At The Interim’s 25th anniversary dinner, founding editor Jim Hughes acknowledged a number of people who have made the paper what it is today. He mentioned some of the old ad sales people, the paper’s builders, financial contributors and others whose work made the paper possible. We are here today because of their selfless work and generosity. We stand on the shoulders of [...]
An obscure section of C-10, An Act to Amend the Income Tax Act, could strip obscene or extremely violent films of tax credits. The changes were first proposed (word for word) in a 2003 position paper drafted by then Liberal heritage minister Sheila Copps and were re-introduced by the Conservative government last year. Parliament passed the amendments without opposition from the Liberal party [...]
Texas law enforcement authorities removed 416 children from a fundamentalist Mormon compound after a 16-year-old girl complained of sexual and physical abuse. The girl claimed she was forced against her will to marry a 49-year-old man and engage in sexual relations. The man, the teenage girl and the children are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. [...]
Mr. Justice Michel Bastarache, who retires from the Supreme Court of Canada on June 30, was an excellent judge when he stuck to upholding the law. But alas, he did not always do so. Like most of his colleagues on the court over the past 25 years, he repeatedly encroached upon the legislative powers of Parliament and the provincial legislatures. Granted, the [...]
During an interview on the CBC radio show Cross Country Checkup in March, Jocelyn Downie, the Canada research chair in health, law and policy from Dalhousie University, stated she knew that new legislation was being drafted to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada. Downie also said a new test case had been drafted to challenge the Criminal Code prohibitions of euthanasia via [...]
If we could see into the heart of most Canadians, I believe we would see a little goddess called “see-no-evil” perched prominently on their souls. I think the same goddess is carried by multitudes of Christians into services every Sunday. It has been observed that if you keep telling people the same lie over and over again, it will finally be accepted [...]
Why “Reflections on the Revolution”? It’s a direct reference to Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke’s prescient 1790 critique of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment that informed it. Burke foresaw the mob rule that culminated in Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. He warned that if the democratic principle were allowed to run without check or limit, the French would lose freedom [...]
I learned long ago that truth-telling is fundamental to being pro-life. And I’m forever learning how abortion advocacy is disconnected from the truth. I was nine when I became pro-life, 10 when I realized that meant without exceptions, 11 when I became an activist and 15 when Michele Landsberg penned something I’d rather not have read. In her Globe and Mail article, “‘Fake [...]
In 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush announced his administration would allocate an unprecedented $15 billion to PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. The enormous sum was three times greater than the comparable AIDS assistance provided by the previous Clinton administration. One might have thought that the world’s leading anti-AIDS activists would [...]
In March, we reported that a “talking points” memo issued by the Justice Department instructed Conservative MPs to keep their mouths shut about Canada’s human rights commissions, private members’ bills on the HRC and specific cases before the commissions at the time.M-446, a private member’s motion from Keith Martin (Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca) that seeks to limit the scope of HRC complaints to [...]
In the 1960s, the pro-abortion movement needed a rhetorical edge in their battle against common sense. To make an unspeakable act legal, they needed a label that was respectable; thus, the campaign for abortion became the campaign for “choice.”It was an ingenious maneuver: they no longer had to promote abortion itself, but merely had to characterize it as an unattractive, but necessary, [...]
Canada The Catholic Organization for Life and Family has issued a letter urging Canadians to do whatever is possible to support Bill C-484, the Unborn Victims of Crime Act, which is currently awaiting justice and human rights committee hearings after passing Second Reading in early March. COLF says: “Bill C-484 is a welcome development, because it recognizes, at least in the case of violent [...]
Dedicated, devoted, passionate, courageous, serious, knowledgeable, well read, always on the job, always available, always thinking pro-life. Those are just some of the words those who knew him are using to describe Father Jim Whalen, who passed away suddenly on Feb. 24 while doing one of the things he loved best – conducting a parish pro-life mission. Whalen was the only national [...]
And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater and before there was Barry Goldwater, there was National Review and before there was National Review, there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind and the spark in 1980 became a conflagration. – George F. Will When I started high school in 1977, my circle of friends ate lunch in [...]
Convicted child killer Robert Latimer was granted day parole by an appeal board in February and then released in mid-March. Latimer, who killed his daughter Tracy, who had cerebral palsy, in 1993 and was convicted by two juries of second-degree murder, began his 10-25 year sentence in 2001, after the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision. In December, the National Parole [...]