Michael Taube: There are many reasons to enjoy the Christmas season. Beautiful trees with tinsel and ornaments. Colourful lights inside and outside our homes. Presents wrapped for family and friends. Movies and television shows for the young - and young at heart. Music and carols heard on the streets and inside churches. And, of course, families, food and faith. Christmas [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements The Christmas schedule this year on Netflix is the usual avalanche of undistinguished, largely low-star-power romantic comedies with titles like The Merry Gentlemen, Meet Me Next Christmas, and Hot Frosty. Sticking out amidst the rom-coms, evergreen holiday films, and fireplace videos is Mary, a film that tells the story of the Virgin Mary [...]
What does Christmas mean for us today, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Four? The decade in which we find ourselves began with a pandemic, and has, since then, seen the rise of significant global turmoil, economic turbulence, and social tensions; in the lather of the last American election—and with a Canadian federal election on the horizon—we can easily [...]
John Carpay: If globalism means free trade and voluntary cooperation between countries, it can be a good thing. For example, doctors and scientists from different countries can share their research with each other and collaborate on creating life-saving medications. It makes good economic sense to buy coffee and bananas from tropical countries, rather than trying to grow those crops in Canada in [...]
Paul Tuns: Barrhead, Alberta, population 4320, will hold a binding plebiscite on a new bylaw that, if passed, would ban rainbow flags and crosswalks following a citizen petition urging the city to take the action. In June, a group of Barrhead residents started a petition to remove all pro-LGBTQ rainbow crosswalks and flag from municipal property. The petition was presented to the [...]
Joanna Alphonso: Today’s technological advances, intended to benefit humanity, have a significant capability to harm every one of us, especially as long as they remain legally unbridled. Welcome to the world of artificial intelligence (AI). What is AI? AI makes it possible for computers to learn from experience based on inputs of its human users. It has exploded over the last year [...]
Interim staff: On Sept. 20, 2024, the second Million Person March for Children, organized by “Hands off Our Kids,” was held in communities across Canada. Although numbers were down in many locations compared to last year according to one-the-ground reports, one organizer said “the message was still clear that parents of all faiths want their children protected from the dangers of LGBTQ [...]
Immigration responsible for nearly all population growth Paul Tuns: Source: Statistics Canada On Sept. 25, Statistics Canada reported that Canada’s fertility rate has been declining for 15 years and reached the new low of 1.26 children per woman in 2023. Demographers consider 2.1 children to be the natural replacement rate. The number of live births in Canada was unchanged at [...]
Paul Tuns: Ahead of the New Brunswick general election officially called on Sept. 17, Campaign Life Coalition distributed thousands of postcards with information about transgender indoctrination in schools. This raised the ire of politicians opposed to Premier Blaine Higgs’s policies requiring parental consent to use names and pronouns at odds with a student’s biological sex. CLC distributed postcards to households in August [...]
Oswald Clark: West Virginia could outlaw euthanasia Voters in ten states will decide the fate of abortion laws after abortion advocates organized to get referenda on the issue on the ballot. The ten states are Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota. In Maryland and New York, the legislature voted to put the constitutional amendment on [...]
Paul Tuns: Cardus, an Ottawa and Hamilton-based Christian think tank, released a pair of studies in September exploring the scope and impact of sports betting, and calling for tighter regulations of the online sports-betting market. In “Hidden Harms of Single-Event Sports Betting in Ontario,” author Johanna Lewis found that the average net monthly spending per sports betting account is $283, the equivalent [...]
Interim Staff: On Sept. 24, Pastor Derek Reimer was acquitted of charges related to his drag queen story time protest in Calgary. Reimer, pastor of Mission 7 Ministries, was charged with causing a disturbance and mischief for protesting the “Reading with Royalty” event marketed for children at the Seton Public Library in February 2023. He was removed from the premises by police. [...]
Almost immediately upon becoming the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris started attacking her Republican opponents, Donald Trump and JD Vance, as weird. To emphasize the difference between the Democratic ticket’s ostensible normalness and the Republicans’ alleged weirdness, she picked the mostly non-descript Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former high school football coach. No sooner had Harris delivered the broadside that “weird” [...]
Every four years, the cyclical rituals of American democracy impose the ordeal of an “election year” not only upon its own populace, but on the entire globe. At such times, stances on a range of geopolitical issues hang in the balance—positions which, in turn, promise to set the general tenor of international diplomacy and public discourse for years to come. The 2024 [...]
Sarah Stilton, Review: Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler (Knopf, $37, 320 pages) Judith Butler is a famous, or infamous, feminist and leading influence on gender theory through her earlier works such as Gender Trouble, Undoing Gender, and Bodies that Matter. This year she returns to the topic in Who’s Afraid Gender? which undermines many of her earlier arguments. Three decades ago, [...]