, “of living in a society in which men are no longer supported by tradition without being aware of it.” The individual who “wishes to bring order and coherence” into his mental life and inner experience must therefore do “for himself what in previous ages had been done [...]
Paul Tuns: As everyone knows, the price of housing -- both renting and buying a place to live -- is skyrocketing across the country. The issue has seized politicians with the Trudeau budget introducing no less than 17 budget measures to address housing affordability and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland saying during her budget speech that out-of-control housing prices is an “intergenerational injustice.” [...]