Justice

  • Sit down. Shut up. You lost.

    Sit down. Shut up. You lost.

    Peter Stockland

    April 17, 2012

    Given her stellar record of journalistic good work, then, it seems borderline churlish then to pick nine words from today's column as evidence of what is wrong with the world. Yet it must be done. If the greatest poet of the day walks into a bank and says the four small words "this is a stickup", his flowing yards of iambic pentameter will not save him when the flatfoots arrive.

    Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente writes thousands of excellent words a month. Almost all bring the fresh scent of common sense. Many are contrarian in a way the makes me wonder how they ever became the contrary rather than the norm.

    Giv...

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  • Conscience rights are Charter rights

    Conscience rights are Charter rights

    Peter Stockland

    April 10, 2012

    According to a Calgary Herald-Edmonton Journal poll reported in today's National Post, Smith and Wildrose have lost the impressive lead they held in the first week of campaigning. They are said to be tied in popular support with the governing Progressive Conservative party. Premier Alison Redford last week attacked the Wildrose platform for promising to protect conscience rights by letting health care professionals and marriage commissioners go to court for legal exemptions from, say, performing abortions, dispensing contraceptives, or officiating at same-sex weddings.

    Have Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith's in-born libertarian instincts cost her a majority government in the Alberta election?

    According to a Calgary Herald-Edmonton Journal poll ...

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  • Losing Canada's humanity

    Losing Canada's humanity

    Peter Stockland

    April 3, 2012

    They will deliberately inject the dying, the depressed, and the distraught with lethal drugs as a form of legislatively approved medical treatment. The malfeasance of the elected officials responsible is breathtaking. More shocking still is the response of the public, which can be accurately described as no response at all.

    Within 14 months, Quebec doctors will almost certainly begin intentionally killing their patients across the province.

    They will deliberately inject the dying, the depressed, and the distraught with lethal drugs as a form of legislatively approved me...

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  • Does Canada have Social Conservatives?

    Does Canada have Social Conservatives?

    Robert Joustra

    March 30, 2012

    The term social conservative is beginning to lose integrity in Canada, if it ever had any. In many ways, like evangelical and conservative, it's a term which is coloured almost beyond utility by the American context. None of these labels mean the same things across the border. Or across many borders, as The Economist wrote recently about Rick Santorum's social conservatism.

    With Ontario's provincial, and now Canada's federal budget tabled, there is the inexorable rush of commentary, lobbyist posturing, and interest group press releases. At least some of those will fit into the mould of what many have come to call social con...

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  • Truly, God never abandons

    Truly, God never abandons

    Brian Dijkema

    March 29, 2012

    So was Benedict's visit a failure?

    Pope Benedict left Cuba yesterday and nothing changed. The state is still run by a communist gerontocracy; it remains an officially atheist state; Good Friday is still not a public holiday; hundreds of political prisoners remain in jail or under close surve...

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  • Government Addictions

    Government Addictions

    Brian Dijkema

    March 15, 2012

    It's a good question, but it's the wrong one. Ontario's finance minister, Dwight Duncan, should have asked, "What is a Crown corporation doing taking revenues from a casino at all?" As Adam Radwanski notes in the Globe, "The new vision for OLG adds up to something radically different—a tough-minded (some would say cold-blooded) business plan without any of the usual moral squeamishness."

    "What expertise does a Crown corporation have in running a hot dog stand in a casino?"

    It's a good quest...

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  • Time to Stop Doubling Down on Short-termism

    Time to Stop Doubling Down on Short-termism

    Jonathan Wellum

    March 12, 2012

    Simply stated, none of these jurisdictions have a hope of ever paying down even a portion of their accumulated liabilities, with non-debased money. They are each so strapped with debt and entitlement that none of them can currently service their interest (despite rates being close to zero), without borrowing more money or resorting to the printing press.

    Over the past four decades, the developed economies have gone on the biggest debt bender in history. The current level of global indebtedness, coupled with the massive unfunded government entitlement promises, are conservatively valued at over six times (6x...

