Peter Stockland
Peter Stockland is Senior Writer with Cardus, and Editor of Convivium.
Bio last updated September 16th, 2021.
Articles by Peter Stockland
Independence and Inequality
By Peter Stockland
May 21, 2020
Ontario’s independent schools outperformed their government counterparts during COVID-19. Peter Stockland reports on policy recommendations from Cardus Education’s David Hunt to strengthen Ontario's education for all students.
Hunt argues the “inflexibility, inequality and inefficiency” of government education stands in stark contrast to the nimbleness and responsiveness of Ontario’s independent schools, which he maintains did a far superior job of responding to the needs of the students and communities In a policy brief submitted to the Ontario government today, Cardus Director of Education David Hunt says the COVID-19 crisis has exposed “the cracks” in the province’s government-run school system
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Moving MAiD
Peter Stockland
May 20, 2020
A recent set of public demands by Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying lobby raise serious concerns, reports Convivium's Peter Stockland.
Scheidl noted the paradox of CAMAP members pressing public demands for greater MAiD access at a time when frontline medical staff have made extraordinary efforts to keep alive people afflicted with COVID-19 CAMAP believes that if necessary provincial governments should issue directives to all faith-...
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Laws and Lawn Signs
Peter Stockland
May 15, 2020
After a two-member pro-life group was investigated for providing campaign volunteers in the 2019 federal campaign, Peter Stockland reports on a likely legal challenge under the Charter in the near future.
In fact, Albertos Polizogopoulos says there will “almost certainly” be a legal challenge under the Charter in the near future unless Parliament amends the legislation to avoid situations such as the one facing his client, the pro-life group RightNow, founded about four years ago by Alissa Golob and ...
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Let Commonality Grow
Peter Stockland
May 14, 2020
A car dealer, a psychologist, and a doctor. Three comically different individuals, one harmonious view of the current circumstances. Peter Stockland unpacks a story of community right under our noses.
The long-time family physician, a social activist who helped lead a successful fight against the Quebec government to keep his local hospital open in the face of budget cuts and is veteran agitator for properly-funded public health care, believes strongly that emergence from COVID-19 will prompt a r...
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Shadow and Light in the Post-COVID Church
Peter Stockland and Peter Menzies
April 30, 2020
Two long-time journalistic and personal friends, former CRTC commissioner Peter Menzies and Convivium's Peter Stockland, weigh the future of faith life in a Canada where churches have been shuttered by government order.
In the column above, my long-time friend and journalism colleague Peter Menzies lays out a necessary, if disturbing, vision for the future of public faith in Canada as we emerge from the COVID-19 crisis The Church now has a powerful opening to remind the recovering world of the truth that because ou...
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A Sailor's Hour at Home
Peter Stockland
April 16, 2020
Amid the danger and chaos of the pandemic wave that has overturned our lives, music lifts the spirit to lead us home, Peter Stockland writes.
Now, in this time of pandemic, what seems an age already of isolation, I think of his feet coming safe to the shore for his hour at home. Though he was not in his public life a professed member of the Christian tribe, in an early song Prine employed a very specific Gospel image, mixed with his chara...
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A New Meaning for Cancel Culture
Peter Stockland
March 27, 2020
COVID-19 has unleashed an epidemic of event cancellations, including the historic National Prayer Breakfast in Ottawa and a speech by Cardus’ own Milton Friesen. Peter Stockland finds good news behind the closed doors.
For my colleague Milton Friesen, as for English Speaking Catholic Council executive director Anna Farrow, a discussion of social isolation being scrubbed because of an imperative for social isolation is a paradoxical golden opportunity to reflect on what the Church and the faithful have to offer dur...
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Getting Ahead of the COVID-19 Curve
Peter Stockland
March 23, 2020
Prime Minister Trudeau announced today that nothing “is off the table” regarding COVID-19. Peter Stockland says we must consider civil liberties before the Emergencies Act is declared.
Yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested today at his regular news conference in Ottawa that Canadians might not have seen anything yet when it comes to such draconian measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic Subject to a conference call with the premiers and territorial leaders, Trudeau said, th...
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Yesterday’s Buried Stories
Peter Stockland
March 17, 2020
While our lives revolve around COVID-19, it’s difficult to remember life before the pandemic. But today being St. Patrick's Day, Peter Stockland reflects on the historic event that took the lives of thousands of Irish during the mid-19th century.
Controversy erupted late last year, and continues to bubble, over Mayor Valérie Plante’s intention to name a new Montreal commuter rail station for former premier Bernard Landry, utterly disregarding the Irish community’s request that it honour the place where starving and impoverished sons and daug...
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What The Doctor Ordered
Peter Stockland
March 13, 2020
Instead of softening reality with euphemisms such as "social distancing," perhaps we might consider accepting quarantine as a response to the novel coronavirus, writes Peter Stockland.
Pulling off the mask of obscuring language would open a real possibility that the coronavirus could, paradoxically, reverse the decades-long plague of social distancing that afflicts us through various strains such as social media isolation, tribal political sequestration, and the pandemic delusion ...
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Seeing the Good in Others
Peter Stockland
March 6, 2020
Concluding a series published this week regarding crucial Indigenous discussion being drowned out by viral alarm bells, Peter Stockland sits down with Cecil Chabot, discussing the significance of partnership between peoples.
While the Newman talk was billed as being drawn for a specific leadership program of the James Bay Cree, Chabot’s words and his personal comportment are invariably drawn from his personal formation as a rare white kid growing up among northern Indigenous people, and developing a lifelong fascination...
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When Will Canada Wake Up?
Peter Stockland
March 5, 2020
Peter Stockland suggests Canadians distracted by the new coronavirus must awaken to pressing issues closer to home, particularly in the case of Indigenous rights.
Nicholas says Canadians should make themselves aware, too, that generations of young people have emerged from the agitation of the late 1980s and 1990s who are superbly educated, strategically well prepared, and ready to take the cause of Indigenous rights forward whether that’s in the courts or in ...
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Panic’s Power to Distract
Peter Stockland
March 4, 2020
While fears of coronavirus rise to pandemic proportions, Peter Stockland suggests Canadians look to our own land, concerning ourselves instead with Indigenous reconciliation.
A story Tuesday from Canadian Press noted Canadian scientists are “at the forefront” of a global research response to deal with the virus that has gripped the globe since first emerging a few weeks ago in one primary city in one province in China It’s grounded in our own history of deceiving Indigen...
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Cut Off And Shut Off
Peter Stockland
February 26, 2020
A hospice in British Columbia has been cut off from provincial funding for its decision to not provide medically assisted death, reports Peter Stockland.
Noting the government has threatened to take control of the privately-owned building, which sits on land leased for a nominal amount from the province, Ireland stressed the facility was constructed 10 year ago at a cost of about nine million dollars raised by the Delta Hospice Society, which has al...
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Live and Let Die
Peter Stockland
February 25, 2020
In light of MAiD changes, disabled Canadians say they’re being offered free choice to die, but no choice in where and how they live. Others wonder how the bill squares with the Supreme Court’s legal definition of consent, Peter Stockland reports.
Scheidl warns the most terrifying thing about MAiD, exemplified by this week’s amendments and its further expansion later this year, is that it sounds the death knell for the Canadian healthcare system Justice Minister David Lametti, Health Minister Patty Hajdu, and Disability Inclusion Minister Car...
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Good News During a Secular Winter
Peter Stockland
February 12, 2020
Despite the Quebec government announcing in January it would cancel the last substantial religious element of provincial school curriculum, Concordia University's Catholic students were hard at work. Peter Stockland reports.
Lemoine, who was assisting the Catholic Student Association as part of her role leading Catholic Christian Outreach (CCO) in Montreal, had some good news numbers to support her enthusiasm If the great and the good of Quebec secularism failed to read that memo – hence abominations such as Bill 21 – t...
