2011‑2022, and is preserved here for archival purposes.
Daniel Dorman argues each of us has an obligation, as soon as it’s safe, to assert individual freedoms lost to the pandemic.
“What? Lose our freedom and not get security in return? Why, it was only for security we surrendered our freedom at all.”
– C.S. Lewis, A Dream
“T...
Yesterday, Peter Stockland queried the usefulness of the COP26 conference. Today, Susan Korah reports on the urgency of saving the Garden from climate calamity.
“We have inherited a garden, we must not leave a desert to our children.”
— Statement signed on October 4, 2021 by Pope Francis and 40 faith leaders
Two countries that were consistently in th...
Peter Stockland notes theopoetics of Christian leaders and 277 Canadian delegates at the recent Glasgow climate conference equal bupkas unless we tackle climate change profitably.
Prior to the so-called COP26 conference, Pope Francis, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians, Bartholemew I of Constantinople, urged the world to “listen to the cry of the earth” regarding climate change...
Sandra B. Julian warns a basic human right is being trampled in the COVID-fed panic to digitize and QR code where we can go and what we can do based on whether we’ve had the jab.
As a bonus feature, we’re linking Sandra Julian’s article to a Long Way Podcast discussion on vaccine passport policy.
...
Peter Menzies argues the salvation of Canadian democracy lies in our two youngest political jurisdictions where consensus government, not leadership whip cracking, prevails.
Six years and three elections ago, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau was about to become Prime Minister. Deficits were to be modest and temporary, Canada was going to “be back” as a global player, ways were to be sunny, transparency would blossom like flowers i...
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...
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...
Don Hutchinson notes that when sports and politics overlap we become "fan-atics" cheering for our favourite sweaters and socks.
Once upon a time in Canada, we knew where we’d be on Sunday mornings and what would hold our attention on Saturday nights. For some, Sunday faith and Saturday fandom were effortlessly exchangeable.
For today’s Canadian fans of team sports, it’s the b...
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 ...
Peter Stockland reports on writer Charles Eisenstein’s work to identify a force even more dangerous than contagious public stupidity.
American writer Lance Morrow recently identified our current moment as the golden age of stupidity.
No evidence exists that the author of America: A Rediscovery and Second Drafts of History was peeping across the border watching the...
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. ...
The flexibility and responsiveness of Ontario’s independent schools during the pandemic prove the advantage of humanized education in small, family-centric schools, David Hunt writes.
As Ontario’s public schools struggle to accommodate students in a new school year amid what could be a fourth wave of COVID-19, what can the Ontario government learn from the last 17 months?
For starters, the government needs to accept that huge, ind...
This just in: the current prime minister is steadfastly refusing to follow his father’s footsteps, especially on human rights and justice. Don Hutchinson traces the divergent path.
The two Trudeaus are the only father-son federal prime ministers in Canada’s brief history. Each in their time, father Pierre and son Justin, led the Government of Canada into record ...
Despite fines for congregating contrary to COVID rules, an open air church in an inner-city park flourishes by serving society’s marginalized, writes Matthew Boardman.
Recent media reports of a petition by residents in Ottawa’s inner-city Dundonald Park neighbourhood demanding more community supports for indigent users of...
As writer Inkar Nación tracked her family’s two weeks of COVID quarantine absurdities, she understood that beneath the liberty to tell the truth lies the nucleus of human freedom.
Bad law makes us all into liars, or we believe our own lies and make them truth. Such is my family’s experience with Canada’s Quarantine Act following a trip to the United States on compassionate grounds.
Day One. We cross back into ...
Though a vaccination supporter himself, Peter Stockland cautions against the campaign to denigrate those honestly questioning it in a world of abounding COVID absurdities.
In a recently re-opened Ottawa restaurant this week, a member of our party of five was forbidden from using a chair.
He wasn’t sitting in it standing on his head showing off some exotic yoga pose or, more pedestrianly, engaged in man-spreading to a d...
Deliberately ambiguous bills such as Ottawa’s C-10 and C-6 are the political deceiver’s plaything, Daniel Dorman argues.
John Milton’s Paradise Regained (the poem which followed his great English epic, Paradise Lost) expands and interprets the gospel narrative of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness (Matt. 4). In one particularly potent scene Jesus accosts ...
Convivium contributor, journalist, and former CRTC commissioner Peter Menzies has been centre stage fighting off the federal Internet control bill. Fortunately, he says, fame is fleeting.
Not long after I ended my decade at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) I began writing about communications issues.
Pretty geeky stuff, I guess, but now my views are apparently so in demand that Convivium.ca wants ...
Theologian James Bryson surveys the historical landscape of Munich and finds troubling harbingers vis-a-vis his home province of Nova Scotia’s authoritarian response to the pandemic.
Born and raised in Halifax, I currently live in Munich, Germany. I have been monitoring the Nova Scotian response to the pandemic from abroad by reading the news and by keeping in touch with family and friends.
I write this article to lend some persp...
Peter Stockland reports on the week’s political signs that the past might be coming back to haunt Canada’s future much sooner than we dreamed.
Ears of a certain vintage had to hear echoes of Elijah in Jody Wilson-Raybould’s emphatic “no” this week.
The reverberation’s source was the late Indigenous politician Elijah Harper rather than the Biblical prophet Elijah. The latter, of course, over...
Restoring trust in language goes beyond improving the sad state of our political debates. It’s vital to our common humanity, Daniel Dorman writes.
Our political discourse is a demoralizing spectacle. In most public forums, and particularly in the House of Commons, we generally listen to what can’t (in any serious sense) be called ‘debate.’ Most of it is mere partisan verbiage.
Character assault...
Faced with pandemic “certainties” that quickly turn out to be up, down, and all around, Don Hutchinson cautions that science can provide estimates but not ultimate truth.
A friend recently joined the growing group of Canadians who take issue with the moving goalposts of the declared as life-or-death (not-really-a) game of pandemic response. Another compared the relationship between science advisors and politicians t...
The very wording of the federal government’s updated Broadcasting Act means language itself is being subordinated to the State’s political purposes, Peter Stockland argues in the second of two parts examining Bill C-10.
Read part one of Peter Stockland's two-part series on Bill C-10.
Debate over the federal government’s updating of the Broadcasting Act has l...
The continuing battle over Bill C-10, which revises the federal Broadcasting Act, is a fundamental dispute over who decides how Canadians connect, Peter Stockland reports in the first of two parts.
Read part two of Peter Stockland's two-part series on Bill C-10.
Two bright spots amid the thunderbolts and lightening of the Liberal government’...