Peter Stockland
Peter Stockland is Senior Writer with Cardus, and Editor of Convivium.
Bio last updated November 16th, 2021.
Articles by Peter Stockland
Laugh or Cry After COP26
By Peter Stockland
November 16, 2021
Peter Stockland notes theopoetics of Christian leaders and 277 Canadian delegates at the recent Glasgow climate conference equal bupkas unless we tackle climate change profitably.
The debate has been sparked by calculations showing that the combined cost of global damage from climate change can actually produce future savings if we avoid it in the first place As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, there’s vigorous debate, among climate economists, and so cause for real hope, that the “social cost of carbon” will provoke genuine behavioural reforms because it profits us to make them
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Deadline Looms to Save Hospice Society
Peter Stockland
October 15, 2021
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.
Ireland insists, though, that the real objective goes far beyond the bitter infighting of the last few years that have seen the DHS board forced out of the 10-bed Irene Thomas Hospice and forced to give up its palliative care support centre, both of which were built through millions of dollars in fu...
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Truth and Justin Trudeau
Peter Stockland
October 5, 2021
Even as Canadians auto-correct for political falsehoods by expecting and accepting them, the Prime Minister’s fib on Truth and Reconciliation Day reveals a worrying pattern, Peter Stockland writes.
In answering that question, of course, we must be prudent in our judgements, charitable with our forgiveness, and acknowledge the Prime Minister has apologized at least for the “slap in the face” on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation A consequence is that we miss the significance of preva...
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The Path Back to Trust
Peter Stockland
September 27, 2021
The good results notoriously sceptical French are getting by taking a leap of faith in the fight against COVID shows the necessity of trust within democratic life, Peter Stockland writes.
The outcome? It has reportedly gone from one of the highest vaccine hesitancy rates in the world last January to one of the highest vaccination rates among world powers this September Still, the picture caught my eye a) because a young man of my closest acquaintance works in La Grande Motte and b) b...
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Separating Sheep From Scapegoats
Peter Stockland
September 14, 2021
Peter Stockland reports on writer Charles Eisenstein’s work to identify a force even more dangerous than contagious public stupidity.
In a four-part essay series released over the summer, Eisenstein goes beyond the emerging risks of public stupidity and warns of the already-here dangers of darkness in the human soul Following the thought of the late French philosopher of anthropology and literature Rene Girard, he sees the dehuman...
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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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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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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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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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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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The Complex Web of Indigenous Diversity
Peter Stockland
July 2, 2021
The Assembly of First Nations is a national voice on issues like reconciliation and residential schools, but its July 7 leadership vote tests the strands that link Indigenous people, Peter Stockland reports.
For example, on an issue as critical to First Nations as passage of legislation to make the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) part of Canadian law, Mbarki was surprised to discover how little consultation the AFN conducted with chiefs across the country before th...
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MAiD in the COVID Shade
Peter Stockland
June 24, 2021
Peter Stockland reports on how the pandemic’s overshadowing of legislation radically expanding medical assistance in dying might reconfigure Canada’s future.
But the thing is, in the pandemic year just past, with Parliament shut down, Canadians locked down, and our most vulnerable population ravaged by COVID in care homes, we rushed through legislation expanding MAiD availability That fundamental conception endured for 133 years until the Supreme Court r...
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Questions Unasked About Indigenous Deaths
Peter Stockland
June 4, 2021
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.
In an interview with Montreal’s Le Devoir newspaper yesterday, Mollen-Dupuis was sharply critical of media response to last week’s shocking news that ground-penetrating radar has revealed the bones of up to 215 of those children at the site of the former Indian Residential School near the south-cent...
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Intimations of Constitutional Crack Up?
Peter Stockland
May 28, 2021
Peter Stockland reports on the week’s political signs that the past might be coming back to haunt Canada’s future much sooner than we dreamed.
