Ethics

  • Playing the Media Percentage Game

    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.

    Warning lights should always flash before our eyes whenever journalists mix raw numbers and percolating percentages in the same paragraph.

    Numbers clearly state actuality. Percentages are the ups and downs of context. Regardless of the axiom attribut...

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  • Cancelling Wisdom’s Colour

    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.

    “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscilla...

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  • A COVID Cold Shoulder for Refugees

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

    They are the wretched of the earth (to use Haitian writer Franz Fanon’s phrase), the world’s homeless wanderers.

    Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees stated recently in his official Twitter account that during the past year when the pand...

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  • Downing a Fighter for Indigenous Kids

    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 statue of a priest whose Indigenous students were originally taught in Cree, and who fought forced removal of Indigenous children from their parents, is slated for removal from a Saskatchewan cemetery.

    The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Regina has...

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  • Caught in the Bill C-10 Spotlight

    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 ...

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  • Enduring Patience for Lasting Peace

    Despite the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Susan Korah reports, undaunted groups seek just solutions that benefit both sides.

    A just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine seems as illusory as a mirage in the desert, particularly since the recent outbreak of violence following expulsion of 40 Palestinian families from Sheik Jarrah in East Jerusalem to make room for Israeli...

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  • London Murders Wound Us All

    The killing of a Muslim family in the southwestern Ontario city demands empathy for the victims, but also renewed commitment to freedom of faith, Father Deacon Andrew Bennett writes.

    The news from London, Ont. regarding a murdered Muslim family is horrifying. It is chilling even to write about a driver deliberately ram...

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  • Questions Unasked About Indigenous Deaths

    Peter Stockland brings a journalist’s mindset and hometown origins to his analysis of media coverage around the finding of Indigenous children’s bodies in Kamloops, B.C.

    Melissa Mollen-Dupuis and I don’t know each other but we appear to share similar thoughts on the journalism around Kamloops, B.C. and the discovery of an unmarked grave containing remains of Indigenous children.

    In an interview with Montreal’s Le...

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  • Grave Men Facing A Grave Faith

    Jonathon Van Maren reports on a series of leading serious intellectuals who recognize the need for Christianity’s resurrection but can’t quite bring the faith to life in themselves.

    Earlier this month, I spent some time on the phone with Niall Ferguson, the Scottish historian and Milbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, for a ...

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  • When Politics Trumps Meaning

    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...

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  • Power Struggle Over Communication

    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’...

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  • Open Wide and Say Law

    Calgary physician Dr. Kiely Williams and Ottawa lawyer Faye Sonier show how the expansion of MAiD has given lawyers medical authority while silencing doctors who consider it very bad medicine.

    When the Supreme Court decriminalized assisted suicide in 2015, many physicians lamented that lawyers could practice medicine in Canada without a license. Now that Parliament has radically expanded the scope of medical assistance in dying (MAID) via the ove...

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  • Charting Educational Justice

    Brett Fawcett argues Alberta charter schools should be free to operate on religious grounds to meet the just vision of Canada’s founding constitutional vision.

    What does a just education look like?

    We talk a lot about what it means to provide a quality education to our children, but perhaps we’ve forgotten that you can’t have a good education without it also being a just education. In virt...

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  • In What Do We Trust?

    As Cardus’ The Long Way podcast probes alarming declines in institutional trust among Canadians, Convivium’s Peter Stockland explores the specific effect on media and academia.

    Purely at the institutional level, it’s troubling enough to watch the current media revolution in which the workers seek control of the means of redaction.

    Journalistic greybeards know in their bones no good can come from recent eruptions whereby you...

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  • Rebuking Canada’s African Colonialism

    In conversation with Convivium contributor Jonathon Van Maren, former career diplomat David Mulroney says Canada’s residential school past should curb its neocolonialist urges in Africa.

