Stephen Harper announced on April 4 that a re-elected Conservative government would scrap Canada’s long gun registry. That hardly comes as a surprise. The Conservatives hate the registry. They tried in the last parliament to do away with it and have all of its records destroyed but they lost the vote narrowly in the House of Commons in November 2010. The Conservatives habitually use the registry as a wedge issue that they hope will dislodge votes from NDP and Liberal MPs in rural and small town areas. For a long while it looked as though the politics of division was working, but prior to last fall’s vote there was a growing chorus in support of the registry from police chiefs, emergency room physicians, nurses, people who run women’s shelters, labour unions and others. The Conservative bid to divide and conquer could well backfire in this election.
Read MoreStephen Harper used the first days of the 2011 election campaign to demonize the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois as plotting a coalition to replace him following an election in which he might win the most seats but form a minority government. It was both a scare and a smear tactic meant to place the other parties on the defensive before he moved on to making his first policy announcement a tax cut for families that won’t come into effect for at least four years. The three political parties did get together late in 2009 with a plan to dump Harper’s minority government and to cooperate on replacing him. He saved his skin by convincing Governor-General Michaëlle Jean to shut down parliament for several months. Harper said then and says now that it somehow borders on treason for parties representing a majority of voters to attempt to replace a party that does not.
Read MoreThe Conservative government, or the Harper government as it insists upon being called, has either fallen or engineered its own defeat and the election is upon us. This is perhaps a good time to take stock of who the Harperites have spent their time attacking in the past several years. (They have also lavished favour on their own, appointing them to be judges, to the Immigration Review Board, the CRTC or other federal agencies). The list of organizations that have been shut down and cut back, and the individuals bullied, is a long one and we can expect it to grow if, as seems likely, the Conservatives are reelected. I have written extensively about some of these actions, including the government’s attack on the ecumenical group KAIROS and the shameful treatment of the Rights and Democracy organization, but the following list, culled from on line sources, is more comprehensive.
Read MoreNote: This writing is drawn from a chapter that I contributed to a recently-published book called Bush Dweller: essays in memory of Father James Gray, OSB.
Long after I had finished with my years at university, I made a list of the five teachers and professors who had been my best. Two of them were Al Gerwing, better known to us during my student days at St. Peter’s College as Brother Thomas, and Father James Gray. James taught English literature to first year university students at St. Peter’s and he was also editor of the Prairie Messenger newspaper. His workload must have been daunting. He was my professor for only one year but he was amazing and had a great influence upon my intellectual development and upon my decision a few years later to become a journalist and a writer.
I was his student in 1966-67, the first year in which university classes at St. Peter’s became co-educational. As I recall, there were six or seven women among the 25 or so students. It must have seemed an odd fit to the women because most of the males had been high school students at St. Peter’s just a year earlier, and we simply continued on with our adolescent habits. That might involve seeing how hard we could punch each other in the shoulder during a break between classes, or setting someone’s shoe laces on fire with a cigarette lighter while he was deeply engaged in a conversation during a coffee break.
Read MoreI have posted several pieces over the past year about the Harper government’s decision to deny project money to the ecumenical social justice group KAIROS. I have also written about CIDA Minister Bev Oda’s deceitful behaviour in the whole matter. For months this story was in the back pages of the newspapers and nowhere on television, but now the parliamentary chickens have come home to roost. Oda lied to a parliamentary committee in December and now the political opposition is demanding that she be fired and found in contempt of parliament. There is a longstanding tradition that ministers can duck, bob and weave in what they say but they cannot tell outright lies. Minister Oda and the government spent the week of February 14th trying to ride this out until the parliamentary break. What happened here, what does it mean and does it matter? KAIROS is an inter-church coalition that has been around for a long time. It is well respected and does good work internationally, particularly on social justice and human rights issues. KAIROS also has a habit of speaking its mind on public issues. It has offered criticisms of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. KAIROS has also raised questions about the rapid development of the tar sands in Alberta and of certain environmental and human rights practices of Canadian mining companies working in developing countries.
Read MoreTony Martin was 11 years old when he emigrated from Ireland to Canada with his mother and six siblings in January 1960. His father had arrived nine months earlier to find work. Martin recalls arriving in Sault Ste. Marie Ontario in the dead of winter then making an additional eight-hour train trip to Wawa, the family’s new home. “I began my Canadian journey in a community where people took care of one another,” Martin says. “That was the kind of Canada that we came to know but it is now slipping through our fingers.” Martin, who is a devout Roman Catholic, was a three-term member of Ontario’s provincial parliament and has now been the NDP Member of Parliament for Sault Ste. Marie since 2004. He spoke on a recent winter evening to about 75 people at Centretown United Church in Ottawa about his crusade to eradicate poverty in Canada. “I said eradicate poverty, not reduce it,” Martin said. “This is key to me. He says it can be done if there is enough popular support for it and the political will. “Government has no greater responsibility than to look after people who are marginalized.”
Read MoreSociologist Reginald Bibby is probably Canada’s closest observer of religious trends. He has been polling on religious practices and attitudes since 1975 and has placed the numbers into context in several books beginning with Fragmented Gods in 1987. Bibby has just released another book called Beyond the Gods and Back, and he spoke about it recently at an Anglican cathedral in Ottawa.
Bibby says that for many years he accepted the secularization thesis commonly proposed by most sociologists and researchers. In its most simple terms, Bibby says, “secularization refers to the decline in the influence of organized religion.” There are a variety of ways to track this situation but the one most often used is the frequency of attendance at religious services. Using Gallup Poll results from 1957, and later his own survey data, Bibby found that weekly church attendance in Canada fell precipitously among the population from 53% in 1957 to 24% in 1990.
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