Part of Basel Abou Hamrah' desire to help is prompted by a need to give back to Canadians who helped him
For Basel Abou Hamrah, the difference between an evacuee and a refugee is a simple matter of months and of who is helping whom. Four months ago, on New Year’s Eve, the 27-year-old Syrian accountant arrived in Edmonton as one of the refugees being helped to resettle here from that wartorn country. Last week, he…
Mulcair was never someone who could win
Showing the pride and impenetrably thick hide of the best political performers, NDP leader Tom Mulcair ignored his own deep wounds to savage the Liberal government in the Commons this week. He was fresh from crippling betrayal by his party at a weekend convention in Edmonton. Yet Mulcair was still at his finest going after…
Why are so-called progressive thinkers so afraid of sharing and legitimately debating ideas?
At the recent Broadbent Institute conference, progressive icon Gloria Steinem dropped a clanger that rates high among the most fatuous thoughts of this addled decade. “The power of the State,” Steinem opined, “stops at the skin.” Even in this moment of Donald Trump turning political speech into Mad Hatter word balloons, Steinem’s nine-word pronouncement can…
Distorting the true religious sense leaves us with sharp social divides and opens the door to politicians like Donald Trump
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks roots today’s religious violence in the soil of ancient heresies. By doing so, he gives us fresh understanding of the spiritual sources of our deep political divides. Sacks will deliver Cardus’s Hill Family Lecture in Toronto on Tuesday. He contends in his latest book that contemporary murder and persecution in God’s name…
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…