2011‑2022, and is preserved here for archival purposes.
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’...
Experts pushed back this week on government efforts to legislate control of Canadians’ Internet use. Peter Stockland reports on what’s at stake.
Despite the almost spiritual significance Internet cat videos apparently have for Canadians, fears that legislation known as Bill C-10 might snuff out Fluffy’s chance for viral stardom seem seriously misdirected.
As Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeaul...
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...
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...
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...
Iain Provan reports on data from a recent Nanos poll showing the substantial number of Canadians willing to criminalize parental guidance of children on sexuality and gender.
The recent Nanos National Survey commissioned by the ...
Eerie silence has met Ottawa’s plan to regulate the Internet and outlaw hurtful – not just hateful – expression, Peter Menzies reports.
Canada’s long march towards violating Charter rights to free expression continues without any sign of political or media opposition.
Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s campaign to suppress the Internet has now opened up on three fronts. It is no l...
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...
Cardus Executive VP Ray Pennings breaks down for Convivium’s Peter Stockland new data on the eagerness of Canadians across faith traditions to gather again in their churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples.
The COVID-19 pandemic has meant bitter medicine for Canada’s religious faithful but its aftermath could be the good news churches and other houses of worship have been waiting for.
Poll resu...
The latest call to defund Ontario’s Catholic schools both rewrites Canadian history and goes counter to international schooling norms, Cardus Education Program Director David Hunt argues.
In terms of cultural insensitivity, the latest call for ending Ontario’s Catholic school funding wins the shamrock, coming...
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 ...
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...
Peter Stockland reports on a group of B.C. Canadian Reformed Churches going to court to be allowed to come in out of the rain and worship together.
As Christians around the world raise “hosannas” to their Saviour this Palm Sunday, the congregation of Aldergrove Canadian Reformed Church might also be putting up umbrellas.
Members of the church located near the western end of B.C.’s Fraser Valley ...
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...
Bad news sells but Peter Menzies wonders why journalists eager to echo alarms about pandemic case numbers ignore the social devastation of lockdown policies.
It has long been accepted both within and without the world of journalism that negative news trumps developments of a positive nature pretty much every time. Much may have changed in how news is delivered to people but the old cliches - “if it blee...
Contrary to theologian David Hionides, James Sikkema argues no one has a moral obligation to obey COVID-19 lockdown orders and that civilly disobeying them is justified.
Lockdown orders are not justified. There is, consequently, no moral obligation to obey them. Let me explain.
In the wake of ...
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...
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...
Desecration of the U.S. Capitol and undermining of North American institutions are both being rebuked by those willing to stand up for reason and sanity, Peter Stockland writes.
The riot that produced the U.S. Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump has its analogue in the cancel culture rampaging through North American institutions. Neither cancels the other, of course. Both are horrid, each in its especially hideous way.
...
Writing from a Christian perspective, theologian David Hionides argues followers of Jesus must endure COVID lockdowns by serving Christ as good citizens in the spirit of the early Church.
Lockdowns are not easy by any stretch of the imagination. They are a hard sacrifice. Christians believe humanity was created for community and as Scripture repeatedly indicates, this is a physical connection.
It is simply not good for humanity to be...
We can agree or disagree over policies, but the Prime Minister and other party leaders deserve the respect conveyed by the honorific preceding their names, Don Hutchinson writes.
Why Mr. Trudeau?
Some will have read the question as if it was written, “Why, Mr. Trudeau?
Why the multiple ethics violations, Mr. Trudeau? Why the departure of Jody Wilson-Raybould, Jane Philpott, and others? Why make announcements about rest...
Western “realities” of freedom, prosperity and individualism have been shattered by the pandemic, clearing the way for a profound spiritual opening of hearts, Tara Vreugdenhil writes.
The year just behind us was one of shaken realities. The news from Wuhan, China was of an unknown virus claiming lives in unprecedented numbers. But China is across the world so the West continued the reality of our usual daily tasks of work, school, activi...
Peter Stockland speaks with lawyer John Carpay, of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, about looming legal battles on pandemic-driven infringements of Charter rights.
It’s tempting to paraphrase a quote about the weather often (mis)attributed to Mark Twain as a summary of our COVID-19 year: Everyone keeps talking about the pandemic but no one’s doing anything about it.
We must not lead ourselves into that temptati...
A severe social side effect of the pandemic is the disconnection between those in authority we must trust and our personal experiences that contradict what we’re told, Travis Smith writes.
As justifiably proud as Canadians are about their health care system, carping about our experiences with medicine is a national pastime, too. Presented with a novel technology under today’s unusual conditions, it is unsurprising that some of the same old fr...