National Affairs Rory Leishman In an ominous sign of the times, London’s Daily Telegraph published a joint letter to the editor on Jan. 12 in which more than 1,000 priests and eight bishops of the Catholic Church decry the onset of a new age of religious persecution in Britain. Of prime concern to the letter-writers is the determination of the [...]
Shortly after Barack Obama won the 2008 United States presidential election, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan ruefully observed: “Whenever Republicans lose an election, a factional dispute arises about ‘economic issues’ versus ‘moral or social issues.’ ‘Traditionalists’ and ‘libertarians’ blame each other, each claiming Republicans would do better without the other.” Now some libertarians are back at it again, blaming the Republicans’ defeat in last [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman The proponents of traditional marriage in the United States suffered a major setback as voters backed the legalization of same-sex “marriage” in all four states that held referenda on the subject in the November elections. This brings to 10 the total number of states that have legalized same-sex “marriage” either by referendum, legislation or judicial fiat. [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman In a combative campaign speech last December, United States President Barack Obama derided his Republican opponents as unprincipled libertarians: “Their philosophy is simple,” he charged. “We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.” Certainly, there are some selfish conservatives who think that the wealthy and prosperous [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman United States President Barack Obama is an astute political tactician. Unlike his secular advisors, he was quick to recognize that the deletion of any reference to God in the initial draft of the Democratic Party Platform was a political blunder. The great majority of Americans still regard themselves as Christians and expect their leaders to believe [...]
What accounts for the frenzied reaction by advocates of legalized abortion to the private member’s motion introduced by Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth. If passed, M-312 would mandate a committee of the House of Commons to determine if the preponderance of medical evidence is consistent with the declaration in Subsection 223(1) of the Criminal Code that, for the purposes of the law, [...]
What is the proper role of a judge in a constitutional democracy? Prior to the 1970s, there was no dispute over this issue within the legal professions of Canada and the United States: Almost all lawyers, law professors and judges agreed that, in essence, a judge should interpret and apply established legal principles, while respecting the exclusive authority of elected [...]
Over the past 30 years, freedom of religion in Canada has come under increasing attack by unprincipled judicial activists and authoritarian politicians. Now the Supreme Court of Canada and the Legislature of Quebec have taken this proclivity to a new extreme, by arbitrarily decreeing that Christian parents no longer have an inalienable right to shelter their children from anti-Christian propaganda [...]
The Way, a low-budget movie starring Martin Sheen, one of the most radical left-wing activists in Hollywood, has won unstinting praise from conservatives like Laura Ingraham, a prominent talk-show host in the United States. At the conclusion of an interview with Sheen and his son, Emilio Estevez, the movie’s writer and director , Ingraham enthused: “There are not many films that I [...]
If you were incurably ill and facing impending death, would you want your medical team to continue with aggressive and painful medical treatments in the hope of a miracle cure? Or would you prefer to be placed in palliative care to help you through the inevitable dying process? Most people would opt for palliative care. However, sometimes, close family members of [...]
In defense of the pernicious proposition that all mentally competent Canadians should have a legal right to medical assistance in committing suicide, the “expert panel” of the Royal Society of Canada on end-of-life decision making contends, in its recent report, that: “Autonomy (or the capacity for self-determination) is a paramount value to Canadians. Respect for autonomy requires respect for competent individuals’ [...]
Philip Slayton, former dean of law at the University of Western Ontario, is not now and never has been a consistent advocate of judicial restraint, but at least he displays some belated concern over the excesses of judicial activism in his latest book aptly entitled Mighty Judgment, How the Supreme Court of Canada Runs Your Life. As examples of judicial legislation, [...]
As originally conceived by Egerton Ryerson, chief superintendent of education for Upper Canada from 1844 to 1876, the publicly funded schools of English-speaking Canada – Protestant, Catholic and secular – were outstanding. But do these schools still provide a suitable education for most Canadian children? Most definitely not. Over the past 50 years, Canada’s publicly funded schools have succumbed to a [...]
In an article entitled “The two-minus-one pregnancy,” published in The New York Times on Aug. 10, Ruth Padawer examined the case of Jenny, a mother of healthy twins, who had one of her babies aborted because she did not feel up to the responsibility of caring for two new infants. How could any mother justify such lethal selfishness? Jenny explained: “If I [...]
It is, and always has been, a serious criminal offence in Canada for anyone to counsel or assist another person to commit suicide. Time and again, the advocates of euthanasia have vainly tried to get Parliament to change that law. In the most recent attempt, former Bloc Quebecois MP Francine Lalonde introduced a private members’ bill into Parliament in 2009 [...]