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 [...]
The Interim Staff In February, Amazon, the online bookseller responsible for more than half of all books sold in the United States, banned the sale of the print and e-book versions of Ryan Anderson’s 2018 book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. The book was removed from Amazon, as well as from Amazon subsidiaries Kindle, Audible, and AbeBooks. Initially [...]
Review By Emma Castellino Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, by Rod Dreher (Sentinel, $36, 256 pages). Live Not By Lies is the book I needed someone to write. When I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 2016, it felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes. I began to smell propaganda beneath every compassionate platitude in the [...]
By Rick McGinnis In the first decades of the 19th century, upstate New York became known as the “Burned Over District,” a hotbed of spiritual revival that gave birth to an explosion of religious sects and utopian communities. Usually evangelical and often millenarian in nature, these included the Shakers, the Mormons, the Millerites – who would in turn produce Seventh-day Adventists and [...]
By The Interim Staff In February, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) published its Pornography Action Kit, a toolkit to help concerned Christians urge the government to act against pornographic websites. The EFC says that “children and youth are exposed to sexually explicit and violent material online at younger and younger ages,” and that Ottawa must act, at the very least, [...]
Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times Jonathan Sacks (Basic Books, $38, 366 pages) Rabbi Jonathan Sacks died last November, and his latest and presumably last book, Morality, was published shortly beforehand. It is message to all, Jew and gentile alike. He opens arguing that: “Societal freedom cannot be sustained by market economics and liberal politics alone. It needs a third [...]