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  • The acid erosion of political trust

    The acid erosion of political trust

    Peter Stockland

    March 8, 2012

    It always has to instantaneously expand from something gone wrong to yet another full-blown scrape us screeching off the ceiling national nervous breakdown. Make no mistake. The information surfaced by Elections Canada—showing that miscreants (as yet unknown) used automated dialing technology to misdirect and confuse voters in the last federal election—is a serious democratic matter. Our one genuine kick at the political can in this country comes every four or five years when we put a ballot in a box. Innocent blood has been shed protecting that electoral sacrament.

    Our real problem is that it's never enough for it to be what it is, is it?

    It always has to instantaneously expand from something gone wrong to yet another full-blown scrape us screeching off the ceiling national nervous breakdown.

    We—at least...

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  • Watching the Frog Boil

    Watching the Frog Boil

    Ray Pennings

    March 6, 2012

    The short-term political strategies are predictable. When campaigns use tactics they prefer to hide, they typically give their political masters "plausible deniability" and keep the circle of those "in the know" as small as possible. If a tactic backfires, a staffer takes the public blame. Accept the resignation, insist it was an isolated incident involving a rogue player acting alone, and try to change the political conversation quickly.

    The boiling frog metaphor is often used to describe gradual change that occurs unnoticed. The political dirty trick stories making Canadian polit...

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  • Contesting the Defence of Liberal Hegemony

    Contesting the Defence of Liberal Hegemony

    Brian Dijkema

    March 1, 2012

    Here's a snippet of the Supreme Court's ruling on parental requests to remove their children from state-mandated religious education, which prompted the discussion: Stackhouse criticizes the EFC and Cardus for "arguing quite wrongly" about the case. Putting aside the fact that Cardus has, to date, not published anything official on this case, I want to query John on two matters in his argument which I think will help the discussion along.

    Dr. John Stackhouse thinks Catholics and Protestants are overreacting in their response to the Supreme Cou...

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  • A Child by Any Other Name

    A Child by Any Other Name

    Richelle Wiseman

    February 29, 2012

    In Calgary's Foothills Hospital, for instance, the "Pregnancy and Infant Loss Program" is described on the website as one which provides information, guidance and "grief support for parents and other family members who have experienced a pregnancy loss (miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, still birth, neonatal death or termination) through individual, couple and group counseling."

    How early does a fetus become a baby become a human being? Our politicians may be loath to debate it, but it seems even our hospitals need more work to get their nomenclature straight. Contradictory practices within single hospitals cannot be serving anyone...

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  • Private lies and public causes

    Private lies and public causes

    Peter Stockland

    February 28, 2012

    Murphy, famous for his acerbic commentaries on CBC Radio and TV as well as in the National Post, doesn't suggest for a moment that we become a nation of muffle-mouths. So, no more comparing advocates of gun control to Hitler. No more comparing anyone alive today to Hitler. Full stop. . . . . . . . .

    Rex Murphy makes the point in the first issue of Convivium magazine that we should all breath deep and turn down the rhetorical heat way down.

    Murphy, famous for his acerbic commentaries on CBC Radio and TV as well as in the National Post...

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  • Vatican Foreign Policy Exposes Fault Lines Without, but also Within

    Vatican Foreign Policy Exposes Fault Lines Without, but also Within

    Robert Joustra

    February 17, 2012

    Vatican foreign policy has a unique position in the global economy: unlike other developed powers it has less of a stake in the maintenance of the financial architecture that led to crisis and disparity, and an increasing interest in reformation and renovation for the developing world. Catholics aren't as rich anymore, or not as rich as they used to be.

    The Vatican is caught between the rock of the rich and the hard place of the poor, and between the work of theology and political advocacy. Its ...

