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 [...]
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, [...]
Light is Right Joe Campbell My parents were immigrants. At the end of the Great War, they left Ireland for Canada, and at the beginning of the Great Depression, they had me. I guess every marriage experiences its ups and downs. I’m an immigrant, too. Oh, I didn’t leave Canada for another country. Canada left me for another culture. The [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Over the past few decades, most people in Canada, the United States, Europe, and elsewhere have chosen to rely on their own unaided reason as a guide to morality with the result that they now condone everything from legalized abortion to assisted-suicide, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. John Calvin, the founder of Presbyterianism, would have been [...]
It’s been a long time since we’ve lived through a juicy controversy about art. The last really huge, international scandals that broke across the headlines and inspired debates on TV and in government were at least a generation or more ago, and it’s doubtful that a millennial will recognize names like Karen Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano or Chris Ofili. Subsequent furors [...]