Family

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

    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.

    As Jews and human rights advocates all over the world mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, Canadians have a special reason to honour the memory of Cairine Wilson, Canada’s first female Senator, who was appointed to the Red Chamber in ...

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  • The Trial of Big Porn

    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.

    The original version of this article appeared in Le Verbe magazine.

    Pornography is not a new phenomenon, but it has enjoyed an ambivalent moral pass for a long ti...

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  • Chicken Little and Teens

    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.”

    Everyone remembers the children’s fable about a chicken called “Chicken Little” or “Henny Penny” who believes that the sky is falling when an acorn falls on its head. While the phrase “the sky is fal...

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  • The Irreplaceable Place of Parents

    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.

    Children have always lived in an adult-centric world. Spend only an hour or two in an airport and ask yourself, “For who was this space designed?” Air travel is taxing at any age, but children are a secondary thought in these busy spaces. 

    Children’s...

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  • Nightmare Lives of Lebanon’s Children

    Susan Korah reports on the grim toll the country’s collapse inflicts on its young while Canadian kids return to post-pandemic trick or treating.

    “For every act of violence against children that creates headlines and cries of outrage, there are many more that go unreported.”

    Henrietta H. Fore, UNICEF Executive Director

    As we approach the first post-pandemic Halloween, ...

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  • Deadline Looms to Save Hospice Society

    A palliative care group in suburban Vancouver has one week to rally members across North America to protect its vision of MAiD-free end-of-life care.

    Although it’s only autumn, Angelina Ireland hopes and prays October 22 will be a very good Friday for the Delta Hospice Society.

    The date is the cut-off for new members to join the Society and help turn the tid...

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  • COVID Lessons for the Education System

    The flexibility and responsiveness of Ontario’s independent schools during the pandemic prove the advantage of humanized education in small, family-centric schools, David Hunt writes.

    As Ontario’s public schools struggle to accommodate students in a new school year amid what could be a fourth wave of COVID-19, what can the Ontario government learn from the last 17 months?

    For starters, the government needs to accept that huge, ind...

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  • When Pro Choice Meets No Choice

    The abortion question Canada’s federal leaders should address is why so many women feel they have no viable alternative, Jonathon Van Maren argues.

    The 2021 Canadian election has begun, and that means that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is talking about abortion. This isn’t primarily a tactic to rake in new votes; Trudeau’s team knows that solidly pro-abortion voters are already voting Liberal, and the ...

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  • Fourteen Days of State Surveillance

    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.

    Bad law makes us all into liars, or we believe our own lies and make them truth. Such is my family’s experience with Canada’s Quarantine Act following a trip to the United States on compassionate grounds.

    Day One. We cross back into ...

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  • Missing Marriages, Empty Baby Carriages

    Peter Jon Mitchell, Cardus Family Program Director, reports on the link between Canada’s severe baby-making problem and young Canadians increasingly choosing to delay or reject marriage.

    Wedding industry vendors are reporting a boom in bookings – or at least south of the border according to the Associated Press. Couples who waited out the pandemic are booking their big day, as are those who married during the pandemic but are now p...

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  • Reality in Truth and Reconciliation

    In this homily, Father Cristino Bouvette says the enduring faith of his Indigenous grandmother shows the real peace of Christ heals even the torments of residential schools.

    One of the most consequential conversations I ever had was with my grandmother- whom most of her younger grandchildren affectionately called ‘Kokum’ – the Cree word for grandma – within my first couple of years of seminary studies.

    I had known by then...

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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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  • Shadows and Light on Palliative Care

    Rapid expansion of Medical Aid in Dying and forced closure of a Vancouver-area hospice have raised alarm among palliative care providers. But Peter Stockland finds vital positive signs, too.

    At the beginning of April, the Supreme Court of Canada finally closed the outside door on the Delta Hospice Society’s ownership of a private 10-bed palliative care centre in suburban Vancouver.

    At one level, the SCOC’s refusal to grant the Society le...

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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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  • Pandemic Pancake Tuesday

    On this day before Lent, Don Hutchinson counsels Convivium readers to prepare for the 40 days before Easter as a mix of self-denial and doing unto others as we would have them do for us.

    It’s Pancake Tuesday! My first memory of Pancake Tuesday is from my elementary school years. My working single mom had arranged on school days for a neighbour to feed me breakfast – cereal I carried each morning in a baggie – and lunch. On that particular T...

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  • How Sanctions Cheat Children

    Leading voices are urging Canada to rethink Middle East sanctions that make daily life a struggle just to get daily bread, Susan Korah reports.

    “Economic sanctions that afflict the poor must be lifted. I stress the word ‘poor,’” Archimandrite (head of a monastery) Georges Masri said in an e-mail from his home base in Syria. He was responding to my request for his views on the unfolding humanitarian...

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  • 10 Highlights of the Year for Cardus

    Daniel Proussalidis and Monica Ratra write that while 2020 was a forgettable year for many reasons, Cardus initiatives throughout the year provided memorable highlights for the organization and our supporters.

    It’s cliché at this point, but 2020 is surely a year most of us would like to forget. And not just because of the pandemic or the brutally polarized political rhetoric of the past year. But, as we think back on the past year at Cardus, there’s actually a lo...

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  • Your Child is Not Your Go-Go Gadget

    Diminished expectations during COVID Christmas make it the perfect time to remember, as Rev. Dr. Cole Hartin writes, that our children are not instruments for parental self-fulfillment.

    During quarantine at home with my three sons five and under, I’ve been reminded that being a parent is not fulfilling. My mornings usually start with wiping bums, changing diapers and washing my hands vigorously (not only out for fear of contracting COVID-1...

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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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  • COVID Hope From Healthy Families

    Winnie Lui reports on research by Trinity Western sociologist Todd Martin revealing that around the world even the hardships of the pandemic have become sources of family strength.

    "Life markers give us an indication that we have moved from one configuration or stage in our family lives to another," says Todd Martin, a family researcher and Dean and Associate Professor of Sociology at Trinity Western University.

    Weddings, birth...

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  • The Human Face of Health Care

    Through the painful season of his wife’s death, Timothy deVries saw past caricatures of faceless health systems to recognize the rich culture of care surrounding patients, families and medical professionals.

    One day in May, 2017, a doctor at St. Joseph’s hospital in Hamilton had the awful task of delivering an incurable cancer diagnosis to a pregnant, 40 year-old, mother. It was an appointment she had been dreading, since very few people are subject to a biopsy...

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  • Regaining Lost Educational Ground

    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.

    University arts students of the 1970s all saw Marxism dominating the world of academic respectability among ambitious young scholars – the Herd of Independent Thinkers – despite Communism’s repeated seven-and eight-figure slaughters (such as Stalin’s four t...

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  • The Myths of Starting Over

    When we travel and separate from our historical baggage and community, we reach a radical moment to start over, writes Jacob Sims. But we do not start from square one.

    Sunlight fades to a glorious, breezy, dry-season evening. Rickshaws and motorbikes hurtle in mesmerizing rhythm amidst the unfamiliar bustle below.

    I stand here at the railing for a moment, then walk over to the pool, kick my sandals off and sit down...

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