Let us be frank: This year's federal election campaign marked another severe setback for the pro-life movement. The lowest point came on Sept. 29, when Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe reiterated the time-worn canard that the Harper Conservatives harbour a secret agenda. Specifically, he charged: "There is every reason to believe that a Harper majority government would reopen wide the [...]
Pro-life physicians in Ontario should beware: The Ontario Human Rights Commission has served notice that any physician who refuses to perform an abortion could be charged with violating the ban on discrimination on the basis of sex in section 1 of the Ontario Human Rights Code. Section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees “freedom of conscience [...]
During an address at a campaign rally in Ohio on March 2, Barack Obama professed: “I am a Christian. I am a devout Christian. I pray to Jesus every night and try to go to church as much as I can when they’re not working me.” Obama regretted that he has been too busy during the election campaign to attend church on [...]
Lorne Gunter, a senior columnist with the Edmonton Journal, is one of Canada’s most prominent and distinguished journalists. Unlike the great majority of his fellow journalists and intellectuals, he understands that abortion is morally wrong and that the difference between right and wrong is a matter of truth, not arbitrary personal taste. However, Gunter is a libertarian. His commitment to that [...]
Mr. Justice Michel Bastarache, who retires from the Supreme Court of Canada on June 30, was an excellent judge when he stuck to upholding the law. But alas, he did not always do so. Like most of his colleagues on the court over the past 25 years, he repeatedly encroached upon the legislative powers of Parliament and the provincial legislatures. Granted, the [...]
In 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush announced his administration would allocate an unprecedented $15 billion to PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. The enormous sum was three times greater than the comparable AIDS assistance provided by the previous Clinton administration. One might have thought that the world’s leading anti-AIDS activists would [...]
On Feb. 13, the members of St. John’s Shaughnessy Church in Vancouver set a good example for all faithful Anglicans by resolving to leave the Anglican Church of Canada, rather than remain under the authority of a heretical bishop. The vote was not even close. By the overwhelming margin of 475-11 (with nine abstentions), the congregation formally renounced the authority [...]
Every federal and provincial human rights code in Canada prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, so why do faithful Christians not take advantage of these laws to protect themselves from anti-Christian discrimination? To anyone who is at all familiar with human rights litigation, the answer is, or should be, obvious: Canada’s human rights codes are a two-edged sword that [...]
For a striking illustration of the repression of freedom of religion and freedom of expression in Canada, consider the plight of Stephen Boissoin, an erstwhile Baptist minister in Alberta. In a letter to the editor of the Red Deer Advocate published on June 17, 2002, Boissoin denounced the indoctrination of children in the public schools by proponents of the notion that homosexuality [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman In a remarkable article entitled, “New Life Matters,” which was published in the National Poston Nov. 6, Margaret Somerville, the founding director of the Centre for Law, Ethics and Medicine at McGill University, acknowledged: “The fetus is a new human life” and she added: “That matters ethically and should matter legally.” Quite so. Somerville advanced this [...]
On a bid to divide and confuse the public on the issue of abortion, some pro-abortion zealots have taken to asking pro-lifers how much jail time they think a mother should serve for procuring an abortion for her child. In response, many pro-lifers have been tongue-tied and for good reason: the question is not amenable to any simple answer. The Criminal Code [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman In a 19th-century classic, the eminent philosopher John Stuart Mill admonished parents not to hand over the education of their children to the state. He warned: “A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases [...]
Time and again, the proponents of traditional marriage and the natural family warned that changing the legal definition of marriage to accommodate same-sex couples could also lead to the legalization of polygamy. Former Liberal justice minister Irwin Cotler disagreed. He insisted that the practices of polygamy, bigamy and incest were criminal offences in Canada and would continue to be. Alas, Cotler’s assurance [...]
Pro-abortion party leaders will thwart pro-life nominations HOW IT WORKS For the next several months, voters in Ontario will be subjected to a government-financed propaganda campaign in favour of a mixed-member system of proportional representation. Pro-life voters should be wary of this ill-considered initiative of Ontario’s Liberal government. In a bid for votes during the last Ontario election in 2003, Liberal leader [...]
In a landmark, five-to-four ruling in Gonzalez v. Carhart on April 18, the United States Supreme Court upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act which the Congress enacted and President George W. Bush signed into law in 2003. In reasons for the majority in Carhart, Mr. Justice Anthony Kennedy described partial-birth abortion (also known as intact dilation and evacuation) as a procedure in which an [...]