Catholics and other people of goodwill have had numerous occasions to be confused by the statements of Pope Francis on various moral issues. Too often, however, they have relied on the media filter and not the pontiff’s actual statements. Asked by journalists about the Zika virus and fetal deformities, Pope Francis is said to have given his okay to contraception to avoid [...]
During the 2015 campaign, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau vowed it would be the last election under the first-past-the-post system in which the candidate with the most votes wins the riding and the party that wins the most ridings (usually) forms the government. Saying that many people consider the system unfair, he said he would ask a commission to look at electoral reform [...]
Few people will be surprised that Justin Trudeau was going to push a pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda considering he banned pro-lifers from running as Liberal candidates. What might have been surprising is how quickly the new government began to push the Culture of Death. Within two weeks of being sworn in, the new Health and Justice ministers announced that the expert committee advising [...]
When December comes, coffeehouses are already serving red cups and, in department stores, plastic sleighs and lighted trees are already on display. “Happy Holidays” was once a euphemism for another greeting, one celebrating the event by which our years are numbered; but “Merry Christmas” now barely echoes in that anodyne supplanting phrase. We can lament our secular culture’s recoil from the few [...]
On Oct. 19, Canadians chose to elect 184 Liberal MPs, 99 Conservative MPs, 44 NDP MPs, 10 Bloc Quebecois MPs, and a lone Green Party representative. The new Liberal government is led by arguably the most pro-abortion politician this country has ever seen, Justin Trudeau, the son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who brought legal abortion to Canada in 1969. By [...]
In February, the Supreme Court threw out Canada’s Criminal Code prohibition on euthanasia and assisted-suicide and told Parliament it had one year to come up with a new law. If a new law were not written in that time, euthanasia, like abortion, would be legally tolerated, and probably left to be regulated by the provinces. As noted in our election coverage, Campaign [...]
For more than three decades, The Interim and Campaign Life Coalition have reminded readers and supporters of the responsibility of all citizens, but especially Christians, to prioritize life issues above all else when they vote. This is not to deny the importance of alleviating poverty, the ability of middle class couples to support their families, how to address crime, Canadian foreign policy, [...]
A weed, by definition, is just a plant in the wrong place. Dandelions on a green lawn and oak trees in an apple orchard are only weeds because the gardener’s wishes make them so. Last month, Canada legalized RU-486, the abortifacient drug sometimes known as “the human pesticide.” This lethal, murderous drug has no place in a civilized society; it is a [...]
It is easy to forget amidst the extensive coverage of the federal party leaders, that on Election Day we do not in fact vote for prime minister. We mark our ballots for members of Parliament. As the jaded observations has it, MPs have become Ottawa’s representatives to their constituents rather than their constituents’ representatives in Ottawa. Increasingly, MPs participate in their own [...]
The pro-life movement owes a debt of gratitude to the 25 pro-life MPs who, sadly, are not running again. They all voted for pro-life and pro-family legislation, and many of them spoke up in the House of Commons and stood with the National March for Life on the steps of Parliament; some of them introduced pro-life and pro-family legislation. On behalf of [...]
Few issues in public discourse are as prominent as concern for the climate. Celebrities, politicians, and activists preach an apocalyptic gospel of environmental repentance because there is a crisis, we are told, just slightly out of the reach of our senses. Carbon emissions and average temperature are used to substantiate fears about a looming disaster which can be felt everywhere but seen [...]
L anguage is rooted in our common experience of the world. As every toddler quickly learns, each thing has a name, and every object within the range of the child’s eye and pointing finger has a word by which it can be called. After a time, the same vocabulary that clothes the visible world with language is used to dress the otherwise [...]
A philosopher once pithily observed that “the map is not the territory.” The same can certainly be said of statements about the Roman Pontiff made in the mainstream media: they do not offer trustworthy maps for navigating the territory of what Pope Francis actually did or said on any occasion. One always needs a ressourcement, a return to the sources, when judging [...]
In a statement issued last month, the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (OCLA) declared its opposition “to the evident statutory and institutional bias that exists in Ontario against the free-expression rights of pro-life campaigners.” We are grateful for their clear-eyed recognition that the institutions which ought to have protected our Charter rights have failed us so flagrantly. The violation of the rights of [...]
Before the last of the confetti had fallen on Patrick Brown’s victory celebration, political reporters had already filed their stories: another moral Neanderthal had ascended to the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario’s top spot. To judge from their reports, one might conclude that Brown, and his erstwhile rival, Monte McNaughton, spoke incessantly (and insensitively) about social conservative issues, with members of the [...]