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Driving Ms. Chrystia

Matthew Lau

August 31, 2020

Matthew Lau argues Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s weakness is not her lack of qualifications but her insistence she can steer the economy while wearing sunglasses at night.

However, what Chrystia Freeland has proposed to do as finance minister – to reorganize the Canadian economy so as to make it more green, equitable, and inclusive – is an undertaking for which she is certainly not qualified It would, in fact, be a strong indication that Chrystia Freeland is well-suit...

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Regaining Lost Educational Ground

Joe Woodard

August 29, 2020

In part two of his essay on the damage done by a century of “revolutionary” pedagogy, Joe Woodard foresees the power of independent schools and parental choice for returning education to its natural purpose.

The real issue in the Pedagogy of Liberation is the theory of happiness as self-discovery, self-expression, self-esteem, self-satisfaction – self, self, self By the 1990s, parents were deliberately choosing language immersion schools for their tighter discipline, and charter schools were reinstating...

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The Lost Common Good of Education

Joe Woodard

August 28, 2020

As parents send their kids back to school plagued by the new peril of COVID-19, Joe Woodard argues the real classroom risk remains an outmoded pedagogical revolution that turned education against its true nature.

For three generations, public education itself had eroded our behavioral norms, artistic tastes and popular pieties, in celebrating the Technocrat as the ascendant cultural archetype The Pedagogy of Community, the commitment to a cultural Common Good and shared virtue, had already been undermined by...

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The Unbearable Whiteness of Jesus

Don Hutchinson

August 27, 2020

Questions about the Christian Messiah’s skin colour offer a fascinating complex of archeological, historical, migratory, linguistic and theological answers that ultimately won’t matter, Don Hutchinson writes.

Questions about the whiteness of Jesus, White presence in Bible times, and the whiteness of the North American Church have become widespread in public debate during recent months Does it matter to the mission and ministry of Jesus and his Church whether Jesus was White? Does the gospel change based ...

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Can We Talk?

Peter Stockland

August 25, 2020

Will the strong showing of Leslyn Lewis in the Tory leadership race revitalize a socially conservative conversation in Canada? Peter Stockland isn’t placing a bet on it.

That means bye-bye-birdie from the federal scene for MacKay, who set off the leadership race last year by criticizing Andrew Scheer for allowing social conservative issues to “hang around his neck like a stinking albatross” during the 2019 campaign Theoretically, that should in turn leave room for a...

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Making Book on Chrystia Freeland

Robert Joustra

August 24, 2020

Newly minted Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s best bet for sussing out his Liberal foes is putting his money down on the newly appointed Finance Minister’s eight-year-old manifesto, Robert Joustra writes.

The pandemic opens an opportunity for just the kind of bold agenda that the Prime Minister and Finance Minister Freeland see as necessary to pry open Canada’s Book of Gold before it is set in stone Chrystia Freeland, in her 2012 book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of ...

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The Cardinal’s Diplomatic Dressing Down

Peter Stockland

August 20, 2020

Quebec’s mistreatment of faith groups during the COVID lockdown drew a Cardinal’s ire in words high on diplomacy and inspiring, says Canada’s former ambassador to the Vatican. Peter Stockland reports.

The whole of the statement is a relentlessly polite evisceration of the Quebec government’s ill-mannered and anti-democratic exclusion of the Church, yes, but also all faith communities in planning, executing and communicating around the COVID crisis But Father Piotr’s words were also a localized ma...

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Kiwi COVID Containment Bears Bad Fruit

Robert Joustra

August 18, 2020

New Zealand is feted for its pandemic lockdown, but Robert Joustra says the awkward truth of Auckland’s approach is it raises irrational fear even as we’re being fleeced economically.

What does it mean for our own careful reopening of schools and businesses this fall? I think it means no matter how economically suicidal certain policies may appear, uncertain short-run security concerns – that we might get sick – may win the battle for hearts and minds Medium to long range economi...

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The Motivations of Missionary Martyrs

Natalie Morrill

August 15, 2020

Reviewing Joan Thomas’ historical novel Five Wives, Natalie Morrill wonders what moral calculus contemporary readers can bring to evangelizing engagement with vulnerable populations.

In 1956, five Christian missionaries attempting to evangelize the “uncontacted” Waorani people set up camp in Waorani territory in Ecuador He’s a character for whom the Christian missionaries are as alien as the Waorani warriors who killed them: “He had no idea how to talk to these people,” he reali...

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Liberalism’s Moody Blues

Robert Joustra

August 14, 2020

Anne Applebaum’s new book eulogizes the global ruin of classical liberalism as an empty table at a dinner party that former friends refuse to attend, reviewer Robert Joustra writes.

Who can’t name a friend, a family member, a work colleague, that we once knew, laughed with, loved, that is now lost? Those losses hang heavy over Anne Applebaum’s new, beautiful memoir, a long lament for a lost liberalism A certain kind of political animal will find Applebaum’s book a tasteless mem...

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Bidding Loyola a Long Goodbye

Peter Stockland

August 13, 2020

Paul Donovan’s retirement as president of Montreal’s Loyola High School ends his 39-year association with the historic Catholic institution, which included a major religious freedom victory in the Supreme Court. Peter Stockland reports.

Paul Donovan, the recently retired president of Montreal’s Loyola High School, stands by the graduating class photo that contains his father Kevin, who was also a student at the storied Jesuit high school When he was promoted to president from principal of Loyola five years ago, in the aftermath o...

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The Moral Pandemic of MAiD

Christina Lamb

August 11, 2020

Afflicted by the ideology of the right to die movement, Christina Lamb writes, Canadians are losing the sense of human dignity that unites us in bearing each other’s suffering.

While death consists of a loss and may involve a prelude of suffering, which can be substantially relieved by ethically proportionate pain control and holistic care measures, all the Canadian euthanasia movement affirms is that Canada is quickly losing a sense of the significance of suffering as par...

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Finding the Right Helping Hands for Beirut

Susan Korah

August 10, 2020

Canadian NGOs are meeting the challenge of keeping aid dollars from disappearing into corrupt pockets after the explosion that shredded the Lebanese capital, Susan Korah reports.

The Beirut explosion seems like the denouement to the unfolding tragedy of Lebanon, a country where high unemployment, an economic meltdown, burdensome taxes, staggering inflation that left its currency virtually useless, and covid-19 were already taking their toll Catholic Near East Welfare Agency ...

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Canada Must Boycott Beijing Olympics

Don Hutchinson

August 6, 2020

Ottawa lawyer Don Hutchinson says it’s “beyond belief” Canada would participate in the 2022 Winter Olympics given the Chinese regime’s reprehensible persecution of religion.

Just before Parliament adjourned in June 2008 for summer break the Religious Liberty Commission (RLC) of The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada released a report called Broken Promises: The Protestant Experience with Religious Freedom in China in Advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games The invitatio...

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Why WE Wouldn’t Listen

Robert Joustra

August 5, 2020

From historic military meltdowns to last week’s barbecuing of the Kielburger brothers by a Commons committee, being too nice to ask hard questions invariably risks organizational catastrophe, Robert Joustra writes.

WE is really a case study in problems that plague organizations of their kind: they are routinely victims of their own groupthink, saddled with high likeability, mission fidelity, and cultish devotion The paradigmatic case study is, after all, the Bay of Pigs; funding and outfitting a violent coup i...

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