Paul Tuns: A report published by the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF) is being used to pressure countries, described as "laggards" in the media and by left-wing politicians, to increase access to contraception. The EPF's "Contraception Atlas" ranks countries on contraception access, counseling and online information and gives each country a numeric grade. Key to getting an "excellent" [...]
Rory Leishman: Then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau promised that the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would enhance the constitutional rights and fundamental freedoms of Canadians. Instead, the opposite is true: Canadians today are demonstrably less free than they were 40 years ago. As evidence, consider the unprecedented, freedom-stifling provisions of Bill C-4, the notorious legislation adopted in December by Parliament with [...]
AndrewLawton: Call them the honks heard ‘round the world. The convoy that rolled across Canada in January before making downtown Ottawa the freest spot in the country sent a message about much more than vaccine mandates. In a country whose pandemic restrictions have been defined by complacency and acceptance rather than resistance, the convoy was the moment at which Canadians decided they’d [...]
Donald DeMarco Commentary: Dialogue is a beautiful word, replete with the promise of two opposing sides getting together in peace and harmony. Socrates was a great champion of dialogue. His perpetual frustration, however, was that his opponents were securely entrenched in a monologue – talking to themselves. This has been my problem in trying to engage abortion supporters in a dialogue. One [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey Pulling straight from Wikipedia: “Body positivity is a social movement focused on the acceptance of all bodies, regardless of size, shape, skin tone, gender, and physical abilities, while challenging present-day beauty standards as an undesirable social construct.” It’s dominated by social liberals, which, given the above buzz words, may be unsurprising, but, [...]
Interim Staff: Supporters of Calgary preacher Artur Pawlowski, who is in jail awaiting a bail hearing on a “mischief” charge, are holding daily protests calling for his release. Pawlowski is charged with mischief over $5,000 and interrupting the operation of essential infrastructure under Alberta’s Critical Infrastructure Defence Act for his role in the Coutts, Alberta, border crossing demonstration. Rebel News reported that [...]
By Mark Wegierski: The Canadian federal election of September 20, 2021, was another failure for the Conservative Party of Canada, despite Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s attempted “move to the centre.” After five months the Conservative Party put an end to the infighting among pro- and anti-O’Toole factions, with the caucus voting him out as leader. While the political leader is important, the [...]
Carl Hétu Special to The Interim: Editor’s Note: Carl Hétu was the national director of CNEWA Canada (Catholic Near East Welfare Association) from 2004 – 2022. This open letter is reprinted with permission. Eighteen years ago this month, I officially began my journey as a national director for CNEWA, specifically to help establish a Canadian office. Many at the time thought the [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements The ‘90s don’t get a lot of love. The last decade of the 20th century is often seen as a kind of pregnant pause – a political and social interregnum between an event that put an (apparently) full stop on the conflict that had shaped much of the previous century (the Cold War) [...]
Whatever Happened to Tradition: History, Belonging, and the Future of the West by Tim Stanley (Bloomsbury Continuum, $38, 266 pages) Tradition and especially traditionalism has a bad reputation. It is often conflated with the old-fashioned and nostalgia, which barely begin to scratch the surface of the richness of tradition. Tim Stanley, an editorial writer for the Daily Telegraph in London comes to [...]
Emma Castellino Review: The Lenten Cookbook by David Geisser with essays by Scott Hahn (Sophia Institute Press, $29.95, 224 pages) In the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, set in medieval Norway, we are told about one nursing mother who was exempted from her Lenten obligations. She took her accommodations just as seriously as she had previously observed the fast, and thrived. I was struck [...]
Abortion leading global cause of death WASHINGTON -- Worldometer is a database that keeps track of statistics on health, the global population, and other metrics in real time based on data obtained from the World Health Organization. It has released its 2021 causes of death for a number of health categories globally. If you watch the news, you would be forgiven for [...]
John Carpay: Have Canada’s Catholic bishops seriously evaluated lockdowns and vaccine passports through the lens of the Catechism of the Catholic Church? The Catechism teaches that a law is just only to the extent that it accords with right reason, and otherwise it “has not so much the nature of law as of a kind of violence” (1902). Are lockdowns and vaccine [...]
Andrew Lawton: Two years into the Covid era it may seem fruitless to call for nuance, let alone compassion. I hope you’ll permit me the opportunity to nevertheless try. In law, there’s a nifty tactic known as arguing in the alternative, in which counsel can advance one (or several) backup arguments with which a judge might agree, on the off chance his [...]
Rory Leishman: Jesus admonished: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” What, though, should a faithful Christian do if Caesar decrees a law that conflicts with the natural and divine law of God? Sir William Blackstone addressed this issue in his magisterial Commentaries on the Laws of England. The natural and divine law, [...]