Peter Stockland
Peter Stockland is Senior Writer with Cardus, and Editor of Convivium.
Bio last updated July 30th, 2021.
Articles by Peter Stockland
Journos Who Soldier On
By 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 frontline reporters and writers who are producing first-rate journalism and bringing it to wider audiences than could ever have been imagined 15 years ago
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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...
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Readers Respond to Sean Murphy
Peter Stockland
March 5, 2021
We asked our readers to let us know what they think about Sean Murphy’s initiative to amend the Criminal Code and make it an offence to compel anyone to participate in the act of non-culpable homicide that is currently called medical aid in dying. Here are some responses.
Health Care should be about saving lives, and in my view the moment Canada made Physician Assisted Suicide law they infringed on the rights of Canadians who feel life from conception until natural death is sacred It seems to me the government is more interested in investing in ending lives through a...
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A Plan to Unmake MAiD
Peter Stockland
February 18, 2021
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.
Given that most people don’t go into health care to commit even non-culpable homicide against the vulnerable, the elderly, the disabled, or the mentally ill – as the Senate amendments would allow – a consequence could be far fewer hands willing to inject death into their fellow citizens’ veins What ...
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Cancel That Cancellation
Peter Stockland
February 11, 2021
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.
Late last month, in the later stages of a long and respected career, Douglas Farrow was subjected to an open letter from students in the Religious Studies department In late January, Kay published a superb piece of journalism on the cancel culture malice and cowardice at the heart of former CTV real...
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COVID in the Courts
Peter Stockland
January 25, 2021
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.
Establishing the right is why Carpay and the JCCF are going to court to argue governments should heed their own data when they decide to “do something” about COVID Carpay is prepared to do the talking in court as he and the JCCF press ahead with legal challenges in five provinces to the shutdowns, l...
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Protecting Freedom From COVID-19
Peter Stockland
January 18, 2021
There’s no question the pandemic is real and really deadly but we must never forget that liberty, too, can suffer the painful demise of simply being forgotten, Peter Stockland argues.
The last time Quebecers were subjected to State control of the hours they could be on public streets was 50 years ago during the declaration of the War Measures Act by Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau during the 1970 October Crisis I don’t even mean it as being free from annoying smart phone bla...
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MAiD Muscles In
Peter Stockland
January 8, 2021
Staff layoffs and eviction of B.C.’s Delta Hospice Society from its facility outside Vancouver show MAiD advocates’ power to impose their will on those who don’t want it, Peter Stockland writes.
In the case of DHS, it met with officials from the local Fraser Health Authority and explained its constitutional predicament: its bylaws banned MAiD and to adhere to the government order would put it in violation of its standing under the provincial Society’s Act government or its local Fraser Heal...