A non-partisan, grassroots organization dedicated to promoting family and traditional marriage in the Kitchener-Waterloo area of Ontario has already been making big political impacts, despite having been in existence for only a short period of time. Defend Traditional Family and Marriage grew out of a merger between two smaller groups that had been attempting to preserve the traditional definition of marriage before [...]
In January, 2003, the House of Commons standing committee on justice and human rights took up the emotional issue of marriage and the demand that its definition be expanded so as to include same-sex relationships. Between January and May 2003, the committee visited 12 different cities covering every region of Canada. It heard 475 witnesses, received 250 briefs and literally thousands of [...]
In January, a study prepared for the Justice Department recommended that polygamy be legalized. Months earlier, in 2005, the president of the Canadian Islamic Congress called polygamy a “positive family force.” Now, a new television series on the American cable giant HBO, entitled Big Love, portrays the polygamous marriage of one man and his three wives. HBO says that the show “explores [...]
National Reporter Marriage activists and critics of judicial activism have yet another reason to be alarmed, after a recent series of provincial court decisions overturning the centuries-old definition of marriage. New information has come to light involving a key judge’s apparent conflict of interest in hearing the issue. Homosexual activists made no secret of their legal strategy of trying to have marriage [...]
The English writer Hilaire Belloc wrote about the Barbarian: a man with a perpetual sneer on his lips, who laughs at the fixed convictions of our inheritance. Paula Adamick, in the January issue of Challenge magazine, quoted Belloc: “We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by [...]
It is not surprising that, in his first encyclical, promulgated on Jan. 25, Pope Benedict XVI examines the relationship between church and state, the meaning of human sexuality and the obligations and prerogatives of Christian life. What is surprising is that he does this only through his reflections on love, the overarching theme of his letter. But if it seems odd that [...]
Genuine choice in childcare is one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s key election promises - and perhaps the most contentious, as his minority government faces off against three socialist parties in the new Parliament. Indeed, the Conservative promise to provide parents a $100 monthly allowance for each child under six years of age became a hot-button issue during the campaign, when two [...]
The Supreme Court of Canada has refused to hear the case of Chris Kempling, in what family supporters and free-speech advocates are calling a serious threat to democratic freedoms. Kempling, a teacher and school counselor in Quesnel, B.C., was disciplined in 1997 by the B.C. College of Teachers for writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper denouncing teaching on homosexuality. [...]
A study conducted for the Canadian federal Justice Department has recommended that Canada ditch its laws banning polygamy. “Criminalization does not address the harms associated with valid foreign polygamous marriages and plural unions, in particular the harms to women,” the report states, as reported by the Canadian Press, which obtained data through the Access to Information Act. “The report therefore recommends that [...]
It was, as we say here, a sight for sore eyes: Prime Minister Paul Martin, story book in hand, sitting on the floor with the kids in the Montessori daycare centre in the tiny crossroads community of Poole’s Corner, P.E.I. He had to do it, of course. Steven Harper had just announced in New Brunswick that the Conservatives would provide parents with [...]
Heather MacNaughton, who chaired the three-panel B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in the mixed judgement of the Port Coquitlam Knights of Columbus v. two lesbians, is the same justice who fined Christian printer Scott Brockie and denied an appeal by Christian teacher Chris Kempling. In 2000, MacNaughton was the adjudicator in a Ontario Human Rights Commission decision against Scott Brockie, a Toronto printer, [...]
Liberal, Conservative approaches differ over the best venue for raising children The Interim “Beer and popcorn.” That’s supposedly what Canadian parents will waste their money on under the Conservative party’s new choice-in-childcare allowance. And that’s what two of Liberal leader Paul Martin’s closest advisers, Scott Reid and John Duffy, were saying about the Conservatives’ “Choice in Childcare” plan. At least, they were [...]
On day one of the election campaign, Stephen Harper was asked about same-sex “marriage” and his response was completely predictable: he would be open to revisiting the issue in the next parliament and that he would allow a free vote. The next day the media dutifully reported that Harper dropped the “divisive” and “controversial” issue of same-sex “marriage” into the election campaign [...]
Linda Burns The Interim Over 150 people gathered at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Walkerton, Ont., for a dinner sponsored by Business for Life Awareness. People of many faiths and political viewpoints joined together to promote and encourage a re-awakening of life and family values in our nation. The keynote speaker was Conservative MP and foreign affairs critic Stockwell Day. In [...]
Tony Gosgnach The Interim The battle to bring back the traditional definition of marriage in Canada is NOT over. That was the message brought loudly and clearly to hundreds of attendees at the 2005 National Pro-Life Conference in Montreal by Pat O’Brien, the independent – and formerly Liberal – MP for the riding of London-Fanshawe, Ont. He spoke along with other Canadian [...]