Mark Wegierski: The last several years have witnessed the brutal struggle between print media and social media -- broadcasters really -- like Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Twitter, in regards to consuming advertising budgets. Facebook now scoops up close to 80 per cent of advertising revenue, thus starving print media of much of its sources of income. Numerous daily and weekly newspapers have [...]
Rory Leishman In an attempt to justify their new, multi-billion dollar, “Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Plan,” the Trudeau Liberals maintain that infants and toddlers generally thrive better under the care and guidance of professional child-care workers than their own parents. Is that right? The Department of Finance claims: “Studies by Canadians Dr. Fraser Mustard and the Honourable Margaret McCain have [...]
Interim Staff After convincing every public school board in Ontario to fly the rainbow pride flag -- the universal emblem of LGBTQ+ rights -- on board and school properties, gay activists focused their attention on the publicly funded Catholic school boards. After the separate boards in Waterloo and Thunder Bay voted earlier this year to begin flying the pride flag in June, [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
By Rick McGinnis Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements The end of lockdown is in sight, or so they tell us. There is, of course, the little matter of vaccinating the majority of the population – easier in some countries than others, apparently. Then there are ongoing debates about just what privilege immunity confers – the speed with which we’ll be [...]
By John Carpay At an April 8 news conference, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney referenced pro-life convictions as the basis for continuing with, and tightening further, his lockdown restrictions on social and economic life. Since politicians imposed “two weeks to flatten the curve” more than 13 months ago, Kenney has repeatedly referred to the “moral responsibility to protect lives.” He and other premiers, [...]
Paul Tuns The centerpiece of the Liberal government’s spending plans over the next five years is a $30 billion commitment to child care. It is a relatively small amount among the $614 billion in program spending in 2020/2021, which is schedule to fall to $475.5 billion in 2021/2022 before levelling off in the vicinity of $430 billion in the years afterwards. But [...]