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Fourteen Days of State Surveillance

Inkar Nación

August 13, 2021

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.

Is our baby getting the necessities of life? Has she needed to go anywhere? Had any visitors? Does she get enough fresh air? Wait a second—the government cares whether we are getting fresh air? Is this a trick question? They clearly are the arbiters of what constitutes enough fresh air This time it’...

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Digital Chill and Frost Burned Freedom

Peter Menzies

August 12, 2021

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.

Guilbeault says only the government can be trusted with this responsibility and wants to create a Digital Safety Commissioner to patrol social media and ensure – never mind due process – removal of problematic posts within 24 hours Frostier still is that the Commissioner of Digital Safety will be em...

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Knowing the Limits of Science

Peter Copeland

August 10, 2021

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.

Evidently, values play a role in shaping the standards of inquiry, methods, and evaluation of the logic of a scientific conclusion, but must that be the case? Is there not a set of principles that others are reducible to? However, the most common conclusion to be drawn from this sort of thinking in ...

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Hidebound Habits of Journalistic Minds

Peter Stockland

August 6, 2021

Despite laudable adaptation to extraordinary technological change, too many journalists remain stuck with a story-telling idée fixe that blocks the light of facts, Peter Stockland argues.

It should at least crack open the doors of journalistic minds to consider whether the story they’re sticking to so relentlessly is the full story or even – what’s the word I’m looking for here? – true In recent weeks, we’ve seen it again in the repeated refrain that those who are vaccine hesitant ar...

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We Cannot Abandon Lebanon

Susan Korah

August 4, 2021

Susan Korah reports on the desperate state of the former Mediterranean oasis one year after the blast that decimated Beirut.

“According to the World Bank’s June report, Lebanon is going through the worst economic crisis of any country since the 19th century,” Carl Hétu, Canadian Director of Catholic Near East Welfare Agency (CNEWA) told Convivium in an interview The port explosion impacted Lebanon’s food supply because Le...

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Pearls of Wisdom on (Disabled) Daily Life

Taylor Hyatt

August 3, 2021

Reviewer Taylor Hyatt finds Larry McCloskey’s latest book the kind of irritating that opens readers to touchstone stories able to articulate the almost inexpressible.

Many of the stories McCloskey recounts come from his experience as an orderly in a rehab facility, followed by over 35 years directing the Paul Menton Centre, the office responsible for disability accommodations in academics at Ottawa’s Carleton University Although Peter is surrounded by friends and...

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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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