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Home is More Than Just a Place

Abigail Sefzik

January 26, 2022

Do younger Canadians lack a strong sense of home? Is that why they tell pollsters they’re more willing to pack up and leave for another country? Abigail Sefzik, a young writer herself, takes up these questions for Convivium.

It seems their sense of home and attachment to their country is fluid, if not weak Cardus, in partnership with the Angus Reid Institute, conducted a study revealing trends among leaders in Canada, young and old, capturing an array of cultural concerns across several generations ...

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Remembering Cairine Wilson, Canada’s Mother of Refugees on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Susan Korah

January 24, 2022

In time for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Susan Korah writes a commemorative piece on Canada’s first female Senator—Cairine Wilson— a “firm but gentle voice” who advocated for refugees entering Canada after WWII.

In 1938, she established a non-sectarian organization the Canadian National Committee on Refugees and Victims of Political Persecution (CNCR) and for the next ten years, led a two-pronged campaign— an educational one to combat anti-Semitism— and an epic political battle for the liberalization of Can...

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The Trial of Big Porn

Maxime Huot Couture

January 19, 2022

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.

Behind those victories, we find some energetic individuals fighting to protect children and women from sexual exploitation and from the fangs of the porn industry We now know, based on evidence presented against the industry, that porn is also a public threat – a real pandemic that affects the physi...

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Unlocking the Doors of Education

Joseph McDaniel

January 17, 2022

Life’s circumstances have a way of reintroducing us to grace, writes Joseph McDaniel. His personal journey refreshed his perspective on his vocation and encourages us to be open to the expansion of our own horizons by the grace of God.

In a Catholic high school in the United States where I had the blessing of being able to serve as a teacher for many years, there was a motto emblazoned above the study hall of the school library that I believe summarized the true power of education: “Knowledge is the eighth sacrament of the Church ...

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Why So Vindictive, Mr. Mandate Man?

John Jalsevac

January 14, 2022

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.

Without a course correction, there is a very real risk that the deep divisions and distrust fomented by misguided mandates will remain with us for years, if not decades, imperiling our ability to respond effectively to future public health crises If vaccines no longer meaningfully slow or prevent in...

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Defining Canada?

Ray Pennings

January 12, 2022

In his most recent Insights newsletter, Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings emphasizes the need to recover a sense of vision and national purpose as Canadians, especially as we think about the future of young Canadian leaders.

Reading the round of end-of-year media features, summarizing the past and projecting the next year in every sphere of life, reminded me of this perennial question: What holds Canada together? What makes Canadians one country from sea to sea to sea? The Charter and our health care system have taken a...

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Chicken Little and Teens

Paul Bennett

January 10, 2022

Author and educator Paul Bennett reviews recent books and articles by Dr. Erica Komisar that have stirred a viral hornet’s nest. Komisar, a New York psychoanalyst, highlights the importance of parent-child attachment and argues that believing in God is so important to parenting, that those who don’t should “lie about it.”

Five years after the appearance of her first book Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters and two years after one of those Wall Street Journal columns went viral, she’s still holding her ground after weathering the media storm While many parents regret not spending ...

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Remembering Ted Byfield

Jonathon Van Maren

January 6, 2022

Ted Byfield was no quitter and until his passing over the holidays, he was a front-line culture warrior in the journalism, publishing, and Christian education spheres, Jonathon Van Maren writes.

For more than a half-century, he was one of Canada’s most significant public Christians, and his life’s work included the founding of a religious order, the formation of several Christian boarding schools for boys, a series of influential newsmagazines, laying the groundwork for a political movement...

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Time to Challenge and Comply

Don Hutchinson

January 3, 2022

When it comes to Canada’s recently passed ban on “conversion therapy," Don Hutchinson argues that it’s bad legislation, not good faith religious counselling, that should be put on trial.

It was Minister Lametti’s responsibility to provide Parliament with “a statement that sets out potential effects of the Bill on the rights and freedoms that are guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” before it could legally proceed beyond first reading in the House Because the pr...

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Stockland Moving On… But Not Out

Peter Stockland and Ray Pennings

December 24, 2021

Convivium's co-founder says goodbye to become publisher of the Catholic Register but Ray Pennings, Cardus Executive Vice-President, welcomes Peter Stockland home as a Senior Fellow.

In return, through the new audiences we reached, Convivium was able to help Cardus grow from its origins and deep roots in the Reformed community to cultivate a broader cohort of Canadians, Catholic, Protestant, even non-Christian, and all with an interest in engaging the interplay of faith and comm...

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True North Interview

Jonathon Van Maren

December 23, 2021

Reading the Canadian storyteller’s posthumous new book, Jonathon Van Maren retraces in imagination his travels from his own driveway to the main streets of small towns and cities across the land.

But the reason his work rings so real to me is that so many of his experiences in “real” Canada echo mine, and so many of his ruminations on our small towns perfectly encapsulate my own experiences over the past decade Such was the intimacy and immediacy McLean’s magnificent voice engendered that wh...

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The Need for A Stable Influence

Don Hutchinson

December 17, 2021

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.

Thus, on December 8, the explosive Bill C-4 became both the first legislation passed in Canada’s 44th Parliament and the first to receive royal assent at the hand of Governor General Mary Simon Conservative MP Rob Moore (Fundy Royal, NB) surprised the House (including members of his own party who we...

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What To Do After the Deluge

Daniel Dorman

December 14, 2021

Daniel Dorman argues each of us has an obligation, as soon as it’s safe, to assert individual freedoms lost to the pandemic.

In Lewis’ dream the owners’ response to this irrational infringement is both comical and heroic: “What? Lose our freedom and not get security in return? Why, it was only for security we surrendered our freedom at all… And the owners with one accord took everyone one of the emergency petty officers b...

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The Irreplaceable Place of Parents

Peter Jon Mitchell

December 10, 2021

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.

Writing during the height of debate around the CRC in the mid-1990s, father and son lawyers Bruce and Jonathan Hafen argued that the United Nations showed its hand when a UN publication guide lauded the CRC as offering a “new concept of separate rights for children with the Government accepting the ...

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Chief Concern With Conversion Therapy Law

André Schutten

December 8, 2021

Drawing on history and imagination, André Schutten “interviews” former Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker about Conservative Party failure to properly oppose the new legislation.

In reflecting on the past week, one of my thoughts is how far the leadership of this conservative party has fallen from more principled days in opposition, like those of the Right Honourable John Diefenbaker In less than 30 seconds, a bill that will profoundly impact religious communities and member...

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