From the editor’s desk: You probably saw that during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, she refused to answer what a woman is. Joe Biden appointed Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court because she was a black woman, the sole qualification Biden outlined for his first Supreme Court appointment when he was running for president. Asked if she agreed with the late Justice [...]
Jed Perl (Knopf, $27, 161 pages): Long-time critic Jed Perl (The New York Review of Books, The New Republic) has slim new volume, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts that is being described in many reviews as a salvo against relevancy. Perl, say these reviewers, defends art-for -art’s sake. Up to a point that this is true. Roger Scruton says [...]
Interim Staff : Under the “Better Regulations for British Columbia” initiative, provincial bureaucrats in B.C. are obligated to take an annual inventory of government regulations to excise any instances of “gendered language.” After removing more than 600 such terms in 2021, it excised 741 more “instances of outdated gendered language” in 138 regulations this year. The changes took effect on March 30. [...]
Paul Tuns: Ontario Premier Doug Ford signed a deal with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to become the last province to join the federal government’s plan for $10-a-day daycare. While seven provinces and territories inked deals before the September 2021 federal election and all were signed onto it before the end of the year except Ontario, Ford was waiting to announce his province’s agreement [...]
Seventy-five years ago, an English poet described what he called “the modern problem:” that is, “of living in a society in which men are no longer supported by tradition without being aware of it.” The individual who “wishes to bring order and coherence” into his mental life and inner experience must therefore do “for himself what in previous ages had been done [...]
Paul Tuns: As everyone knows, the price of housing -- both renting and buying a place to live -- is skyrocketing across the country. The issue has seized politicians with the Trudeau budget introducing no less than 17 budget measures to address housing affordability and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland saying during her budget speech that out-of-control housing prices is an “intergenerational injustice.” [...]
The managerial welfare-state consumes the planet By Mark Wegierski It is the 52nd anniversary of the first Earth Day (1970). Many people in Western societies today are rightly concerned with environmental issues. The locus of resistance to many negative current-day trends is likely to be found in ecology. Ironically, however, it could be argued that the Western managerial welfare-state so beloved by [...]
Interim Staff: An Ontario Superior Court judge dismissed a legal challenge by two southwestern Ontario evangelical churches against the province’s pandemic restrictions that closed and limited capacity of churches. During a three-day hearing that began Jan. 31, lawyers for the Church of God in Aylmer, Ont., and the Trinity Bible Chapel in Waterloo, Ont., argued that restrictions designed to limit the spread [...]
There are two stories in this issue that delve into ways in which the Culture of Death is sustained through deception. We have a story about how the abortion pill is being marketed as “missed period pills.” Of course, the missed period being described is not a medical ailment, but a natural occurrence during pregnancy. The pill does not treat the missed [...]
Paul Tuns: Transgender activists regularly tout an “epidemic” of murderous violence against self-identified transgender individuals, but statistics are seldom provided to back up their claims. While there are no official statistics for Canada or the United States, the TransRespect project claims nine Canadian transgender murder victims from 2008 through 2021. But even these statistics raise questions. Gender identity researcher Tish Still examined [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey Parliament Hill has been cleared, but the memory of the Freedom Convoy and the extreme actions government took to crush it will remain. Snapshots of the move by the police against peaceful protesters were splattered across social media with proclamations like, “This is not my Canada.” Except it is. Anyone who was [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements While writing my recent review of Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book, I couldn’t help but notice some conspicuous omissions from the catalogue of pop culture and political events the writer referenced in the book. I could understand why he might overlook important events that took place outside the United States – Klosterman’s [...]
Jonathon Van Maren Commentary: One of the few issues that Canadian social conservatives have been able to discuss without backlash is that of digital pornography. Several years ago, freshman Conservative MP Arnold Viersen put forward Motion 47 to have a committee research the connections between porn and sexual violence—it passed unanimously.With a number of parliamentary allies and his unlikely partner, Montreal Senator [...]
Old films are charming partly for the windows that they open on to the vanished worlds of the past. We hear cadences and colloquia that we might dimly recall from our own youth—or from the phrases of our fathers or grandfathers. We see antiquated manners and styles of dress that have migrated from thrift stores to antique shops—or sometimes even history books. [...]
Interim Staff: The Jason Kenney government announced that women on Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH) or income support will be eligible for a new prenatal benefit beginning in May. On March 10, Premier Kenney, along with Jason Luong, Minister of Community and Social Services, announced eligible women will be able to receive $100 per month starting in the second trimester [...]