It's being called an issue that has few rivals in terms of controversy in Canada and around the world. It's dominated by bloody images, heated rhetoric and impassioned defences on both sides. Few facts go unchallenged. Language becomes a tool, as words become weapons of outrage or instruments of reassurance. Abortion? Nope. The annual Canadian seal hunt. The description above comes from [...]
Until the Jan. 23 federal election, the campaign to legalize drugs in Canada seemed unstoppable. The Chretien-Martin Liberals, whose values were formed in the free-love, pot-smoking 1960s, had already legalized "medicinal" marijuana, opened a government-contracted pot-growing facility and sanctioned a heroin shooting gallery in Vancouver. A Liberal bill to decriminalize marijuana possession was also working its way through Parliament. Yet, on April [...]
On April 5, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the federal broadcast regulator, rendered a bizarre decision, granting a Toronto-area radio licence to a group committed to promoting homosexuality on the airwaves. Rainbow Broadcasting gained the first Toronto FM radio licence issued in more than four years at the expense of many legitimate applicants, including a group hoping for an all-Catholic station. [...]
Organs are being taken for transplantation from the living bodies of thousands of detainees in China's labour camps - a big story out of the world's biggest country. Couple this with a current surge in transplant operations being performed in China's hospitals in advance of hastily cobbled-together restrictions on transplants that take effect July 1 and we have a breaking news story [...]
Judging from the reputation of Justice Marshall Rothstein, and the answers he gave to the questions put to him in the unprecedented public hearing that preceded his appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada, he should make an excellent addition to the country’s top court. Asked by Conservative MP Diane Ablonczy to state his views on the proper role of judges in [...]
Watching Judge Marshall Rothstein, our newest Supreme Court justice, perform was like watching Wayne Gretzky in his prime dodge, circle, hide and evade. Wayne had the aid of a hockey cop dressed in a uniform similar to Wayne’s, who was ready to hospitalize any opponent aiming to hospitalize Wayne. What did we know about Justice Marshall Rothstein? Nothing. Nothing important. And after [...]
Years ago, feminist Gloria Steinem opined that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” adding for good measure that one become a “semi-non-person” after the wedding vows are exchanged. Steinem later raised some eyebrows in 2000 when she tied the knot with a wealthy younger man, but Canadian women seem to have taken her earlier views on cohabitation [...]
Legalizing abortion and child pornography, overturning the definition of marriage, requiring the funding of sex change operations and granting prisoners the vote are just some of the outrageous decisions forced on Canadians, not by elected legislatures, but by unelected courts. Those courts have been stacked with increasingly activist, liberal judges for the past 40 years. However, that trend may be coming to [...]
Special to The Interim As the 50th session of the Commission on the Status of Women met for its closing ceremony March 10, delegates were uncertain whether a set of agreed conclusions would be adopted. Negotiations went down to the wire, as delegates struggled to come to a consensus on the contentious health section of the draft text. The original draft of [...]
If the courts do not step in to thwart the will of the people on July 1, a far-reaching ban on abortion will take effect in South Dakota. On March 6, South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds (R) signed into law House bill 1215, which prohibits all surgical abortions except for those committed to save the life of the mother. Starting this summer, [...]
Following a speech to the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce on Feb. 3, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada was asked for her opinion on the desirability of having Parliament play a more active role in the appointment of judges. A restrained judge would have refused to answer such a politically charged question. What, though, did McLachlin do? She [...]
In last November’s issue of The Interim, we looked at the general state of Canadian medicine, which we noted is distinguished by characteristics including the fact that it kills more than 100,000 pre-born Canadians a year through abortion and perhaps as many as 24,000 born ones a year through medical errors, takes up huge chunks of government budgets and is marred by [...]
Mainstream media coverage of the 2006 federal election campaign was marked by a perhaps-surprising improvement in the fairness of the reporting of the major political parties. But still, there persisted an animosity toward, and an ostracization of, socially conservative candidates, particularly those from the Conservative party. Observers wondered, when the campaign began, whether the media would engage in the kind of blackmarking [...]
Many believe that the entertainment machines of Hollywood are motivated by nothing but crass commercialism, that the people who make movies are enslaved to mammon. An examination of the numbers, however, reveals that movies might be better and more interesting if they were. If Hollywood were motivated solely by the profit motive, the buying public might more often be offered films they [...]
In a judgement handed down just four days before Christmas, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin declared on behalf of the Supreme Court of Canada that Canadians have a constitutional right to engage in group sex in a nightclub. The ruling was unprecedented. It outraged the public. And it ran clearly contrary to Section 210(1) of the Criminal Code, which prohibits the practice of [...]