Paul Tuns - Analysis: On August 15, Justin Trudeau asked for an election with an eye to regaining a majority. Voters will cast their ballots on Sept. 20, following a five-week campaign. Over the last 22 months, the Trudeau government has continued to push a socially liberal agenda, just as it had during its first mandate. Over the first four years, Justin Trudeau’s [...]
Mark Wegierski The Maverick Party (formerly the Wexit Party) is the federal Western separatist party readying to attack the Conservative flank in the next election. The Conservatives do not need an election, until they can figure out how to deal with this undoubtedly potentially fatal vote splitting. Their Western flank is only going to be more exposed as time passes (as Wexit/’Buffalo’/separatism [...]
Editor’s Note: The Interim’s editor Paul Tuns interviewed Christian Heritage Party leader Rod Taylor by email. The transcript appears with only slight edits to conform to our style guide. The Interim: The pandemic has affected politics over the past 16 months -- the Conservative leadership, virtual parliamentary debates, possibly even the decision to put off going to the polls federally. How has [...]
Joanna Alphonso: Ontario New Democrat MPP Terence Kernaghan (London North Centre) introduced Bill 259, the Viewer Discretion Act (Images of Fetuses) on March 8. Bill 259 directly targets the efforts of pro-life groups such as the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform (CCBR), which uses abortion victim photography in “Choice Chains” in high-traffic locations, but also distributes the images in residential mailboxes. The [...]
Road to Redemption: The Liberal Party of Canada, 2006-2019 Brooke Jeffrey (University of Toronto Press, $39.95, 322 pages) Brooke Jeffrey, a Concordia University professor of political science and long-time Liberal activist, follows up her history of the party during the Chretien-Martin feud, Divided Loyalties, with a volume that looks at the post-Martin political lows of the party and its revival under Justin Trudeau. [...]
Mark Wegierski The problem of centre-periphery relations in a society, and of how a geographically extensive country extending beyond the confines of a city-state, is to be effectively governed, are some of the most pressing problems in political theory. One of the failures of the Ancient Greeks was that they found it difficult to extend their political units beyond the city-state. One [...]
Paul Tuns The Trudeau government deducted $140,216 from Ottawa’s Canada Health Transfer to New Brunswick over “the province’s lack of coverage under its health insurance plan for abortion services outside the hospital setting.” According to the 2019-2020 Health Act Annual Report, the federal government’s report to Parliament, tabled on Feb. 22, Ottawa reimplemented a cut made to the health transfer that was [...]
Rod Taylor On Monday, April 19, the federal Liberals unveiled a budget that showed no attempt to achieve balance or relief for taxpayers. What else could one expect? The same government that took the national debt over the $1 trillion mark in 2020 has now laid out a plan to allow that debt to further balloon to $1.23 trillion over the course [...]
Conservative MP Kelly Block (Carlton Trail – Eagle Creek) tabled a private member’s bill to protect the conscience rights of medical professionals, Bill C-268: An Act to amend the Criminal Code (intimidation of health care professionals). She explained, “Freedom of Conscience is one of the first fundamental rights laid out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and it is at the [...]
Paul Tuns There are many unhyphenated conservatives in both the Conservative Party in Canada and Republicans in the United States, that is citizens who are both socially and fiscally conservative. I hope to write about conservatism and libertarianism in a future issue of the dead tree edition of this paper. For now I want to bring attention to Ben Woodfinden's fine essay [...]
Oswald Clark and Paul Tuns Pro-life Evangelicals for Biden released a letter on the weekend expressing their disappointment that Joe Biden is precisely who he says he is: a pro-abortion Democrat who wants to codify Roe v. Wade in law and force American taxpayers to foot the bill for abortions at home and abroad. Once upon a time, Biden supported the Hyde [...]
Paul Tuns The Equality Act passed in the House of Representatives last week amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to add "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" as protected classes under federal nondiscrimination statutes. There has been a great deal of criticism that by adding special protections for transgenderism, the law could undermine or erase women's rights by opening female institutions from [...]
Calgary city council is considering banning advocacy displays near schools after a council committee approved the proposed bylaw on Sept. 9. The new rules, if passed, would prohibit any signs larger than a postcard (5 inches by 3.5 inches) that express an opinion on any issue or cause within 150 metres of a school, although the bylaw would not apply to school [...]
The U.S. election is about many issues including the fitness of the two major candidates to lead and the president’s handling of the pandemic and the economy. A major difference between the parties and presidential candidates is their approach to abortion, which would have been important to many voters but will have a higher profile and could become the issue of the [...]
CLC national president Jeff Gunnarson said the “pro-life candidates had stunning performances, representing a combined 35 per cent of the total vote on the first ballot.” He told The Interim that having “once again proved that pro-lifers are a large and important part of the Conservative coalition, Erin O’Toole needs to respect their views with more than lip service that social conservatives [...]