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  • The Repentance of Thieves and Murderers

    The Repentance of Thieves and Murderers

    Brian Dijkema

    February 9, 2012

    The long-time Cuban president is responsible for the dispossession of millions of dollars worth of land, cars, cash, and other material goods once held privately by Cubans. He is also responsible for the more heinous crime of dispossession of the dignity and lives of countless Cuban citizens. Hundreds of men and women endure squalid prison conditions because of his policies. Churches, trade unions, newspapers, political parties, free courts, and other green shoots of independence, pluralism, and liberty have been cut down to the nub or choked by Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and their geriatric posse of communist true believers. But rumour has it that Fidel is contemplating a return to his old faith. As with most news from Cuba, it's difficult to determine the veracity of these claims, but an Italian newspaper quotes his daughter Alina as saying, "Today he is more interested in the fate of his soul than the future of Cuba." Because while it might be true that he is more concerned for the state of his soul than for the future of Cuba, it is also true that a full reorientation of his soul towards God and his rejoining of God's church would be a tremendous development in the future of Cuba.

    Fidel Castro is a thief and a murderer. And he may be returning to Christianity.

    The long-time Cuban president is responsible for the dispossession of millions of dollars worth of land, cars, cash, and other material goods once held privately by Cuba...

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  • It's not the cake's fault

    It's not the cake's fault

    Peter Stockland

    February 7, 2012

    Bennett was, many responses went, a mug, a bug, a mope, a dope, a know-nothing know-it-all unable to understand that a game is just a game. Worse, he was guilty of making some readers, in the immortal words of Elmer Fudd, "vewy, vewy angwy" for his misguided missive.

    Kyle Bennett, Comment magazine's reviews editor, stirred up a fuss among readers last week with an essay scalding makers of a popular board game for designing it to provok...

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  • What the Monks of Tibhirine Teach Us about Faith and Public Life

    What the Monks of Tibhirine Teach Us about Faith and Public Life

    Brian Dijkema

    January 27, 2012

    The film depicts the life of eight Trappist monks at Our Lady of the Atlas monastery in Algeria during Algeria's civil war in the 1990s. Unlike Into Great Silence—another excellent film portraying the lives of monks—Of Gods and Men focuses not merely on the day-to-day practices, routines, and disciplines of the monastery, but on how such routines can be maintained in the face of a deadly, and very real, threat of Islamic terrorists and the violence of war. Of Gods and Men is a violent film, but it is so good because the conflict—the seed of drama—is not one between men with guns, but within the hearts of men who self-consciously exist to love God and love their neighbours, and they do so within an institution dedicated to that task. The film's greatest struggle is fought both within the hearts of the brothers and among them. In the face of terrible violence, violence which threatened their lives, the question "do we stay or do we go?" is more compelling than any showdown between snarling men with loaded .44 magnums.

    Faithful presence. Those two words returned to my mind again and again as I reflected on the movie Of Gods and Men.

    The film depicts the life of eight Trappist monks at Our Lady of t...

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  • Bring Back the King

    Bring Back the King

    Peter Stockland

    January 24, 2012

    It has always baffled me how anyone who has so much as skimmed history could regard the horrifying legacy of the British Royal family (see persecution of Irish Catholics, prosecution of the First World War, palling around with Nazis before the Second World War, et al) and avoid feeling green. The interminable primaries are bad enough, but hearing that President Obama will contort tonight's State of the Union address into a campaign pitch is beyond the pale. One might expect the State and the Union would be protected from use as debased gee-gaws for voter bemusement. Apparently not.

    Having been a small child in the last years before Canada dumped its red Royal Mailboxes into the dustbin of history, I have always considered the British Crown a useless necessity.

    It has always baffled me how anyone who has so much as skimmed histo...

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  • There can be no peace, after Westphalia

    There can be no peace, after Westphalia

    Robert Joustra

    January 6, 2012

    The politics of Epiphany can be easily forgotten, a forgotten feast drowned out by the pounding of a cultural Christmas hangover. But it is striking how political Epiphany, and its attendant liturgy can be. Oliver O'Donovan recalls the same in the prologue of The Desire of the Nations, quoting the second stanza of the Te Deum:

    Epiphany is here, and on it we remember the Magi, the wise, and the powerful, bending the knee as one to the Christ. Its opening sentence in the lectionary is from Isaiah 60:3, "Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising."...

