Sacrificed? Truth or Politics by Larry D. Spencer (Kayteebella Productions, $17.99, 172 pages) Truth and politics – are they mutually exclusive? After reading Larry Spencer’s new book Sacrificed? Truth or Politics, the answer, unfortunately, seems to be yes. And that’s the main reason every concerned Canadian should read this well-written volume. The book is more than a simple retelling of the details surrounding [...]
A year ago, Ottawa was pressuring New Brunswick to pay for abortions committed in Henry Morgentaler’s Fredericton abortuary. Today, nobody seems to be in a hurry to pursue that issue. Under former premier Bernard Lord’s Conservative government, the province paid for abortions only if they were done in hospitals after two doctors attested to “medical necessity.” The government had a strict policy [...]
Stephane Dion, a cabinet minister in the Jean Chretien and Paul Martin governments, shocked the political world when he overcame Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae, the two frontrunners for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, at the party’s convention in Montreal. With the support of former Ontario education minister Gerard Kennedy, Dion leapt ahead of Rae, the former NDP premier [...]
Did Harper really want to win it or was he playing politics? On Dec. 7, the Conservative government’s motion to re-open the debate on same-sex “marriage” was defeated in the House of Commons by a vote of 175-123. If you believe the pundits and the politicians, on Dec. 7, Canadians debated the issue of same-sex “marriage” for the last time and the [...]
Earlier this year, the Harper government began opening the process of Supreme Court appointments when it permitted a Parliamentary committee to ask questions of their Supreme Court Justice appointee, Judge Marshall Rothstein. There were cries from the usual quarters about the politicization of the judiciary and worries about “American-style” confirmation battles, never mind that Canadian parliamentarians are only vetting, not confirming the [...]
As the only two girls in a tight-knit Italian family, Dr. Grace Tridico and her younger sister Lorena have always done everything together. Their sisterly endeavours include standing up for Terri Schiavo’s right-to-life and fighting a proposed strip club in their community. Thus, friends and family were not surprised when the Tridico sisters put their names forward in Ontario’s 2006 municipal election. [...]
The current Canadian culture wars are rooted in the fact that democracy, in the form it has evolved to today, is locked in an ideological and moral conflict with many of the forms of belonging that we cherish in civil society – the heart of which is the natural family. That was the message brought by one of Canada’s leading intellectuals and [...]
It is too easy to equate Republican losses in the mid-term elections with a defeat for pro-life and other socially conservative causes. Easy, but wrong. It would also be easy to focus on the challenges pro-lifers face. But that would ignore the opportunities that present themselves in the election’s aftermath. First, the pro-life cause’s fortunes may rise and fall with the success [...]
The American mainstream media, left-wing Democrats and pro-abortion and gay rights activists, all claimed that the Religious Right was repudiated after the country turfed the Republican Party and voters in some states defeated pro-life and pro-family ballot initiatives. This plinkered view of the midterm elections self-servingly misses numerous points: the Replican Party is not the same thing as the "Religious Right," voters [...]
I warn readers that I just had one of my most outrageous and embarrassing dreams ever. The dream started when I was just beginning my column. The phone rang. I answered it. It was Bob Rae. “Is that you, Frank Kennedy?” “Yes, is that you, ‘Bungling Bob’ Rae?” Rae laughed uncomfortably. “They warned me that you had quite a sense of [...]
Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter (Crown Forum, $36.95, 308 pages) Review by Kathy Shaidle The Interim Those who object to U.S. conservative columnist Anne Coulter’s torture-all-prisoners punditry are like pre-teen boys griping that Gone With the Wind has “too much kissing.” That is, Coulter-haters suffer from genre dysphasia. The bestselling author is neither a journalist nor a scholar, so [...]
On Oct. 12, NDP MP Tony Martin held a town hall meeting for his constituents in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. Although the city boasts a population of 75,000, and the meeting was advertised well in advance, only about a dozen people showed up to discuss issues with the MP. The meeting began when an individual, who appeared to be an NDP supporter [...]
Court Challenges Program eliminated, Status of Women chopped Interim Staff When the Harper Conservative government announced $1 billion in spending cuts in late September, special interest groups, their friends in the media and opposition politicians went ballistic. Opposition leader and militant homosexual rights advocate Bill Graham attacked the reductions as “vindictive, mean-spirited cuts targeted at the weak, the needy, the vulnerable and [...]
Tories deliver in several important areas Many social conservatives did not have high expectations for the first term of a Harper-led Conservative government. They put their faith in the Conservative party due in part to Stephen Harper’s promise to revisit the same-sex “marriage” issue and because of the large number of pro-life MPs within the Tory caucus as compared to the other [...]
It’s hard writing about Queen’s Park, an institution that needs 175 Peter Kormoses to liven it up. This is a dreadfully boring era. Years ago if this happened, a good duel would lighten things up. Now for excitement, you’ve got Premier Dalton McGuinty doing hopscotch for the media on the first day of school, only to find that the minister of education, [...]