The Prime Ministers: Canada’s Leaders and the Nation They Shaped J.D.M. Stewart (Sutherland House, $37.95, 361 pages) The last books on Canada’s prime ministers were published in the 1990s and while it is difficult to match Right Honourable Men by Michael Bliss, former high school teacher, J.D.M. Stewart has proven worthy of the task. History that focuses on politics or great men [...]
Paul Tuns, Review Moral Issues: How Public Opinion on Abortion and Gay Rights Affects American Religion and Politics by Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp (University of Chicago Press, $42.50 pb, 223 pages) In their book Moral Issues: How Public Opinion on Abortion and Gay Rights Affects American Religion and Politics, Paul Goren, director of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology [...]
John Carpay: For power-hungry tyrants, government control over the internet is non-negotiable. The internet facilitates the exercise of our Charter freedoms, including freedom of expression, association, and even conscience and religion. Tyranny does not thrive and flourish when free people can communicate with each other freely. First, the federal Online News Act required social media companies to compensate news outlets for any [...]
From the editor’s desk: From the editor's desk On pages 14 and 15 of this issue we have book reviews of three giants of mid-20th century conservatism: William F. Buckley, Frank S. Meyer, and James Burnham. All three were at the founding of National Review, a magazine that has shaped U.S. conservatism since its founding 70 Novembers ago in 1955. [...]
Paul Tuns: On Oct. 8, the British Columbia legislature voted 48-40 against the Protecting Minors from Gender Transition Act, a comprehensive, 11-page bill that would have outlawed medical transitioning of minors and restricted social transitioning of children. “I stand before you today not only as a member at this legislature but as a mother,” OneBC Party MLA Tara Armstrong (Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream) said [...]
Paul Tuns: According to the Catholic Register, Karina Gould, chair of the House of Commons Committee on Finance, has denied the Carney government has any plans to follow through with a proposal from the committee in 2024 to rescind the charitable tax status of religious organizations by removing the promotion of religion as a valid charitable end. The Register obtained a copy [...]
Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich has been a painful disappointment for pro-lifers. A long-time ally of the since-defrocked abuser, Theodore McCarrick, Cupich has been, at best, a reluctant defender of the unborn. Although he did hail the demise of Roe v. Wade as an opportunity for “a national conversation on protecting human life in the womb,” he criticized a statement made by his brother [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography by David T. Byrne (Northern Illinois University Press, $45.95, 242 pages) James Burnham, like many of those on the political Right in the second half of the 20th century, migrated there from the Left. Historian David T. Byrne examines the intellectual journey of this foundational conservative thinker from literary critic and Trotskyite philosopher to one [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: The Man who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer by Daniel Flynn (Encounter, $54.99, 544 pages) Frank Meyer is the most important conservative whose name you never heard. Perhaps more than anyone not named William F. Buckley, he shaped American conservatism to adopt the seemingly contradictory stances of promoting a socially dynamic economic freedom with respect for [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House, $54, 1018 pages) The conservative columnist George F. Will says that before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, that before that there was Goldwater there was National Review magazine, and before NR there was its founder William F. Buckley. Buckley was without doubt, the most influential [...]
Paul Tuns Ottawa’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Fund gave the University of British Columbia faculty of Medicine’s Contraception and Abortion Research Team (CART) $4.3 million in taxpayer funding to pay for research into expanding abortion to “underserved” groups such as individuals who identify as LGBTQ+, the homeless, and youth. UBC Medicine said in a press release, the funding will “address barriers to [...]
Donald DeMarco: My iPad, that incomprehensible marvel of technology, conveyed a letter from a politician who wanted my vote. He was polite, as was proper, and promised to do many good things if elected, as was expected. He closed his missive, fully confident that I would fully agree with him. “And I will always defend,” he said, “a woman’s right to abortion.” [...]
Paul Tuns: During the Sept. 16 session of the House of Commons, three Conservative MPs rose to submit petitions from Canadians concerned about the All-Party Finance Committee’s 2024 recommendation to strip all religious and pro-life organizations and institutions of charitable status. In December 2024, the All-Party Finance Committee submitted more than 400 budget recommendations, including Recommendation 429 to amend the Income Tax [...]
John Carpay: The new Justice Centre report Post-COVID Canada: The Rise in Unexpected Deaths explains how the latest Statistics Canada death data discredits the government-and-media narrative that Canadians were fed in 2020 and 2021. Politicians and media were wrong about COVID, wrong about lockdowns, and wrong about the COVID vaccines. COVID was much closer to being a bad annual flu than it [...]
Paul Tuns: In July, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute published a paper by Christine Van Geyn, a lawyer and litigation director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, titled “Anti-free speech ‘bubble laws’ are unconstitutional – and expanding. We need to stop them.” Van Geyn wrote that “From one province in 1995 to thousands of locations across multiple cities by 2025, ‘bubble zone’ laws have significantly [...]