    “[The Trudeau government] is using foreign policy as an exotic stage from which to tell stories to its supporters back in Canada. This is a really cynical political move.”

    It is rare for a former Canadian diplomat to speak out against a sitting gover...

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  • Replacing Aid With MAiD

    Expansion of medically assisted dying risks an explosive moral crisis when shortages already endemic in health care make Canadians choose death over delay, Ruth Dick writes.

    One day, before the pandemic arrived and wreaked its depredations on our health care system, I was driving with the radio on and heard, within a single, five minute, top-of-the-hour news recap, both a story about the federal government’s Medical Assistance ...

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  • Heeding Shahbaz Bhatti’s Call

    A decade after the religious freedom fighter’s murder, Pakistani Canadians call on Ottawa to renew his work, Susan Korah reports.

    Ten years ago, the world lost a hero, a soldier who fought courageously in the treacherous terrain of Pakistani politics, for the fundamental rights of that country’s oppressed faith minorities. And the Canadian government needs to pay more than lip service...

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  • Conversion Therapy Bill Off Target

    The Liberal government’s Bill C-6 aims so wide that it threatens freedom rather than criminalizing abuse, Cardus’ Father Deacon Andrew Bennett argues.

    Parliament needs to find the courage to stand up for Canadians’ fundamental freedoms instead of allowing Bill C-6 to trample them. While the intent of the bill to criminalize harmful practices under the banner of “conversion therapy” is right and good, the ...

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  • Chaos ’Round The Corner for CRTC

    Peter Menzies looks into a planned major expansion of federal regulatory powers over the Internet. It’s enough to take your breath away, he reports.

    Were the consequences not so serious, Canada’s chaotic venture into the regulation of content on the Web might be consigned to the realm of thigh-slapping farce.

    The government’s goal, it was learned last week, will be to focus programming funding on...

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  • HELP to Redefine MAiD

    Speech-language pathologist Tara Vreugdenhil breaks down the definitions that make up medical assistance in dying and determines it’s really homicide masquerading as health care.

    The importance of definitions has long been recognized by great thinkers. George Orwell’s 1984 demonstrated the ultimate impact of language on thought and culture. Newspeak went so far as to redefine words, ban words, and simplify vocabulary, all with the e...

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  • A Plan to Unmake MAiD

    A former veteran Mountie and local coroner has a sure-fire way to protect health care workers from being made to administer MAiD. So why won’t anyone answer Sean Murphy’s call? Peter Stockland reports.

    Sean Murphy has what he considers a clear way through the tangle between the House of Commons and Senate over Liberal government legislation to expand Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).

    The former veteran Mountie and coroner says the bill’s status w...

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  • The HandMAiD’s Toll

    As the Senate studies Bill C-7’s dramatic expansion of medical assistance in dying, Anna Nienhuis and André Schutten warn of a MAiD copycat effect on those tempted to suicide.

    Action inspires action. This is often positive, as people’s activities motivate others to engage in positive service too. But there are times when action inspires deadly action. As the Senate continues its review of Bill C-7’s dramatic expansion of medical ...

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  • Progress Against MAiD

    Catherine Frazee, a long-time disability Rights activist and Ontario’s former Chief Commissioner of Human Rights, talked to MPs about pending MAiD expansion recently. It wasn’t enough to make her give up hope, Peter Stockland reports.

    A powerful impetus behind the Liberal government’s push to jam expanded medical aid in dying through Parliament has been the force of proponents arguing it is progressive legislation.

    Yet Catherine Frazee, who testified last week before the Commons c...

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  • MAiD to be Vulnerable

    Laval University bioethicist Cory Labrecque argues the debate over medically assisted death ignores the reality we all face risk just by being human, Peter Stockland reports.

    Cory Labrecque began deeply re-thinking society’s growing acceptance of what we now euphemistically call Medical Aid in Dying when his plan to become a doctor collided with caring for his ailing grandmother. 

    Labrecque, now an associate professor of ...

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