Ethics

  • Humanitarian Crisis Adds to Burdens of Afghan Religious Minorities

    Media attention may have shifted away from Afghanistan, but suffering families and religious minorities remain in the country. On-the-ground relief efforts are in dire need of support, writes Susan Korah.

    For Fawzia Shah, (not her real name), a middle-aged Hazara (Shia Muslim) woman from Central Afghanistan, the words “democracy”, “freedom,” and “women’s rights” mean nothing. 

    Those were the stirring slogans with which political leaders in Canada, the...

    Read more...

  • The Trial of Big Porn

    Cardus NextGen Fellow Maxime Huot Couture summarizes important progress in 2021 towards cancelling porn culture. He hopes both the law and the culture will continue to make anti-porn progress in 2022.

    The original version of this article appeared in Le Verbe magazine.

    Pornography is not a new phenomenon, but it has enjoyed an ambivalent moral pass for a long ti...

    Read more...

  • Why So Vindictive, Mr. Mandate Man?

    The increasingly heated rhetoric towards the unvaxxed is designed to assuage the feelings and retain the confidence of the vaccinated. At least, so argues John Jalsevac, a FAST Fellow and PhD student at the University of Toronto, who is concerned the current trajectory will not end well.

    "The unvaxxed, I really feel like pissing them off," said French President Emanuel Macron a few days ago. "And so we’re goi...

    Read more...

  • The Need for A Stable Influence

    Christians who cherry-pick Scripture for particular purposes, like the politicians who abuse Parliament by rushing through legislation, need to consider what they’re celebrating, Don Hutchinson writes.

    Newscasters were almost giddy introducing coverage of Canada’s social-distancing, mask-wearing, elbow-touch-greeting prime minister gliding across the House of Commons’ floor to hug and handshake with members of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Canadians cou...

    Read more...

  • The Irreplaceable Place of Parents

    Marking the 30th anniversary of Canada ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Peter Jon Mitchell examines how much it has put the State between children and their families.

    Children have always lived in an adult-centric world. Spend only an hour or two in an airport and ask yourself, “For who was this space designed?” Air travel is taxing at any age, but children are a secondary thought in these busy spaces. 

    Children’s...

    Read more...

  • Christian Women Doubly Vulnerable to Persecution

    On a day that will live in infamy to mark violence against Canadian women, Susan Korah reports on a global study of gendered religious persecution.

    Aid to the Church in Need, a global Catholic charity has released a groundbreaking—and heartbreaking— report. 

    With the launch of Hear Her Cries—the first comprehensive report on gender-specific religious persecution—Aid to the Chur...

    Read more...

  • True Progress Moves Us To God

    As Advent foreshadows the Christmas narrative, Peter Copeland and Father Deacon Andrew Bennett write that our end is not in restless secularism but the peace of union with the Father.

    Returning to where we began, to find out what ends we seek, what is the story we claim to be a part of?

    The secular progressive story is one that is inherently ill-defined. The end, the telos, are goalposts that are constantly changing. Its gaze is s...

    Read more...

  • The Secular Servants of Abstraction

    As Advent leads us to Christmas, Peter Copeland and Fr. Deacon Andrew Bennett map Christian clarity of the common good against secular confusions of equity and equality. Part two of three.

    When it comes to the social and political spheres, the dominant secular vision of the social good is a utilitarian or egalitarian one. In the case of the former, the collective good is an aggregate of individual pains and pleasures. We ask – what does the g...

    Read more...

  • The Tyranny of Pragmatism

    Ominous State expansion under cover of the COVID crisis isn’t a sign of future despots at work but the consequence of a culture in which outcome trumps process, Robert Joustra argues.

    The overreach of government is a common refrain among conservatives this pandemic, and not without cause. As those such as Father Raymond de Souza, Ed Bosveld, and others have argued, the State has not merely expanded to the occasion of the crisis, nor only...

    Read more...

  • Nightmare Lives of Lebanon’s Children

    Susan Korah reports on the grim toll the country’s collapse inflicts on its young while Canadian kids return to post-pandemic trick or treating.

    “For every act of violence against children that creates headlines and cries of outrage, there are many more that go unreported.”

    Henrietta H. Fore, UNICEF Executive Director

    As we approach the first post-pandemic Halloween, ...

    Read more...

  • Doctor's College Needs Political Attention

    Ottawa lawyer Albertos Polizogopoulos says the regulatory body for Ontario physicians and surgeons has a serious Charter abuse habit and requires Premier Doug Ford’s immediate intervention.

    The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (“CPSO”) has spent hundreds of thousands in legal fees to limit Charter-protected rights of Ontario physicians and citizens. The Ontario government must act. It must stop the CPSO’s attack on Ch...

    Read more...

  • Defending Artur Pawlowski’s Dissent

    Don Hutchinson says the recent court order compelling a Calgary street preacher to reference science in his sermons about COVID is offensive and has to be appealed.

