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Journos Who Soldier On

Peter Stockland

July 30, 2021

Peter Stockland argues that despite the legitimate criticism journalism gets for all its institutional failings, abundant first-rate reporters and writers serve Canadian democracy well.

The very adulterations of social media that catalyze journalism’s institutional failings have also spurred the possibilities and the proliferation of individual journalists working to do, well, good – even great – work It would be disingenuous, however, if due emphasis is denied the abundance of fro...

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COVID and the Fearful State

Anna Farrow

July 28, 2021

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.

The Star’s Susan Delacourt remarks that the role the Impact Unit played in Canada’s Covid messaging is a “social-science experiment” one that “may have given government clues on how to modify citizen’s behaviour for other big global issues – such as climate change, for instance Dodsworth asserts the...

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The Spiritual Solution to Residential Schools

Jonathon Van Maren

July 26, 2021

From a profound Christian faith, Residential School survivor Chief Kenny Blacksmith believes true healing will come not from politics but from paying our debt to God, Jonathon Van Maren reports.

In the years after his residential school experience, Blacksmith read books on the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, researching their ways Blacksmith summarized his experience thusly: “Forced to live away from home, stripped of your true identity and punished every time you tried to express yourself...

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Unmasking the Match Lighting Mob

Don Hutchinson

July 23, 2021

Don Hutchinson asks who has fuelled church burnings across Canada, and notes Indigenous leaders from coast to coast have been most stalwart in condemning the two dozen arson attacks.

We call upon the federal government to work with provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, churches, Aboriginal communities, former residential school students, and current landowners to develop and implement strategies and procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintena...

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Playing the Media Percentage Game

Peter Stockland

July 21, 2021

Peter Stockland flags an institutional shift in journalism that seems to be causing media outlets to follow the State line rather than inquire and clarify in the public interest.

“Britain reported 48,553 new cases on Thursday, while the number of people in hospital rose 42.8 per cent in a week, Bloomberg reports,” Kirkey wrote as part of broader reportage on the pressing global case for vaccination urgency An excellent editorial in the WSJ makes the case as well for a much d...

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Cancelling Wisdom’s Colour

Daniel Dorman

July 19, 2021

Daniel Dorman argues that the phenomenon of cancel culture emerges from a black and white vision of the world that forgets the vivid hues moral struggle brings to life.

Cancel culture begins in a misunderstanding of the human person; it forgets our fallenness and our complex moral struggle against our own passions or flesh Cancel culture fails to take the first step of wisdom, to remember the first pages of Scripture, and to define the world as fundamentally fallen...

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Standing Up for Vaccine Skeptics

Peter Stockland

July 16, 2021

Though a vaccination supporter himself, Peter Stockland cautions against the campaign to denigrate those honestly questioning it in a world of abounding COVID absurdities.

Detailing the statistical global benefits of vaccination even in the face of the much-hyped Delta variant, they cite a Public Health England study showing the average unvaccinated person is “25 times as likely to be hospitalized with COVID as the average vaccinated one I regularly hear, for example,...

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Putting Aside Pandemic Mistrust

Tim McCauley

July 13, 2021

We must not let the stresses and fear of the COVID crisis seep into suspicion and crowd out mercy, Father Tim McCauley writes.

With trust, we assume that the vast majority of people have good intentions Nonetheless, if we are to speak meaningfully about mercy and trust, it is important to first acknowledge people’s emotional reactions such as anger The recipients of these deeds of mercy grow in trust in other people ...

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Indigenous Women Ascending

Peter Stockland

July 9, 2021

Peter Stockland sees the appointment of Mary Simon as GG, the election of RoseAnne Archibald as AFN National Chief, and Jody Wilson-Raybould’s political courage as hope for Canada.

Thursday’s fifth ballot win that made RoseAnne Archibald the first ever female National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations sealed the Week of the Indigenous Woman in Canada Even as the AFN readied itself to vote in the election that brought Archibald to the headship of the national organization ...

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A COVID Cold Shoulder for Refugees

Susan Korah

July 8, 2021

Susan Korah reports on the plight of global millions fleeing persecution unnoticed while our attention is fixed on the pandemic.

Whether internally displaced in their own countries or seeking refugee status from temporary homes elsewhere, these diverse groups of people are clinging to the fragile threads of their lives in tents, cramped, airless apartments or even in the streets and alleyways of countries such as Lebanon, Syr...

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A Rabbi for the Long Way Home

Andrew Bennett and Hannah Marazzi

July 6, 2021

Father Deacon Andrew Bennett, program director for Religious Freedom at Cardus, and Hannah Marazzi, former Cardus staff member, celebrate and mourn their dear friend, Rabbi Reuven Bulka.

Yet to see Rabbi Bulka as simply a kind man whose kindness was active in the community is to fail to see what that kindness was a manifestation of: the divine life He was known to so many as Rabbi Reuven Bulka and his death on June 27 has brought forth both mourning and rejoicing in a life that brou...

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The Complex Web of Indigenous Diversity

Peter Stockland

July 2, 2021

The Assembly of First Nations is a national voice on issues like reconciliation and residential schools, but its July 7 leadership vote tests the strands that link Indigenous people, Peter Stockland reports.

For example, on an issue as critical to First Nations as passage of legislation to make the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) part of Canadian law, Mbarki was surprised to discover how little consultation the AFN conducted with chiefs across the country before th...

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The Devil in the Lack of Details

Daniel Dorman

June 25, 2021

Deliberately ambiguous bills such as Ottawa’s C-10 and C-6 are the political deceiver’s plaything, Daniel Dorman argues.

Likewise, the intention of Bill C-6, to ban the harmful practice of conversion therapy, was uncontroversial but the Liberal’s failure to articulate a clear definition of ‘conversion therapy’ would have opened doors for infringement on Canadian’s fundamental freedoms If I were to level a single criti...

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MAiD in the COVID Shade

Peter Stockland

June 24, 2021

Peter Stockland reports on how the pandemic’s overshadowing of legislation radically expanding medical assistance in dying might reconfigure Canada’s future.

But the thing is, in the pandemic year just past, with Parliament shut down, Canadians locked down, and our most vulnerable population ravaged by COVID in care homes, we rushed through legislation expanding MAiD availability That fundamental conception endured for 133 years until the Supreme Court r...

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Downing a Fighter for Indigenous Kids

Alan Hustak

June 18, 2021

Alan Hustak reports on the removal of a statue honouring the 19th-century priest who suffered a nervous breakdown battling Ottawa over its abusive residential school system.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Regina has agreed to relocate the statue of the 19th century Oblate missionary Father Joseph Hugonard following complaints from the Chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indians that it is a “distasteful” emblem of the residential school era When the Dominion governm...

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