Ray Pennings
Ray Pennings co-founded Cardus in 2000 and currently serves as Executive Vice President, working out of the Ottawa office. Ray has a vast amount of experience in Canadian industrial relations and has been involved in public policy discussions and as a political activist at all levels of government. Ray is a respected voice in Canadian politics, contributing as a commentator, pundit and critic in many of Canada’s leading news outlets and as an advisor and strategist on political campaign teams.
Bio last updated May 10th, 2023.
Articles by Ray Pennings
God's in His Heaven and All Right With A Joke
By Ray Pennings
December 18, 2018
Now is the ideal time for non-religious Canadians to lighten up around discussions of faith, says Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings, citing polling data showing religious Canadians are happy to debate their beliefs in good humour.
A full 72 per cent of Canadians say it’s never acceptable to make fun of someone’s religious beliefs (while 74 per cent say the same for teasing someone’s lack of beliefs) That jumps to 75 per cent among non-religious Canadians but falls to just 37 per cent among those who actively follow a religious faith
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Getting Religious Freedom Right
Ray Pennings
November 26, 2018
Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings says polling data done for the think tank by the Angus Reid Institute suggests many Canadians suffer amnesia about the centrality of religious freedom in the Charter of Rights.
Only 31 per cent of the group hostile to public faith says religious freedom makes Canada better The same Angus Reid Institute survey used a series of measures to classify Canadians among three categories – those welcoming of faith in public life, those who are unsure, and those hostile to it ...
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Religious Diversity is Good Business
Ray Pennings
October 11, 2018
Cardus Executive Vice President Ray Pennings says the Quebec government’s planned public service ban on symbols of faith is out of step with growing awareness about the positive presence of religion in the workplace.
It’s also out of step with the growing awareness among the business community that religious diversity deserves respect in the workplace Even if it doesn’t, perhaps the business sector can show there is a better way to do things by respecting and making room for religious diversity in the workplace ...
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Coming Anew to Religious Faith
Ray Pennings
September 19, 2018
With fresh polling data from the Cardus-Angus Reid Institute in hand, Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings tells Convivium newly arrived Canadians hold the key to renewing our public understanding of faith.
That’s significant about new immigrants, but it’s also significant for the all Canadians however long they’ve been here to understand the place of religious faith in public life But we did ask when they compare the situation here to their home country when it comes to religious freedom, 43 per cent ...
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New Canadians Keep the Faith
Ray Pennings
September 13, 2018
Canadian society must come to grips with new Angus Reid polling data showing a strong majority of newly arrived Canadians want faith vigorously present in the public square, writes Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings.
Meanwhile, the latest polling by the Angus Reid Institute (ARI) finds that Canada’s faith communities get a big boost from immigration, which both sculpts and sustains Canada’s diversity Cardus has long argued that true commitment to diversity must acknowledge that communities and individuals of fai...
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Standing Up For Trinity Western’s Board
Ray Pennings
August 20, 2018
Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings challenges social media “experts” disparaging TWU’s volunteer board for altering its Community Covenant. Agree or disagree, with the decision, the members served with honour and sincerity, Pennings argues.
Whether you agreed with their stand or not, TWU, and the board members who ultimately had to make these missional decisions, decided to stand up all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada for their right to have a Community Covenant I estimate that one year when I served as chair of the board of a C...
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Getting Education Right
Peter Stockland with Ray Pennings
May 2, 2018
In a recent talk to a group of conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians, Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings challenged those present to re-think their approach to educating Canadian kids. Too often, he tells Convivium’s Peter Stockland, the Right offers more problems than solutions to what ails our schools.
The result is that we have a public school system operating as a monopoly with a monopoly mindset protecting their monopoly and resistant to innovation.So, we have a robust sense of public education, we have meaningful choice, not based on private/public but of different sorts that parents right acr...
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Salvation By The Young
Ray Pennings
March 6, 2018
Drawing on Angus Reid polling, Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings tells Convivium’s Peter Stockland why young Canadians are far more faith driven than the current secular narrative leads us to believe.
Convivium: In a recent symposium hosted by the Centre for Research on Religion at McGill University in Montreal, you made the argument that Angus Reid polling data shows young people are much more engaged in faith than we think The narrative is really one of decline of influence of faith institution...
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A Seriously Sorry New Year
Ray Pennings
January 3, 2018
Changing the way we apologize, Cardus executive president Ray Pennings writes, can change the way we live our whole lives
Yet the person responsible seems to expect friends to rally around in support on the basis of “I’m sorry” regardless of the legal, social and moral consequences of the behaviour It is worth reminding ourselves that in Christian theology, Jesus came to pay the price for sin, to satisfy Divine justice...
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Desiring a Better Country
Ray Pennings
December 5, 2017
Today, we continue our series of Policy Options articles that have emerged as a response to our Spirited Citizenship: Care, Conflict, and Virtue round table in Ottawa last month, convened in partnership with the Angus Reid Institute to mark Canada’s Sesquicentennial.
(Left to Right: Jennifer Ditchburn, Editor, Policy Options; Ray Pennings, Executive Vice-President, Cardus; Shachi Kurl, Executive Director, Angus Reid Institute ...
