From the editor’s desk: In the United Kingdom, the House of Lords is debating whether to legalize euthanasia. We have a report on it in “And then there was this” on p. 17. I wanted to highlight one part of the on-going debate on that side of the lake, namely Lord Falconer’s comment during the third committee stage debate that the Terminally [...]
Sporting Life, Victor Penney: I’m laying down the law in my home ahead of the Super Bowl. As a father, it’s my right and duty to lead and set the tone throughout the year, but especially ahead of one of the biggest sporting events on the calendar. As a man, as the head of the household, it falls on me to make [...]
Josie Luetke: Officially, in Canada, there were 326,571 deaths in 2023. If you add the abortion volume for that year to that number, you’re looking at 428,124 recorded deaths. Tallying up abortion (101,553), “MAiD” or “medical assistance in dying” (15,427), (legally recognized) homicide (778), and suicide (approximately 4,447), 28.5 per cent of deaths were not tragic accidents or the sad succumbence to [...]
John Carpay: Darkness has descended upon Canada as Parliament contemplates extending government control over the internet. The Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) became law in 2023, and put all streaming platforms and user-generated content under the authority of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The CRTC now has control over the content produced by Canadian individuals, businesses, charities, and citizens’ groups [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Some of us might have woken up with a shock recently to discover that we are already a quarter of the way through the 21st century. By this point in the last century the old monarchies of Europe had made themselves extinct after a world war of unprecedented carnage, one of them had embarked on [...]
From the editor’s desk As we were ready to go to press, Norman Podhoretz died. He was one of the three most important conservative intellectuals of the American conservative movement of the second half of the 20th century alongside William F. Buckley, founder of National Review, and Irving Kristol, with whom Podhoretz is a founding godfather of neoconservatism. Neoconservatism has come into [...]
Josie Luetke: “You would prefer the human race to endure, right?” “Uh—” “You’re hesitating… Yes?” “Yep, well…I-I don’t know. I-I would—I would…um—” “This is a long hesitation. This is a long hesitation.” “There’s-There’s so many—there’s so many—there’s so many questions implicit in this.” “Should the human race survive?” “Uh…yes, but…” This June 2025 exchange between New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and [...]
John Carpay: Canada was one of the leaders of the international opposition to the Apartheid laws in South Africa, in force from 1948 to 1991. All South Africans were legally classified by race as White, Black, Coloured, or Indian, with laws defining the rights and obligations of each group. Apartheid laws enforced segregation in most spheres of life, including housing, marriage, and [...]
Rory Leishman: The United States Declaration of Independence famously asserts: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” As originally understood in 1776, the phrase “all Men” in this context referred to all humans. In [...]
Sporting Life, Victor Penney: Do you want to know one of the easiest ways to get under the skin of the toughest, most intimidating professional wrestlers on the planet? Call out pro-wrasslin’ for what it is: fake. The outcomes are predetermined and the moves are choreographed, but make no mistake: the athleticism and pain are real, and so is the passion. It’s [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements If you go by what you read or the cultural mood today, we’re doomed. In spite of improvements in life expectation, overall wages, quality of life, consumer goods and nutrition – among a dozen other benchmarks – the sense that we are on the downward slope of a decline persists, a subjective intimation [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice edited by George Delgado (Ignatius Press, $19.95, 254 pages) There is no better person to edit a collection of testimonials about Abortion Pill Reversal (APR) that its creator, Dr. George Delgado. In Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice, Delgado describes how he came about inventing the “game changer” that gives [...]
From the editor’s desk: In October, Compact published a provocative essay by Helen Andrews titled “The Great Feminization” in which she argued that cancel culture is essentially feminine: “Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” The thesis is not Andrews’. She borrowed it from the pseudonymous J. Stone and an essay [...]
Josie Luetke: The sympathetic protagonist trotted out by pro-choicers is the teenager who accidentally gets knocked up. Think Ellen Page in Juno or Shailene Woodley in The Secret Life of the American Teenager (disregarding the bit of trivia that both their characters gave birth). Yet, this stereotype hasn’t reflected reality for a while. According to Statistics Canada, in 1975, girls under 20 [...]
Victor Penney: Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life College basketball has lost one of its impressive figures, and no, it wasn’t a lean, mean, dunking machine — it was a five-foot nun in a wheelchair. I’m talking about Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, who died back on Oct. 9 at the tender age of 106. She was a Sister of Charity [...]