Paul Tuns British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Sandra Wilkinson ruled on April 26 that the name of a second mother must be included as one of three legal parents on the birth certificate of a two-year-old boy, finding that the provincial legislature “did not contemplate polyamorous families” when it amended the Family Law Act (FLA) in 2011. Wilkinson said all three members [...]
Andrea Mrozek Laying out plans for a national daycare system is one thing. Dealing with the reality of implementing those plans is quite another. The federal government is staring down a shocking reality check on both the costs and complexities of a daycare system. The federal government wants to spend $30 billion over five years on a daycare system – landing on [...]
Paul Tuns A new report from the Cardus think tank, “Look Before You Leap,” says the federal government of Justin Trudeau is dramatically underestimating the cost of creating a national daycare plan modeled on Quebec’s $10-a-day plan, leaving provinces on the hook for a much larger share than federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland suggests might be the case. The authors conclude, “the [...]
Abortion advocates exploit pandemic There is a saying “don’t let a crisis go to waste,” which in today’s parlance is commonly applied to economic and diplomatic crises that can be exploited to advance a political agenda. Nowhere is this truer than during our present pandemic and to no organization is it truer than to Planned Parenthood. In addition to the millions of [...]
Do Girls and Women Know They Don’t Have to Go to Planned Parenthood?” Kathryn Jean Lopez National Review Online (April 13) I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a fan of the approach of some — every once in a while I’ll encounter someone shouting about people going to hell and babies being butchered. I definitely favor the hope approach. [...]
Paul Tuns From the editor's desk Last month was Joe Campbell’s last as a regular columnist. This month, Jim Hughes, president emeritus of Campaign Life Coalition, writes about Joe’s long-time involvement in the pro-life movement and what his writing has meant to so many. There are many privileges of editing this newspaper, but my greatest pleasure has been to read [...]
William Gairdner Special to The Interim It’s deeply ironic that while our predecessors thought the most important use of human will was to escape slavery to our own harmful appetites and judgements, “choice” is now cited as the most important moral authority for whatever is chosen. It’s as if personal choice makes something good, despite the obvious fact we may choose something [...]
By Paul Tuns On March 4, Manitoba MLA Nahanni Fontaine (NDP, St. John’s) introduced for the third time in six years a private member’s bill, No. 207, The Abortion Protest Buffer Zone Act, which, if passed, would make the province the seventh in Canada to restrict the free speech rights of pro-lifers within the vicinity of an abortion facility. Fontaine told the [...]
Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey By Josie Luetke Is your neighbour’s teenage son going to shoot up a school because he plays violent video games? Short Answer: No. Long Answer: Still no. Is he going to join a gang because he listens to rap? No. The entertainment we consume doesn’t deterministically dictate our path. Piercings, tattoos, and dyed hair [...]
By Rory Leishman In a tragic case stemming from the gender-identity craze that has engulfed much of North America and Western Europe, the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled on March 19 that the father of a transgender child must remain in jail pending trial in April on charges of criminal contempt of court. In court documents, the father is designated C.D., his [...]
Twenty years is not a long time. In the United States, it is a period that could see as few as three presidents. Shorter than the term of most mortgages, a pair of decades is certainly not a timeframe in which one should expect, in healthy societies, radical changes to fundamental categories and definitions. And yet imagine the shock that someone describing [...]
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism Benjamin M. Friedman (Knopf, $50, 534 pages) Benjamin M. Friedman, a former chairman of the Harvard economics department, has written a masterful and accessible intellectual history showing, not as R.H. Tawney did in his book of the same title in the early 1900s about the influence of religion on economics but rather how religious ideas have [...]
Donald DeMarco Commentary An embarrassing number of “Catholics” have tied themselves in academic knots attempting to convince people that they can both express their religious faith and at the same time negate it while offering a coherent political strategy. John Milloy is a former Liberal Ontario MPP and cabinet minister. He currently serves as the director of the Centre for Public Ethics [...]
Interim Staff The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has allowed abortion drugs to be dispensed by mail, with acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock declaring it safe to allow mifepristone, the first half of the chemical abortion drug RU-486, to be taken at home without medical supervision, in order to reduce the risk of contracting COVID-19 by minimizing visits to doctors’ offices. [...]
By Andrew Lawton Saskatchewan Conservative member of parliament Cathay Wagantall’s private member’s bill to criminalize sex-selective abortion is noble, but it should be approached with caution. The bill confronts a horrific reality, but also poses moral challenges to the pro-life movement. “Above all, I’m bringing this bill forward in defense of pre-born Canadian girls and boys who are aborted simply due to [...]