What is essential Good news for once. The Wall Street Journal reported that churches in America and Europe are pushing back against restrictions on worship services during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that they are not the locus of spreading the coronavirus. In other words, they are arguing that churches are safe as long as certain protocols (namely masking, [...]
Alex Schadenberg Special to The Interim It removes the requirement that a person’s natural death must be reasonably foreseeable to qualify for death by lethal injection. It permits a doctor or nurse practitioner to lethally inject a person who is incapable of consenting, if that person was previously approved. This contravenes the Supreme Court of Canada Carter decision which stated that only [...]
By Paul Tuns Two new vaccines aimed to protect people from COVID-19, from Moderna and Pzifer, have been lauded by some U.S. pro-life groups, but still pose ethical problems. In early November, within days of each other, Moderna and Pfizer announced that they were close to getting a vaccine to market as early trials indicated a success rate of protecting 95 per cent [...]
By Oswald Clark and Paul Tuns Despite contesting the election results due to a number of irregularities in the counting and qualification of votes in several states, President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to the most pro-abortion candidate offered by either major party—Joe Biden. Biden, a former senator and vice president, repudiated his lifelong record of opposing taxpayer funding of [...]
Who speaks for the working classes? In Canada and the United States, the holiday honouring workers and the union movement is celebrated on the first Monday of September, as Labour Day, to avoid the radical connotations of May Day. In some parts of Europe, by contrast, May Day is still celebrated with enthusiasm by socialist and far left parties who share [...]
80 years since its outbreak, World War II continues to shape the world: A précis of some of the ideological consequences of the war World War II and one of its main ideological results – the general discrediting of Western traditionalism -- continue to shape events in the world today. Among the long-term effects of the war, there is the ongoing erosion [...]
Canada, which Pat Buchanan once called a “Soviet Canuckistan,” certainly has some serious problems combating the ceaseless self-undermining of its military forces and traditions, but it is also having at least as difficult a time defining a coherent identity for itself. For example, there have been frequent calls to eliminate the traditional oath to Queen Elizabeth and her heirs and successors, [...]
Many of those who are demonstrators against the various international and economic summits conventionally define themselves as anarchists or radical Left. Opposition to capitalism and globalization today is said to belong to the Left. However, it could be argued that some of the profoundest critiques of capitalism, technology, and globalization have historically come from the traditionalist Right (for example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, [...]
The happenstance that Easter Sunday and Earth Day fall within a day of each other in 2019, leads the author to attempt a sketch towards the synthetic nesting of ecological issues within notions of culture and tradition. What are some of the affinities between traditionalist and ecological thinking? The United States and Canada certainly participate today in the worldwide trends to technology [...]
By Mark Wegierski George Parkin Grant (1918-1988) is Canada’s leading traditionalist philosopher. He is a complex, philosophical critic of technology and America. One of George Parkin Grant’s most popular and more accessible books is, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965). That work has remained almost continuously in print in Canada. Lament for a Nation mourns what George Grant [...]
What should the legacy of World War I, and its great battles such as Vimy Ridge, be for Canadians? To many current-day observers, Canada’s participation in the First World War, and the great victory at Vimy Ridge in 1917, may often seem like events that happened several centuries ago. The roaring tide of change in Canada has been so massive, that it [...]
It could be argued that, over the last five decades, Canadian social conservatism has failed to successfully propagandize a “counter-ethic” to the now-prevalent “social-liberal idea of Canada.” The origins of the decline of Canadian social conservatism can be traced to the battles from 1963 to 1968 between Liberal Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson and the staunch Tory John Diefenbaker (Prime Minister from [...]
By Mark Wegierski It is argued that strengthening the provinces and regions in Canada may lead to a more balanced society. While there is no returning to the Old Canada which existed “before the ‘60s,” it is possible that the “New Canada” could reach out to incorporate some better aspects of the Old Canada, to create a new synthesis, “Canada Three,” rather [...]
Rory Leishman In a significant seven-to-two ruling in Masterpiece Cake Shop Ltd. v. Colorado on June 4, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down a ruling by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission that a Christian baker had no right in law to refuse on grounds of sincere religious conviction to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. That baker can count himself [...]
It is argued that some traditionalist remnants in education will be of vital importance to the future of society. In Canada, education is an area formally under the jurisdiction of the respective provinces. So, it is at least theoretically possible that a right-leaning government in a given province could introduce substantial changes in educational policy. However, when premier Mike Harris attempted [...]