The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America Cara Fitzpatrick (Basic, $40, 375 pages) With a title like The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America Cara Fitzpatrick’s book could be a victory lap by a right-wing writer at the growth of school choice in recent decades so families can [...]
Paul Tuns: A leaked York Region District School Board memo reveals that the public school board has directed teachers to keep gender transitions of their students secret from their parents. The Sept. 28 memo was leaked to independent journalist Chanel Pfahl, a former educator. It states, “Parents should not be contacted without the student’s consent about any change in identifiers.” The memo, [...]
Interim Staff: On Oct. 13, the Society of Canadian Psychiatry (SocPysch) issued a 13-page brief on Medical Assistance in Dying and mental illness calling for an indefinite pause on expanding eligibility for euthanasia and assisted-suicide to patients suffering solely from mental illness. The organization’s board of directors said the expansion for eligibility which takes effect next March was rushed into and failed [...]
Paul Tuns: Prior to the House of Commons debate on C-314, the Mental Health Protection Act, the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition held a press conference on Oct. 3 featuring three speakers supporting the bill. Anike Morrison spoke in favour of Bill C-314, saying that if euthanasia for mental illness was available when she suffered her worst depression, she might not be here [...]
Paul Tuns: The unanimous support of all Conservatives, Green, and NDP MPs, joined by a handful of Liberals, was not enough to save Bill C-314, the Mental Health Protection Act, from being defeated in the House of Commons, on Oct. 18, in a vote of 167-150. The private member’s bill was introduced by Conservative MP Ed Fast (Abbottsford) in March to turn [...]
NOTE: After a backlash to the policy, Chaplain Brig-Gen Guy Belisle rescinded the policy banning prayer at public ceremonies involving military chaplains. Paul Tuns: The Epoch Times reported on Oct. 11 – one month before Remembrance Day – that Chaplain General Brigadier Guy Belisle sent a memo to all armed forces instructing them to avoid religious prayers at all official functions. Belisle [...]
The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good Alexander William Salter (Catholic University of America Press, $32.95 pb, $97.95 hc, 238 pages) Distributism, popularized at the beginning of the 20th century by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, is an economic system that draws upon Catholic social teaching and emphasizes a human dimension to the economic sphere, although its advocates [...]
With this editorial, we conclude our series surveying the reasons why each of our nation’s national parties should adopt, wholeheartedly, a pro-life platform, and why they should all defend the unborn from the menace of abortion. Having made cases for the Liberals and the New Democrats (and even, in a separate editorial last month, the Greens and the Bloc), we come finally [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Rick McGinnis: I have a theory that we only started thinking seriously about generations after World War II when – in Western countries at least – it became rarer for multiple generations to inhabit the same household. Instead of being divided roughly into “young” and “old” we became obsessed with the small differences between discrete [...]
Paul Tuns: On Oct. 3, the Manitoba NDP won a majority in the provincial election for the first time since 2011, leading pro-lifers to wonder whether the province might reverse course on conscience rights and freedom of speech. The Progressive Conservative government of Brian Pallister, first elected in 2016, introduced what the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition calls the “gold standard” in conscience rights [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind by Melissa S. Kearney (University of Chicago Press, $32.50, 225 pages) For the second time in two years, a long-time argument made by conservatives became mainstream following the publication of a book that digs deep into the data about a social phenomenon that had previously been both controversial [...]
In August of 2023 at the University of Regina, UR Pride Centre for Sexuality and Gender Diversity filed a court application seeking to strike down Saskatchewan’s “Use of Preferred First Name and Pronouns by Students” policy. This policy protects children from being pressured or manipulated (absent parental knowledge and consent) into embarking on a dangerous and futile quest to become the opposite [...]
Paul Tuns: On August 22, then Saskatchewan Minister of Education Dustin Duncan announced the implementation of a parental consent policy to ensure parents and guardians were notified and gave permission to schools before teachers began using a student’s chosen name and pronouns at odds with their biological sex if the student is under 17 years of age. After a Saskatchewan judge temporarily [...]
From the editor’s desk Two recent books, both published by Broadside Books, delve into the roots of today’s woke ideology to describe its origins and march “through the institutions” as Antonio Gramsci called for: The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and The Triumph of Identity Politics by Richard Hanania ($39.50, 270 pages) and America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical [...]
Is freedom of speech dead in Finland? Paivi Rasanen is an elected Member of Parliament in Finland. In 2022, she and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola faced hate-crime charges for the publication of a 2004 booklet which confirmed the biblical truth that marriage is between a man and a woman. A three-judge panel in Helsinki unanimously decided that it was not the business [...]