The Supreme Court's Carter decision set the floor, not the ceiling, according to one proponent
Euthanasia? Assisted suicide? There’s an app for that. Or there soon might be, the executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association told a joint Senate-Commons committee this week. The committee is studying legislative responses to replace the Criminal Code prohibition on helping someone end his or her life. That provision was struck down, of…
Newspapers now seem so irrelevant to civic life that not even nostalgic moneybags want to preserve them
Thirty-five years ago, bankruptcies of two major daily newspapers prompted such concern across Canada that a royal commission was struck to inquire into the future of the industry. This month alone, four major English-language metro papers, one small city paper as old as Confederation itself and another that had been in circulation for 141 years, and…
We should not equate change with progress, but we should expect real leadership from our prime minister
Justin Trudeau’s penchant for platitudes masks an unwillingness – or inability – to tell the difference between progress and change. Waggish columnist John Robson observes in the National Post that Trudeau's maiden speech as prime minister to the Davos Economic Forum left out much while not leaving out nearly enough. Our prime minister's oration this…
Quebec doesn't feel legally bound by Canada's separation of powers regarding criminal law
An early surprise of 2016 has to be the failure of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s ghost to streak across the sky ululating at the damage done last week to his beloved Canadian constitution. Even minus the inspiration of Trudeau père in spiritus, however, Canadians who care at all about our constitutional democracy, and about the rule…
Christians experience religious persecution more than any other faith group on a global scale and in absolute numbers
There was good news and bad news around an open letter released in Ottawa recently. The bad news was the letter concerned the persecution of about 230 million Christians worldwide faced with “daily threats of murder, beating, imprisonment, and torture.” An estimated 400 million more Christians face appalling discrimination in housing and jobs. The good…
To Canadians’ shame, Canada’s greatest novelist’s centenary has been met with silence
Only a forgetful silence has marked this month’s centenary of the greatest of all Canadian-born novelists. Yet those who care to remedy such a state of affairs still have time before Saul Bellow’s birth month is out to read his astonishing 1976 Nobel Prize Lecture. They have the rest of their lives to marvel that…
Grant Notley bequeathed to his young daughter the idea of standing and fighting for a coherent set of beliefs
On an October day three decades ago, I watched aboard a plane taxiing for takeoff at Edmonton’s Municipal Airport as the body of then NDP leader Grant Notley was off-loaded from another aircraft. In the wildest of dreams, I could not have imagined a day when Notley’s daughter Rachel would bury the most dominant dynasty…
The State cannot privilege either religious or non-religious beliefs to the detriment of the other
Before the Supreme Court’s recent Saguenay decision becomes shorthand for assaults on religious freedom in Canada, the point needs making that it is a thoughtful, fair-minded, and overall welcome ruling. As with any judgment that must walk the fraught line between faith and politics, there are some findings that should properly raise warning flags. But,…
Magna Carta's 800th anniversary reminds us to kneel to no one
One of the most meaningful, hopeful, and typically unreported speeches on Parliament Hill in recent years came from Calgary's own Pierre Poilievre. Poilievre, of course, has represented a suburban Ottawa riding for a decade, but he is Calgary born and bred. He is an intellectual apprentice of the Calgary School made famous – infamous? –…