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Why Changes to Internet Regulation Matter
Peter Stockland
February 4, 2020
A new federal approach to governing broadcasting proposes bringing the Internet under authority of the CRTC, sparking questions of what it means for Canadians’ online access. Two former long-time CRTC commissioners express their concerns.
Menzies believes the federal report’s call for a melding of those two very distinct roles has the very real potential to limit how freely Canadians can access the Internet, and what content they’ll be able to find when they do That regulatory power becomes doubly dark indeed, Denton says, when facto...
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When MAiD Matters More Than Choice
Peter Stockland
January 27, 2020
A small palliative care facility in Vancouver has been told it must drop its refusal to provide MAiD for qualifying patients in its care, despite being a private organization.
While the Society owns the building and has a 35-year lease on the land, the Fraser Health Authority decides which patients are admitted for palliative hospice care She wants Canadians to demand that a small hospice be permitted to keep its doors open so patients who don’t want MAiD, and don’t want ...
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MAiD In Canada: A Thankless Fight
Peter Stockland
January 20, 2020
As Canadians weigh in on prospective changes to MAiD laws, Peter Stockland sits down with Euthanasia Prevention Coalition’s Alex Schadenberg to discuss his serious concerns with the country’s trajectory.
Federal Justice Minister David Lametti and two of his Liberal cabinet colleagues are shepherding the process in response, at least purportedly, to a 2019 Quebec lower court ruling that found Ottawa’s MAiD law to be unconstitutional “They (the federal government) know there’s not a judge in the land ...
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The Cultural Mousetrap of Cats
Peter Stockland
January 7, 2020
The less-than-purrfect Cats movie presents an underlying problem with the way in which our entertainment industry claws at art and replaces it with something in-fur-ior.
But the real agony of Cats is unravelling the yarn’s deepest mystery: Why on earth am I here in the first place? The movie itself brashly seeks to suck completely dry what Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘80s stage version has milked for decades from Eliot's original book ...
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The Humour Must Come Out
Peter Stockland
December 18, 2019
Humanity's hunger for humour comes from our deep belief that the absurdity and darkness of the world can be absorbed, transformed, and sanctified, writes Peter Stockland.
Humour is, at heart, a crucial form of the three supernatural virtues: faith, hope and charity A long-ago friend of mine had a combination mantra that doubled as a HazMat level warning: “The humour must come out ...
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Andrew Scheer’s Fight and Flight
Peter Stockland
December 12, 2019
The Conservative leader couldn’t secure electoral gains he’d already made. But his ouster signals a serious threat to democratic difference and dissent, Peter Stockland writes.
In the end, it’s probably just as well for both the Conservative party and Canadians that leader Andrew Scheer resigned today Beyond the relief of being spared watching a party leader’s political blood spilled repeatedly during the three-month eternity of inevitable knifings before the Conservative’...
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A Place of Great Debate
Peter Stockland
December 6, 2019
After this week’s Munk Debate in Toronto, Peter Stockland wonders if the somewhat positive conversation on capitalism would have yielded the same response in a different crowd.
How is it, Van Pelt demanded at a post-debate breakfast Thursday morning, that about 3,000 self-evidently upscale Torontonians could settle into the uber-comfy seats of elegance-personified Roy Thomson Hall for the event, and by evening’s end fully 45 per cent of them voted in favour of a motion tha...
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Questioning the Outrage-Apology Cycle
Peter Stockland
November 29, 2019
The routine offense-apology-criticism as a response to issues of political correctness does not answer the deeper problems that could be addressed simply by slowing down and asking key questions, Peter Stockland writes.
Anyone in the university administration had actually grown up or lived in a paper mill town and so was able to reasonably adjudicate from lived experience whether the words were a fair and current representation? Those words were: “The only way out of a paper mill town is through a university door ...