The recent scandal involving Josh Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting has prompted calls for the cancellation of the show and speculation that the whole genre of reality TV might have played itself out. While I don’t think that the end is in sight for the most cost-effective production model TV has invented since the game show, it might be time for [...]
Donald DeMarco was honoured by the Catholic Civil Rights League. On June 18, the Catholic Civil Rights League bestowed their Archbishop Adam Exner Award for Catholic Excellence in Public Life to professor and pro-life activist Donald DeMarco, a long-time contributor to The Interim. Gwen Landolt, last year’s winner of the award, introduced DeMarco, calling the retired St. Jerome’s College philosophy [...]
The official policy of the Canadian Pediatric Society is that preemies born under 23 weeks of gestation should only receive palliative care, not intensive care. However, an American study published on May 7, 2015, in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that nearly a quarter – 23 per cent – of babies born at 22 weeks survived if actively treated and [...]
A philosopher once pithily observed that “the map is not the territory.” The same can certainly be said of statements about the Roman Pontiff made in the mainstream media: they do not offer trustworthy maps for navigating the territory of what Pope Francis actually did or said on any occasion. One always needs a ressourcement, a return to the sources, when judging [...]
Rory Leishman The issue was brought before the Court by Alain Simoneau, a professed atheist in Saguenay, a municipality in the Lac-St.-Jean (Maria Chapdelaine) region of northern Quebec. In 2006, Simoneau filed a complaint against the municipality with the Quebec Commission des droits de la personne on the ground that the longstanding practice of reciting a Christian prayer at the [...]
Six years after I was laid off from my job at a national daily newspaper and sent back out to the uncertainties of freelancing as a writer and photographer, I’ve found myself with a steady gig again. Of those six years I can’t say much except that it’s no way to earn a living. The new job is more interesting – editing [...]
NCLN's Rebecca Richmond welcomed Ontario Civil Liberties Association paper on free speech being denied to pro-lifers. The Ontario Civil Liberties Association (OCLA) released a position paper commenting on “the evident statutory and institutional bias that exists in Ontario against the free-expression rights of pro-life campaigners.” Violations of these rights include “university-campus suppressions of student pro-life events, and an unconstitutional statute [...]
A court action was settled in favour of a pro-life activist apprehended for distributing pro-life literature on campus. Nicholas McLeod of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform was ordered to stop handing out the pamphlets at Mount Royal University (MRU) on Feb. 19, 2013, by a security guard, who found it “offensive.” McLeod refused, citing R. v. Whatcott, an Alberta ruling which [...]
Campaign Life Coalition, Canada’s national pro-life political organization, has translated its detailed analysis of the Ontario Liberal government’s explicit sex-ed curriculum into many of the languages spoken by outraged parents. CLC’s comprehensive examination of the history and harmful nature of the controversial curriculum is now available in Arabic, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Italian, and Spanish. Many of the demonstrations against the imposed [...]
Liberalism is a smiley-faced demolition project – in a purely positive, hopey-changey sense of the word “demolition,” that is. Since the innumerable “social constructs” that litter the highway of history are impediments to human progress, the time has come to clear them out of the way. Margaret Mead taught us that patriarchy was a social construct. According to moral relativists, right and [...]
The Supreme Court of Canada (SCOC) was busy last month; they handed down two significant judgements. Both are significantly flawed. The judgement on prayer in a municipal chamber in Quebec was discussed in more detail in Leader Rod Taylor’s article in the Vancouver Sun, but other arbitrary decisions by the SCOC, including its recent ban on mandatory minimum sentences for gun-related infractions, [...]
On April 15, in a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada deemed it unconstitutional for municipal councils to begin their meetings with a denominational prayer. The case originated when Alain Simoneau and the Mouvement laëque québécois (Quebec Secular Movement) challenged the city of Saguenay opening its meetings with a Catholic prayer. The case wound through the province’s human rights commission and [...]
Light is Right Joe Campbell When she revealed that she was carrying twins, her next-door neighbour suggested an ultrasound to determine their sex. “Ultrasounds don’t determine sex,” she replied. “Of, course,” the neighbor declared, “I should have said ‘discover.’” But the clarification didn’t help. The twins came only minutes apart. When the first arrived, the doctor declared happily, “It’s a [...]
2015 is the 50th Anniversary of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, probably Grant’s best known and most accessible book. One could sharply ask today – is there still really a place for Grantian-type traditionalism in current-day Canada? First of all, it should be remembered that Grant’s profound and subtle definition of conservatism is very remote from [...]
Over the past 10 months, many readers have wrote, emailed, and called to complain about Michael Coren. It should be noted that these complaints were never about something he wrote in The Interim. But his columns elsewhere and on-air commentary sometimes rubbed readers the wrong way when he differed with this paper’s editorial line. He took a different approach on homosexuality, pro-life [...]