Tom Wolfe (Photo Rick McGinnis) Reading the obituaries for writer Tom Wolfe, who died last month, it’s hard not to think of the overused word “enigmatic,” which seems odd for a man who was neither reclusive nor reticent with his opinions. Wolfe flamboyantly embodied a collection of contradictions that only seem unusual now that his sort of public intellectual seems [...]
Talk Turkey Josie Luetke On March 20, 2017, famed white supremacist Richard Spencer declared, “We should recognize that the pro-life movement – this is not the alt-right, this has nothing in common with identitarians … Pro-lifers want to be radically dysgenic, egalitarian, multi-racial human rights thumpers – and they’re not us.” In response, I commented on my Facebook wall, “Well, [...]
Maybe it’s some remnant of our tribal past, but it’s hard for us to leave behind some impulse to fear and vilify whoever lives one village over, beyond the river or in the next valley. We might think we’re sophisticated, cosmopolitan people, but this nascent tribalism is never far from the surface, and I saw it re-emerge with a roar during recent [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Paul McHugh, University Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry in the John Hopkins School of Medicine, relates in Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory and Mind, that he has often put this question to himself and others over the past few decades, having “repeatedly witnessed how faddish misdirections of thought and therapeutic practice sweep across the field to [...]
Law Matters John Carpay Banning peaceful pro-life protests near abortion facilities is not about freedom of expression, claimed Alberta’s Health Minister Sarah Hoffman at a recent news conference. Yet she went on to say that her new law has been carefully crafted to withstand a constitutional challenge. Why is the Minister preparing to withstand a constitutional challenge? Because she knows [...]
Light is Right Joe Campbell Is it wrong to discriminate? I hope not, because I do it all the time. I discriminate on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation and religion, among other grounds. I hate cassava and plantains, so I refuse to patronize African restaurants. It’s not the African cooks I discriminate against. It’s their cooking. You know, [...]
Light is Right Joe Campbell Sociologists tell us that the makeup of the family is changing. My friend Dingwall believes the sociologists are right. He’s seen the changes in his own neighbourhood. There are several different family forms within walking distance of Dingwall’s home. Down the street is a married couple with three cars, two cats, a dog, and a [...]
Talk Turkey Josie Luetke March 10 was quite the emotional roller coaster. The widely-anticipated release of the Ontario PC leadership election results was delayed. Rumours swirled that Tanya Granic Allen had placed in third, and Doug Ford and Christine Elliott were neck and neck and battling it out in the backrooms. Then, out of Saskatchewan: News that Brad Trost had [...]
Law Matters John Carpay On March 19, the University of Alberta held a public event to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Vriend v. Alberta. In 1998, the court ordered Alberta to add “sexual orientation” to its human rights legislation. When pondering the Vriend ruling, it is important to remember that, during the 1990s, activists across Canada were [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman On Jan. 31, the Ontario Divisional Court held in The Christian Medical and Dental Society of Canada v. College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, that pro-life physicians have no constitutional right to refuse to collaborate in killing or assisting in the death of a suicidal patient upon request. Who bears primary responsibility for this appalling [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]