The Ontario government has released the results of reports completed more than a year ago showing that the impact of its $1.5 billion per year full-day kindergarten program is mixed. Whatever benefits children gain are likely to fade as they get older. In 2010, Ontario’s Liberal government began rolling out a program for full-day kindergarten in the province, a plan that will [...]
A national pro-life club for homeschoolers has been started by two homeschooled students in affiliation with Student Life Link and Toronto Right to Life. The co-founders are Alexandra Jezierski, organizer of the Letters4Life campaign in support of Motion 312 and 2013 summer student at The Interim, as well as Sarah Blake, a youth board member of Toronto Right to Life. The Homeschool [...]
Ah, Christmas! It’s a wonderful time of the year. Many families will be trimming their trees, wrapping presents, putting up wreaths and boughs of holly, and stringing colourful lights. The old caroling books will be dusted off, eggnog will be consumed, and the unenviable task of last-minute shopping will be suffered by a few well-meaning souls. I’ll be doing many of these [...]
How Duck Dynasty became a television and cultural sensation After years of celebrating little-watched cable television shows like The Sopranos (about the mafia and laced with profanity) and Breaking Bad (about a drug dealer and laced with profanity), the North American entertainment media took notice of the ratings success of Duck Dynasty, which attracts millions more viewers. In the February 2013 season [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman In a report five years ago, the “Expert Panel on Infertility and Adoption,” a body appointed by Deb Matthews, then Ontario Minister of Children and Youth Services, admonished the government of Ontario to assure that people from the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer (LBGTQ) communities” have access to assisted-reproduction and adoption services on the same [...]
The worst part of being a TV critic, I used to joke to my friends, was having to watch television. Like most jokes, it was mostly a statement of fact. The worst thing about watching TV in the last decade or so was a ubiquity of a lazy trope, played for laughs, that cast men as the village idiot of the family. [...]
I didn’t watch television for nearly 20 years, roughly from when Knight Rider hit the air to when the first season of The Sopranos debuted. Only a few years after that I found myself – quite against my will – writing a daily TV column for a national newspaper, but as the one-time child who grew up with That Girl and Petticoat [...]
A study released by the Fraser Institute says that contrary to reports that have the cost of raising a child exceeding $200,000 or $10,000 a year, the actual cost of a child more likely between $3,000 and $4,500, or between $55,000 and $80,000 from birth to the age of 18. In “The Cost of Raising Children,” Chris Sarlo, a professor of economics [...]
This story is more than a year old but Acculturated is reporting it and I haven't noticed it before: A 36-year-old North Dakota woman who married herself in a commitment ceremony last March has now spoken about her self-marriage choice in an interview with Anderson Cooper. The marriage took place among friends and family who were encouraged to “blow kisses to the world” after she exchanged [...]
Writing in the Daily Mail, columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown looks at last night's BBC documentary Mum And Dad Are Splitting Up which says that couples split up too easily and the children are often the victims of family breakdown. Many children of divorce end up having social and psychological troubles and often have trouble forming healthy relationships later in life. As one child of divorce [...]
Justice Antonin Scalia dissented from the decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, saying that the courts should not be deciding social policy. On June 26, the Supreme Court of the United States issued two rulings related to same-sex “marriage” in what critics are suggesting could be the Roe v. Wade of marriage. In a 5-4 decision (United [...]
I'm a big Duck Dynasty fan. The show is about a family who became wealthy by making and selling duck calls. The show celebrates entrepreneurship, family, hunting, and faith. Each episode ends with the family praying before a meal and Duck Commander CEO Willie Robertson musing about the lessons learned from whatever the family was up to that week (cleaning the warehouse [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman While judges in Canada and the United States usually hand down reasonable decisions in conformity with the separation of legislative and judicial powers, occasionally some rogue judicial activists take the law into their own hands with potentially disastrous consequences. A case in point is the judgment on June 26 by the United States Supreme Court in United [...]
Editor’s Note: There is sexually explicit content in this story. Former deputy minister of education Benjamin Levin, federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, and former federal Liberal interim leader Bob Rae at Toronto's gay pride festivities in June. Levin, a member of Wynne;s transition team who now faces child pornography charges, was the top bureaucrat at the Ministry [...]
The Supreme Court of Canada asked government lawyers tough questions as they heard arguments for and against the law on prostitution. The federal Criminal Code provisions criminalizing brothels, pimping or “living off the avails” of prostitution, and communication to buy sex was struck down in 2010 by the Ontario Superior Court. In 2012, a 3-2 ruling by the Ontario Court of Appeal [...]