A single year to legalize such a wholesale change about the ending of human life signals a country moving away from its past
For two evenings recently, my Cardus colleagues and a panel of expert guests have engaged in an in-depth discussion on YouTube on Canada’s post-COVID future. They covered an impressive range of issues from education to the bifurcation of society as the pandemic exposed real, and really troubling, differences in how cohorts of Canadian society were…
The implications for Canadian politics are profound
In the year before the pandemic, Jody Wilson-Raybould was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s worst headache. In a speech she gave on Wednesday, the former justice minister and attorney general showed why she could become the PM’s worst nightmare. “This practice, this hypocrisy, the affirmation of Charter rights … but denial of Indigenous rights is, in…
Former Mountie Sean Murphy is calling for a Criminal Code amendment to protect conscientious objections to MAiD
Sean Murphy has what he considers a clear way through the tangle between the House of Commons and Senate over Liberal government legislation to expand Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). The former veteran Mountie and coroner says the bill’s status would be clarified if all Canadians understood that MAiD means homicide. A logical outcome he…
Cancel culture slaughters reputations, leaving its victims to endure financial uncertainty, isolation, bewilderment and pain
The riot that produced the U.S. Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump has its analogue in the cancel culture rampaging through North American institutions. Neither cancels the other, of course. Both are horrid, each in its especially hideous way. The Jan. 6 attack on America’s federal Capitol destroyed institutional property, mobbed and halted the democratic…
‘This is about the B.C. government destroying a sanctuary for dying patients who want the choice to stay in a facility where MAID is not offered’
You might think the middle of a global pandemic is less than an ideal time to disrupt the operations of a hospice where palliative care patients receive comfort as they approach death. If so, you would not share the apparent thinking of the B.C. government or its local Fraser Health Authority, which is forcing layoffs…
‘Imposing the intentional taking of human life as a solution to human suffering is unacceptable for a civilized society’
More than 50 leaders across the faith spectrum warn the Liberal government’s changes to medical assistance in dying legislation will pressure vulnerable Canadians to opt for “lethal procedures” over living with illness or disability Equally alarming, says the gloves-off open letter released recently, the alterations contained in the bill known as C-7 will undermine the…
Vandalizing public spaces under the delusion that such acts make yesterday a better today is sad-sack politics that fosters democratic weakness
For her book Talking Stones: The Politics of Memorialization in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland, Elisabetta Viggiani mapped 157 publicly visible sites of Troubles commemoration in Belfast. Broken down, the city’s memorials alone offer a ratio of one wall plaque, garden, public tableau or statue for every 25 of the 4,000 or so people killed by the…
The speed of the spread and the rise of the body count prove something menacing has us at its mercy. How we deal with it is crucial
The Quebec government recently ordered the province’s cathedrals of commerce – also known as shopping malls – to close. The edict followed another imperative obliging all places of religious worship to lock their doors. Yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau subsequently suggested Canadians might not have seen anything yet when it comes to draconian measures to…
Taking shortcuts becomes a fast track to ending the conversation and starting the shouting. We need to build a workable partnership
Canadians have been swept over the roaring information waterfall and plunged into a kind of suspended frenzy, from the ‘crisis’ of Indigenous railway blockades to the fresh hell of a spreading global virus most of us had never heard of when 2020 began. One immediate effect is a dizzying distractedness that makes coherent political response…
Delta Hospice Society has been locked in a lengthy fight with the health authority and the B.C. government, and has now lost its funding
Directors of a Vancouver-area hospice are considering their legal options after the B.C. government abruptly yanked its funding because it doesn’t permit medical assistance in dying (MAID) on the premises. And an Ottawa lawyer engaged by the Delta Hospice Society says B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix is simply wrong to claim the facility’s refusal to…
For two evenings recently, my Cardus colleagues and a panel of expert guests have engaged in an in-depth discussion on YouTube on Canada’s post-COVID future. They covered an impressive range of issues from education to the bifurcation of society as the pandemic exposed real, and really troubling, differences in how cohorts of Canadian society were…