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Points of Christian Re-Formation
Ray Pennings
November 21, 2017
On Monday night during a panel discussion at McGill University’s Newman Centre in Montreal, Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings set out five points that he, as a Reformed believer, considers vital if Christians are to re-form a divided Church into unified faith.
You might rightly summarize my contribution as being keen on dialogue, conversation and understanding each other; sceptical about the likelihood of finding doctrinal or ecclesiastical unity that is meaningful or lasting; but finding reason based on my own experience for robust collaboration – co-bel...
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Religion's Perception Gap
Peter Stockland with Ray Pennings
November 16, 2017
With today's release of the fourth major Angus Reid Institute polls on the state of religion in Canada, Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings says the biggest identifiable gap is between Canadians' positive lived experiences of faith and their negative perceptions arising from narratives about spiritual belief.
What I find interesting about all of these questions is that when you take a look at the intensity of anti-faith feelings in the group of non-believers, or even their feelings about Islam, people of faith are far more positive about those who are Muslim than non-believers are I think it’s also a sen...
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Contempt of Lethbridge
Ray Pennings
September 27, 2017
Alberta MP Rachael Harder’s mistreatment by Liberals and New Democrats is a sad comment on their misunderstanding of Parliamentary democracy, says Cardus executive vice-president Ray Pennings.
Insisting, as the Liberal and NDP members of the Committee seem to be doing, that an MP in good standing must pass some sort of ideological orthodoxy test in order to serve in Parliament is offensive ...
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The Age of Hubris
Ray Pennings
August 23, 2017
Cardus Executive Vice President Ray Pennings delivers a thoughtful essay on the Age of Hubris and the way in which dignity and humility serve as essential ingredients to effective disagreement.
I confess to being sceptical that this generation can be so uniquely insightful about the modern version of human dignity, with its attendant corollaries regarding race, conception, gender, sexuality and death ...
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Keeping The Faith Local
Ray Pennings
June 29, 2017
With this week’s release of a third set of Angus Reid Institute polling data on the state of faith in Canada at its 150th birthday, Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings tells Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland there are signs of local hope, though Canadians of faith must pull up their socks when it comes to the national dimension of religious life
One of the things we wanted to do was identify the degrees to which Canadians recognize the expression of faith in their community and in their neighbourhoods, whether in hospitals, in the care for immigrants or in all the different institutions that were formed and motivated by faith communities th...
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The Five Goodbyes of Dying
Ray Pennings
May 12, 2017
Palliative care is less about medical science than about giving time to say what needs saying before life ends.
Depending on our station in life, some may feel the impact of our death, not just in terms of our absence, but also from the loss of our care So what does any of this have to do with palliative care and the end of life? Imagine how much less stressful, and less terrifying, anyone’s last days would b...
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Sacred Fire
Ray Pennings
January 4, 2017
Ray Pennings reflects on the sacred in a ceremony and looks forward to how Canada can best flourish over the next 150 years.
Yet, at this moment celebrating the kickoff of Canada’s 150th birthday party, something felt strange and out-of-place regarding this public celebration of aboriginal faith in a civic ceremony The appetite for participation by the full range of diverse religious groups in the sesquicentennial celebra...
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No Trumping Virtue
Ray Pennings
November 8, 2016
Convivium: Conrad Black, who obviously lived in the States for a number of years – in fact for a couple of years longer than he necessarily wanted to – made the point that if Trump doesn't get this right, it's not going to be just people who are going to go away mad And we will have to adapt to that...
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Perpetuating Homeschool Myths
Ray Pennings
October 31, 2016
The Globe and Mail ran a story on the dispute between the Alberta government and the Wisdom Home Schooling Society of Alberta, which has been shut down due to alleged financial irregularities Our report found that in most dimensions, homeschool graduates along with all other non-public school gradua...
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What to do in Post-Truth Politics?
Ray Pennings
October 24, 2016
And if a candidate who went too far down the post-truth road were to win, and if my vote were to be part of that win, would I not be enabling a willful campaign to make language meaningless and bald-faced lying the new norm for civil discourse? It was captured in a September issue of The Economist, ...
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Is the Party Over?
Ray Pennings
August 12, 2016
While the degrees and consequences of these various circumstances differ widely, is the incapacity of the political party to survive the absence of coherent foundational ideas at least part of the problem? Canadian journalist Susan Delacourt wrote a book a few years back documenting the shift from t...
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Palliative Care: Time for a Compassionate Approach
Ray Pennings
May 31, 2016
Three documents have come out of this roundtable: an adapted version of the agenda and background documents; a summary of discussion themes; and a backgrounder providing a statistical overview of Palliative Care in Canada ...
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Mapping the Progressives Progress
Ray Pennings
April 8, 2016
(Might federal Conservatives, who dropped the term Progressive from their name when it became unfashionable a decade ago, ponder renewing old nomenclature at their May convention in Vancouver?) Conventionally, party conventions were idea factories for future elections References to aboriginal spirit...
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Paris: Avoiding the Knee-Jerk Reaction
Ray Pennings
November 23, 2015
Just as Christians of a previous era were challenged to, on the basis of their own Scriptures, explain what their faith meant regarding issues of slavery, today’s adherents of Islam can be challenged both internally and in the context of multi-faith dialogue, to explain their religion’s views regard...