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, [...]
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 [...]