But there is hope that new batch will be better While pro-life leaders are delighted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s elevation of Justice Russell Brown from the Alberta Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, trendy proponents of judicial activism are appalled, and understandably so: Brown subscribes to the traditional judicial doctrine that judges should refrain from legislating from the [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Given the dramatic drop in birth rates throughout most of the world over the past 50 years, it is amazing that so many doom-and-gloom academics still cling to the false and pernicious notion of global overpopulation. Prominent among these persistent doomsayers is Stephen Emmott, professor of computational science at Oxford University. In his recently published and [...]
Gay marriage comes to America courtesy of five judges National Affairs Rory Leishman In Obergefell v. Hodges.on.June 26, the United States Supreme Court endorsed.the manifestly preposterous argument that the provision in the Fifth and 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law” implies that same-sex couples have [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Pro-lifers across Canada have been dismayed by the decision of Michael Coren to endorse same-sex “marriage” and leave the Catholic Church. What could have led this erstwhile champion of the Catholic Church and the traditional principles of Judeo-Christian morality so sadly astray? When Coren first disclosed that he had “moved on” in his thinking on same-sex [...]
Rory Leishman The issue was brought before the Court by Alain Simoneau, a professed atheist in Saguenay, a municipality in the Lac-St.-Jean (Maria Chapdelaine) region of northern Quebec. In 2006, Simoneau filed a complaint against the municipality with the Quebec Commission des droits de la personne on the ground that the longstanding practice of reciting a Christian prayer at the [...]
Experts on sexual health ranging from the executive director of the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada to the head of adolescent medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto have lauded the new sex-education curriculum imposed on all elementary schools in Ontario. Does it follow that concerned parents have no reasonable basis for alarm? Definitely not. Notwithstanding the assurances [...]
William D. Gairdner, prolific author of The War on the Family, The Trouble with Canada, and several other penetrating publications, is one of the most influential conservative intellectuals in North America. In his latest book, The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives will Never, Ever Agree, he explains how the ideological divide between left- and right-wingers in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere in the [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman With the precedent-shattering ruling in Carter v. Canada on Feb. 6, nine robed dictators on the Supreme Court of Canada not only struck down the longstanding ban on physician-assisted suicide in the Criminal Code: they also delivered a lethal blow to democracy and the rule of law in Canada. Consider the evidence: Gloria Taylor, the now [...]
With the precedent-shattering ruling in Carter v. Canada on Feb. 6, nine robed dictators on the Supreme Court of Canada not only struck down the longstanding ban on physician-assisted suicide in the Criminal Code: They also delivered a lethal blow to democracy and the rule of law in Canada. Consider the evidence: Gloria Taylor, the now deceased person who initiated the Carter case, was tragically afflicted with amyotrophic [...]
In “End of Life Decision Making,” a report issued in 2011, a so-called “expert panel” appointed by the Royal Society of Canada assured Canadians: “The evidence does not support claims that decriminalizing voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide poses a threat to vulnerable people, or that decriminalization will lead us down a slippery slope from assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia to non-voluntary or [...]
Dr. Atul Gawande is a renowned surgeon, public-health researcher and medical professor at Harvard. His latest book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, contains many valuable suggestions for improving the care and treatment of terminally ill patients nearing the end of life. To begin with, Gawande notes that as recently as 1945, most deaths in the United States, Canada, and [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Over the past 50 years in North America, faithful Christians – that is to say, those who look to Sacred Scripture as the ultimate authority on all questions of faith and morality – have endured one political calamity after another. In the United States, the process came to an early climax in 1973 with the calamitous [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Prior to the 1960s, the great majority of Canadians deplored the immorality of fornication, adultery and abortion. Tommy Douglas, founding leader of the New Democratic Party, was no exception. In his master’s thesis in sociology for McMaster University in 1933, he called for the sterilization of “mentally defective” women on the ground that they are prone [...]
Sue Rodriguez (left) and Lee Carter (right) In the 1993 Rodriguez case, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the constitutional validity of the ban on assisted suicide in section 241(b) of the Criminal Code. Since then, advocates of so-called death with dignity have made several failed attempts to legalize assisted suicide by means of a private-member’s bill; most recently in 2010, when [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Among proponents of judicial restraint, Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court is widely esteemed as one of the most brilliant, learned and principled judges in the English-speaking world. Bruce Allen Murphy disagrees. In Scalia: A Court of One, he sides with the partisans of judicial activism who deride Scalia as a vainglorious hypocrite who [...]