Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen (Yale University Press, $39, 225 pages) Works about the bankruptcy of current day liberal ideology are a fairly common subgenre in traditionalist or conservative writing. Nevertheless, Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed stands out in this field. Deneen, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, traces liberalism’s errors back to its founding thinkers, [...]
Light is Right Joe Campbell You can’t be too careful accessing the media. If you relax your critical faculties for even a few seconds, the media can soothe you into accepting the unacceptable. I know, because when a local TV news anchor called the weathercaster a meteorologist, I let it pass. I used to announce the weather when I was [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Following a much-publicized campaign to obtain medical assistance in dying, Aurelia Brouwers, a 29-year-old, Dutch psychiatric patient, killed herself on Jan. 26, by drinking a lethal potion served up by a physician affiliated with a roving Dutch death squad, the Levenseindekliniek (an end-of-life clinic) in The Hague, the Netherlands. Brouwers was not terminally ill. Neither was [...]
Henry VIII One of the differences between a free society and a repressive regime is the right to remain silent. In the 20th century – the darkest in human history – Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and other tyrants required citizens to display their support for the regime or its ideology. In contrast, a free country does not compel its citizens [...]
To the victor go the spoils; fortune favours the bold; who dares, wins. These are just a few of the idioms that convey the enduring connection between victory and audacity. Triumph is often a kind of retrospective blessing upon the prophets of action whose visionary deeds favourably shape the arenas in which they struggle. Those who would win must first have the [...]
My first glimpse of Jordan Peterson was almost a decade ago, when he appeared on TVO’s current affairs show The Agenda with Steve Paikin alongside my friend, the writer Kathy Shaidle. She was on the show arrayed against a dismal group of evangelical atheists, including then-United Church minster Gretta Vosper – the God-botherer against the God-deniers, a hard hour of media labour [...]
Tanya Granic Allen While not part of the official Manning Networking Conference, the Blue Committee.org, a not-for-profit group that seeks to grow Canada’s conservative movement, hosted an event at the Westin Hotel in Ottawa, examining how the Conservative Party could win in urban centers. Joseph Ben-Ami, founding director of BlueCommittee.org, asked how Conservatives can win ridings by appealing to socially [...]
Andrew Bennett, program director for Cardus Law, said culture is about our common life, which itself is bound in the common good, about which state institutions cannot be neutral. Despite some grumbling from social conservatives before the Manning Networking Conference Feb. 8-10, at least five panels examined issues of interest to Canadians on the right concerned with life, family, and [...]
Talk Turkey Josie Luetke I must confess that when I found out about the Canada Summer Jobs program adding an attestation to their application to exclude pro-life groups from getting funding, I did not think anything could be done about it. I complained on Facebook and signed Campaign Life Coalition’s petition, but just accepted that this would be yet another [...]
My Child, My Chance: Guarding and Guiding Your Child’s Identity In the Chaos of Culture and Sex Education by Susan Zuidema (242 pages, $18.87) A Christian, public elementary school teacher, with assistance from an employee in the health care industry, has published a timely book in response to Ontario’s controversial sex ed curriculum. Written by Ontario educator Susan Zuidema with editorial assistance [...]
Tanya Granic Allen was declared the winner of the Feb. 15 Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership debate on TVO after she took on the legacy of former leader Patrick Brown, focused on policies, and directly challenged the record of presumptive frontrunner Christine Elliott. Punditis declared Tanya Granic Allen the debate winner because she articulated a clear vision of her agenda and spoke [...]
Evangelist Billy Graham Evangelist Billy Graham passed away Feb. 21, with no cause of death officially disclosed. Born in a Charlotte, North Carolina farmhouse in 1918, William Franklin Graham would become the most famous Christian evangelist in the world, preaching to hundreds of millions of Christians in the United States and abroad beginning in the 1940s. Over six decades – [...]
Tanya Granic Allen Tanya Granic Allen, a 37-year-old mother of four children and former president of the parents’ rights group Parents As First Educators, announced on Feb. 8, that she intended to run for the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leadership. In an email to PAFE supporters, Granic Allen resigned from the parental rights group in order to run. “I’m stepping [...]
Canada Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer told the Globe and Mail that his party was more tolerant than the Liberal Party of Justin Trudeau pointing to the governing party’s opposition to pro-life Tory MP Rachael Harder chairing the status of women committee, Trudeau’s “values test” for the Canada Summer Jobs program, and the Liberal leader blocking pro-life Grits from running under the [...]
Over the pasts several weeks I have read and reread Stephanie Gray’s book Love Unleashes Life (LifeCycle Books). At the same time, I also had the privilege of attending the U.S. March for Life, which had a very similar theme of “love saves lives.” I was particularly excited by this book because Stephanie Gray has long been a pro-life heroine of mine, [...]