    Politically determined public health guidelines during the covid-19 pandemic have come with a cost. 

    Governments have defined essential and non-essential services, ostensibly to ensure Canadians have access to food. Not all can afford essential servi...

    Read more...

  • Deadline Looms to Save Hospice Society

    A palliative care group in suburban Vancouver has one week to rally members across North America to protect its vision of MAiD-free end-of-life care.

    Although it’s only autumn, Angelina Ireland hopes and prays October 22 will be a very good Friday for the Delta Hospice Society.

    The date is the cut-off for new members to join the Society and help turn the tid...

    Read more...

  • The Hard Truth About Reconciliation

    Healing wounds inflicted on Indigenous people by Canada and its churches means facing what’s wholly true, not what’s politically appealing, Father Deacon Andrew Bennett writes.

    Let’s discuss truth and reconciliation in their fullness. How do we tell the truth, the fullness of the truth? How do we achieve true reconciliation? Both are two-way streets.

    Firstly, what is truth? Pilate’s question to Christ at his passion rings d...

    Read more...

  • Truth and Justin Trudeau

    Even as Canadians auto-correct for political falsehoods by expecting and accepting them, the Prime Minister’s fib on Truth and Reconciliation Day reveals a worrying pattern, Peter Stockland writes.

    George Orwell would likely have caught his breath at news of a prime minister caught in a flagrant fib on a day dedicated to capital T Truth.

    Orwell, of course, spent his journalistic career ferreting out and castigating the incessant political lying...

    Read more...

  • A Liberal Dose of Compulsory Confusion

    In the dizzying dash for vaccine mandates, James Bryson asks, what happened to the liberal/Liberal claims of “my body, my choice” that justified abortion and MAiD?

    By throwing their weight behind vaccine mandates, Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada have picked a strange hill to die on in the run to Canada’s snap election next week.

    The Liberal support of vaccine mandates represent a 180 degree turn ...

    Read more...

  • An Election Exercise in Media Conformity

    The shared-bathwater insularity of Parliament Hill’s media elite has made the 2021 campaign an adventure in safe and narrow thinking, Peter Menzies argues.

    The words of Jody Wilson-Raybould are as good a place as any to begin an assessment of media coverage of Canada’s 44th federal election.

    “In Ottawa, the political culture, which includes the media, lives in a world of its own construction, quite divo...

    Read more...

  • Pushing Back Against Vaccine Bullying

    In the second of two parts, Tara Vreugdenhil writes that regardless of pure intentions, many methods used in the pandemic response are classic harassment tactics.

    This is part two of a two-part series from Tara Vreugdenhil. Click here to read part one: "A COVID Shot in the Dark" 

    The point is made frequently that hospita...

    Read more...

  • A COVID Shot in the Dark

    In this first of two parts, Tara Vreugdenhil argues the pandemic response has unleashed a contagion of fuzzy language, shifting definitions, and logic that doesn’t follow.

    This is part one of a two-part series from Tara Vreugdenhil. ...

    Read more...

  • Canada Fails Afghan Religious Minorities

    Human rights workers tell Susan Korah it’s inexplicable Canada hasn’t prioritized the rescue of Christians and minority Muslims.

    Afghanistan’s religious minorities are facing nothing less than a genocide but the Canadian government has yet to make a firm commitment to protect some of the most vulnerable among them, say Canadian human rights activists.

    Hazaras and Christians – ...

    Read more...

  • When Pro Choice Meets No Choice

    The abortion question Canada’s federal leaders should address is why so many women feel they have no viable alternative, Jonathon Van Maren argues.

    The 2021 Canadian election has begun, and that means that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is talking about abortion. This isn’t primarily a tactic to rake in new votes; Trudeau’s team knows that solidly pro-abortion voters are already voting Liberal, and the ...

    Read more...

  • Digital Chill and Frost Burned Freedom

    Former CRTC Vice-Chair Peter Menzies warns the federal government’s so-called online harms bill, Bill C-36, leaves the Charter rights and liberties of Canadians out in the cold.

    Canada did not build protection of certain rights and freedoms into its Constitution because, as some might think, they are saucy symbols of pop virtues. They are there because serious people understood that without the Charter of Rights and Freedoms the na...

    Read more...

  • Knowing the Limits of Science

    Those who invoke the political nostrum “follow the science” need reminding it is an activity that’s never free of value judgement, Peter Copeland writes.  

    Over the past year or so, there has been continuous reference to complex social decisions as scientific, as though value judgments do not apply, or play only a limited role.

    Some of the most prominent examples include the designation of types of work...

    Read more...

  • COVID and the Fearful State

    In her review of a 2021 book by British journalist Laura Dodsworth, Anna Farrow highlights disturbing evidence of governments using our primal panic response to push pandemic policies.

    Long before David Attenborough brought his soothing voice to the explication of animal behaviour for the BBC Life series, the North American television public had been introduced to the majesty and oddities of the natural world through Mutual of Om...

    Read more...