Paul Tuns: A leaked York Region District School Board memo reveals that the public school board has directed teachers to keep gender transitions of their students secret from their parents. The Sept. 28 memo was leaked to independent journalist Chanel Pfahl, a former educator. It states, “Parents should not be contacted without the student’s consent about any change in identifiers.” The memo, [...]
The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good Alexander William Salter (Catholic University of America Press, $32.95 pb, $97.95 hc, 238 pages) Distributism, popularized at the beginning of the 20th century by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, is an economic system that draws upon Catholic social teaching and emphasizes a human dimension to the economic sphere, although its advocates [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Rick McGinnis: I have a theory that we only started thinking seriously about generations after World War II when – in Western countries at least – it became rarer for multiple generations to inhabit the same household. Instead of being divided roughly into “young” and “old” we became obsessed with the small differences between discrete [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind by Melissa S. Kearney (University of Chicago Press, $32.50, 225 pages) For the second time in two years, a long-time argument made by conservatives became mainstream following the publication of a book that digs deep into the data about a social phenomenon that had previously been both controversial [...]
In August of 2023 at the University of Regina, UR Pride Centre for Sexuality and Gender Diversity filed a court application seeking to strike down Saskatchewan’s “Use of Preferred First Name and Pronouns by Students” policy. This policy protects children from being pressured or manipulated (absent parental knowledge and consent) into embarking on a dangerous and futile quest to become the opposite [...]
Paul Tuns: On August 22, then Saskatchewan Minister of Education Dustin Duncan announced the implementation of a parental consent policy to ensure parents and guardians were notified and gave permission to schools before teachers began using a student’s chosen name and pronouns at odds with their biological sex if the student is under 17 years of age. After a Saskatchewan judge temporarily [...]
From the editor’s desk Two recent books, both published by Broadside Books, delve into the roots of today’s woke ideology to describe its origins and march “through the institutions” as Antonio Gramsci called for: The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and The Triumph of Identity Politics by Richard Hanania ($39.50, 270 pages) and America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical [...]
John Carpay: Judging by Canadians’ overwhelming compliance with lockdowns, vaccine passports, and travel restrictions since March of 2020, it unfortunately seems that most Canadians meet authoritarianism with unquestioning obedience. University of Manitoba psychology professor Robert Altemeyer argues that those with an authoritarian personality are submissive even to authority figures who are dishonest, corrupt, and inept. They persist in their belief that their [...]
Donald DeMarco: In the novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan poses a soul-searching question to his brother, one that over time has invited no end of comment. “Suppose,” he asks, “that you are building up a fabric of human destiny with the object of making people happy at last and giving them peace and rest, but that in order to do so it [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Social media as we know it is nearly a quarter century old, and by now I think we have some idea of its dangers as well as its benefits. There was a reminder of those dangers earlier this year – just one of many we get, and one that you’re likely to miss [...]
Joanna Alphonso: Lucy Letby, Elizabeth Wettlaufer, and Charles Edmund Cullen all had something in common: they were all registered nurses who killed their patients. Lucy Letby, Registered Nurse, Chester, U.K. Lucy Letby, a 33-year-old registered nurse in the United Kingdom, was convicted in August for her murder spree of seven babies over the span of two years at the Countess of Chester [...]
Paul Tuns: On Sept. 15, Christian Heritage Party leader Rod Taylor held a press conference to elucidate where the party stands on issues other than abortion while committing itself to “the protection of innocent human life from conception until natural death, a position we still hold . . . and on this position we stand alone.” Held in the Ottawa Press Gallery [...]
While this current series of editorial confines itself to national parties, it is clearly the case that boutique political entities—like the Green Party—and regional ones—like the Bloc Québécois—should abandon their advocacy of abortion as well. The environmental movement has long been the vehicle for a virulent, radical, and dangerous form of anti-human policy. Implicit in the panic about carbon and emissions is [...]
In the second installment of this series of editorials—a series in which we make the case why each of Canada’s national political parties should be pro-life—we turn our attention to the New Democrats. Last month, readers will recall that the we argued that the Liberal Party should make an about-face and embrace the pro-life position because its long-standing (and endlessly repeated) commitment [...]
Paul Tuns: From Sept. 7-9, Conservative delegates from across the country assembled in Quebec City for the party’s biannual policy convention, where they elected a new National Council and voted on dozens of policies for the platform and constitutional amendments that govern the party. While the policies are not binding – a point leader Pierre Poilievre made to the media before the [...]