That said, incorporation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, combined with the specifics provision of Bill C-15 itself, opens the door to a very different Canada than even the Meech Lake Accord envisioned, or that the crisis-stasis-crisis dynamic of the past 30 yea...
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A Rude Awokening for Justin Trudeau?
Peter Stockland
May 21, 2021
Peter Stockland reports on the political implications of a speech the former justice minister gave this week castigating the Prime Minister’s “hypocrisy” on Indigenous issues.
“This practice, this hypocrisy, the affirmation of Charter rights… but denial of Indigenous rights is, in my opinion, the most insidious and prime example of systemic racism rooted in the legacy of colonialism that remains pervasive at the highest levels of government and underpins the relationship ...
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When Politics Trumps Meaning
Peter Stockland
May 14, 2021
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.
Why, for example, must the class of conventional broadcasters operate under different rules from the “distinct class” of Internet, errr, uhhh, broadcasters? Why does the “distinct class” need to be a distinct class at all? Why is the distinction allowed – and it will be characterized as an allowance...
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Power Struggle Over Communication
Peter Stockland
May 12, 2021
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.
In fact, Dimitrieff argues this week, the very argument that the legislation threatens free speech and thought “demonstrates exactly why Bill C-10 is an important and necessary tool” to enhance, rather than menace, Canadian democracy Initially, the amendments, formally known as Bill C-10, seemed set...
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The Cat Fight Over State-Controlled Internet
Peter Stockland
May 7, 2021
Experts pushed back this week on government efforts to legislate control of Canadians’ Internet use. Peter Stockland reports on what’s at stake.
Geist does see some hope that the kerfuffle that has erupted around C-10 will provide a sharp reminder to the Heritage Minister and the federal government that there’s a cost to interfering with Canadians’ Internet freedom The whole purpose of Bill C-10 is to amend that Act (and several others) in ...
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Shadows and Light on Palliative Care
Peter Stockland
April 26, 2021
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.
Out in British Columbia, Angelina Ireland says the Delta Hospice Society, too, will be steadfast in continuing bereavement and grief counselling as well as supportive therapies that were its core work before it fundraised $9 million to open the Irene Thomas palliative care centre a decade ago “We’ve...
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In What Do We Trust?
Peter Stockland
April 12, 2021
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.
The good news, Kambhampati says, is that there’s an increasing wariness, if not outright rejection, of social warrior dogma and tactics among students he teaches and encounters at McGill “In the past 20 years, the university has become a commodity that exists to give undergraduates an educational ex...
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At Home in Houses of Worship
Peter Stockland
April 1, 2021
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.
Poll results released today by the Angus Reid Institute in partnership with Cardus show about 80 per cent of those who attend regular worship service across faith tradition report missing being able to worship together It highlights the importance of community, of communal in-person worship as part ...
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A COVID Cold Shoulder for Churches
Peter Stockland
March 25, 2021
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.
“We can’t use the church for the purpose for which it was built by the people: the worship of God,” Schouten points out Canada’s Charter protections for religious freedom mean the State doesn’t get to tell people of faith where and how to worship What he and others perceive as the incongruity and i...
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Irish Eyes on Meghan and Harry
Peter Stockland
March 17, 2021
This might be the best Saint Patrick’s Day to skip the clownish caricatures and ponder the British monarchy from Ireland’s historical perspective, Peter Stockland argues.
For as Peggy Noonan perspicaciously points out from her position in a watchtower of the greatest republic in human history, the question that the furies besetting the House of Windsor raise is whether the family will escape with their skins before the institutional walls tumble down around them With...
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When Calls to Service Call Us Back
Peter Stockland
March 15, 2021
The Cardus Religious Freedom Institute’s Diakonia Project moved its two researchers to faith-based service themselves, Peter Stockland reports.
Matthew House was one of eight service organizations across Canada that Bennett and Lewis looked at in depth and, more, created space on the CRFI website so workers within the faith-based groups could tell their own stories as well When Father Deacon Andrew Bennett and researcher Johanna Lewis began...