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  • What does debt do to us?

    What does debt do to us?

    Brian Dijkema

    January 5, 2012

    Paul Krugman is in favour of accruing national debt for the sake of stimulating a stalled economy. He implies that economic growth is stalled due to a lack of demand among various sectors of the economy, and that government spending—enabled by government borrowing—is what is needed to kick-start the American economic engine.

    There is an ongoing discussion, between various economists on the left and right in the United States, on how to understand debt.

    Paul Krugman is in favour of accruing national debt for the sake of stimulating a stalled economy. He implies that econo...

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  • Beyond the Predictable

    Beyond the Predictable

    Ray Pennings

    January 4, 2012

    This is not to say such polls are meaningless. Canadians in an optimistic frame of mind are more likely to spend money and take risks than those in a pessimistic mood. Polls and predictions are significant not for the accuracy of what they say but for their effect on those who read them. When it comes to predicting what might shape the world in 2012, a wider lens is needed.

    After reading too many columns summarizing what was in 2011, predicting what might be in 2012, and explaining why the predictions made a year ago were not quite on the mark, I am more than ready to dismiss the entire exercise as a waste of energy. ...

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  • Hope Against Those Who Have No Hope

    Hope Against Those Who Have No Hope

    Brian Dijkema

    December 22, 2011

    And while each of those deaths mean that scores of people around the world are bereaved, only a few deaths made it into the newspaper headlines this week. Three in particular—Christopher Hitchens, Vaclav Havel, and Kim Jung-Il—have dominated the headlines.

    This week saw the demise of thousands of people around the world. The rough statistics, as I understand them, are that there are approximately 8.37 deaths per thousand people per year. That means that taking a very conservative world population of 6 billion...

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  • Unlikely Mentors for the Occupiers

    Unlikely Mentors for the Occupiers

    John Stackhouse Jr.

    December 20, 2011

    But the Occupiers wouldn't seem to settle for such incremental particular changes. Now, as the chaotic movement begins to hibernate or fade away, perhaps it's helpful to offer a concrete suggestion to those seeking large-scale political upheaval to rearrange the whole system: talk to people who know about such things.

    Seeing the incoherence of the Occupy movement, some recommended that the Occupiers each pick a particular, pointed concern (banking reform, sexual trafficking, environmental protection, native land rights) and join, or start, a focused organization that mig...

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  • Veiled Interference in Freedom of Religion

    Veiled Interference in Freedom of Religion

    Ray Pennings

    December 14, 2011

    The issue is controversial, of course, due to the practice of certain Muslim women of wearing a niqab or burka in public. While Minister Kenney's edict sounds reasonable, as Peter Stockland noted in this space yesterday, the response of outrage to the announcement also sounds reasonable. Recognizing that freedom of religion is a greatly attacked freedom these days, I am usually inclined to bend over backwards to protect it, but here—in matters as basic to our citizenship as swearing public oaths, establishing identity, or witnessing at a trial—I think the state has a more reasonable argument, to ensure it functions properly. These essential processes in the state's functioning are part and parcel of the very package of freedoms that allow for the freedom of religion, which in my mind does allow for the wearing of religious head coverings on other occasions.

    For the record, I think Minister Jason Kenney is right in insisting that when taking the oath of citizenship, new Canadians are required to show their faces. He is quoted as saying, "The citizenship oath is a quintessentially public act. It is a public decl...

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  • The anvil on the cliff edge

    The anvil on the cliff edge

    Peter Stockland

    December 13, 2011

    The problem is, the response from Muslim women outraged by the edict seems just as reasonable. More, he said, the moment of swearing an oath to Canada requires a visible affirmation of the value of equality among all Canadians. In his eyes, and many Canadians would see it similarly, a veiled female face attests to the inequality of the woman who must live her life unseen by her fellow citizens.

    Immigration Minister Jason Kenney's edict ordering Muslim women to remove their veils while taking Canada's citizenship oath seem...

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