Tanis Cortens, Feature Writer: Over the past year, six Canadian hospitals have experienced decreases in maternity care availability. Peace Arch Hospital in White Rock, B.C., has a maternity diversion in place as of this writing: Expectant mothers will have to deliver their babies at other hospitals between March 12 and 18, marking the ward’s eighth temporary closure since December. Also in B.C., Ridge [...]
Our cover story and editorial this month is about artificial intelligence (AI), and as the Marxists say, it is not a coincidence that we are publishing this series of articles and commentary the month after we wrote about the significance of imago dei. AI presents an existential threat to humanity, but even if it does not wipe out mankind, it still represents [...]
Paul Tuns: Artificial intelligence (AI) is celebrated by its boosters as a game-changing innovation that promises not merely greater efficiency and convenience, but solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges and problems. As Marc Andreesson, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, says, “AI will save the world.” AI’s critics warn that it creates new problems from widespread unemployment to an existential risk to the continued [...]
Consider a first-year university student writing a paper at the end of the term. The task is daunting, and a tumult of emotions besets the young writer as he sits down to do his work. He is excited by the swirl of nascent ideas and by a handful of what sound, in his head, like fine phrases. But as the work gets [...]
Editor’s Note: The Interim’s Paul Tuns interviewed Maria Slykerman after she retired as head of CLC Manitoba on Dec. 31, 2025. Paul Tuns: How did you become involved in the pro-life movement and Campaign Life Coalition? Maria Slykerman: My husband Niel and I were always pro-life, but we became involved with the pro-life movement in 1989. At that time someone asked us [...]
Donald DeMarco: Traditionally, the word ‘choice’ was always connected with that which is chosen. It never stood alone. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare states, “There’s small choice in rotten apples.” In Titus Andronicus, he states, “Come, and take choice of all my library/ and so beguile thy sorrow.” In the first instance, choice is suspended when confronted with nothing but [...]
Mary Zwicker, European Correspondent: The United Kingdom is in the midst of an ongoing battle to legalize assisted suicide. In October 2024, Labour party MP Kim Leadbeater introduced the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, a Private Member’s Bill, which proposes to legalize assisted-suicide in England and Wales for terminally ill adults under certain conditions. The bill is now stalled in the [...]
Mary Zwicker, European Correspondent: Several lobbying groups are pushing the Canadian government to expand its Medical Assistance in Dying laws to include mature minors, citing various European countries as examples of how it could be done. “Sadly, once killing by euthanasia becomes a legal option the law will continue to expand,” said Alex Schadenberg, executive director for the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. “There is [...]
Paul Tuns: On March 18, Alberta Minister of Justice Mickey Amery introduced Bill 18, the Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act, which, if passed, will restrict euthanasia in the province. Bill 18 would require individuals to have a 12-month terminal prognosis, thus limiting euthanasia in the province to Track 1 approval (those with a reasonably foreseeable death). By banning Track [...]
Paul Tuns: Last fall, the Quebec government tabled a proposed provincial constitution that, if enacted, would enshrine “freedom to have an abortion” as a right in the province. After a backlash from pro-abortion activists who did not want abortion mentioned in the constitution because it would become a lightning rod for pro-life activism, Quebec Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette announced on Feb. 20, [...]
Paul Tuns: On Feb. 18, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ordered Barry Neufeld, a former Chilliwack, British Columbia school trustee, to pay $750,000 to a teacher’s union for his insistence that there are only two genders. The BC HRT decision ruled that Neufeld made discriminatory comments against LGBTQ teachers over a five-year period in his social media posts. The Tribunal’s decision said, [...]
Mary Zwicker, European Correspondent: The United Kingdom put an end to a clinical trial that would have tested the effects of puberty blockers on children as young as 10-years-old. On Feb. 20, the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. announced the halt of a proposed clinical trial of puberty blockers on minors after the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) voiced [...]
Interim Staff: On March 18, the Ontario Court of Appeals upheld a Superior Court decision in favour of the City of Hamilton which censored a Christian Heritage Party of Canada advertisement defining a woman, that was intended for bus shelters in the southwestern Ontario city. In January 2023, CHP Canada attempted to purchase advertising space in bus shelters in Hamilton for a [...]
The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters Diane Coyle (Princeton, $41, 306 pages) Economist Diane Coyle argues that traditional economics metrics like Gross Domestic Product and the System of National Accounts, important as they were in helping policy-makers and economists understand material well-being, are inadequate to measure complex modern economies and thus economists are unable to answer the vital question: “Are things [...]
Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $56 hc or $38 pb in August, 531 pages) Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys have written a remarkable biography of a poet, Constantine Cavafy, who lived, in their own admission, an unremarkable life, by writing it thematically rather than linearly. Cavafy was born into a Greek family in Alexandria, [...]