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, [...]
Paul Tuns: On March 5, the Ontario Superior Court heard arguments in the case of Campaign Life Coalition and Maeve Roche v. Parliamentary Protective Services (PPS) over the latter’s 2023 prohibition against CLC using signs with abortion victim photography during a press conference on Parliament Hill. In May 2023, CLC had a scheduled press conference the day prior to the National March [...]
Administration dithers on abortion pill review Oswald Clark, U.S. Correspondent: While American pro-lifers have generally supported Donald Trump as a president and candidate despite the fact he says he does not want a federal law banning abortion, there has been a shift in the movement’s leadership that patience is running short with the Trump administration. Donald Trump points to numerous pro-life policies that [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements You have to wonder if Paul Ehrlich ever thought he’d live to 93. The biologist and writer – his initial specialty was butterflies, though his ambitions proved much broader – had his death announced this March to what can only be described as a mix of tributes and mockery. We should, according [...]
Thousands of youth march for life in Paris On Jan. 18, about 10,000 people gathered in front of the ‘iconic’ Invalides palace in Paris, France. (The palace includes the Cathedral of Saint-Louis-des-Invalides; the resting place of Napoleon Bonaparte; and was commissioned as a hospital and retirement home for disabled soldiers by King Louis XIV in 1670.) The National Catholic Register described the [...]
Russell E. Kuykendall, Review: The Omnipotent Child: How to Mold, Strengthen, and Perfect the Developing Child, Fourth Edition by Thomas P. Millar MD (New Westminster, B.C.: Palmer Press, 2005. 241 pp.) Version 1.0.0 In his first edition of The Omnipotent Child in 1983, the child psychiatrist Thomas Millar took on the still-popular approach to child-rearing: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book [...]
John Carpay: Benjami Franklin wrote 250 years ago that “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” For decades, the trend in Canada has been towards an ever-increasing body of laws and regulations, so many that even the most diligent and conscientious businessman, school principal, manufacturer and manager of a [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements At the core of Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s new book Breaking Point: The New Big Shifts Putting Canada at Risk is a simple truth that doesn’t get repeated enough. “Canada is not a love story,” they write. “It is a marriage of convenience, a survival strategy conceived a century and a half [...]
Victor Penney: Sports and smut. I’m not a fan of the combination. In general, mixing anything with sexual perversion is a horrible idea, but not everyone feels the same way, at least on the surface. On Jan. 15th, for example, Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the National Hockey League, was asked about his opinion of Heated Rivalry, the sexually explicit hit series [...]
Paul Tuns: On Feb. 17, Heartbeat International announced that more than 8,000 lives have been saved through the Abortion Pill Rescue Network (APRN) in what it called “a significant milestone in its effort to provide immediate medical care to women who regret beginning a chemical abortion.” APRN connects women who have taken the abortion pill to licensed medical professionals who can prescribe [...]
From the editor’s desk We sent our February edition with its cover story on the link between transgenderism and deadly violence to the printer in the last week of January. The edition started hitting mailboxes around Feb. 7. On Feb. 10, a man who identified as a woman, killed eight people in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., at his family [...]