From Terrible Depths:

It’s not partisan. It doesn’t have a website. There is a chairman – normally two – and possibly even an independent staff of assistants. It’s been operating on Parliament Hill for the last decade, maybe more, and there still hasn’t been a public listing of its members.

The “it” I’m referring to is the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus, a theoretically non-partisan (though mostly Conservative, with a Liberal minority and pretty much no one from the other parties) group of MPs who are pro-life and would support reconsidering the current lack of national laws banning or restricting abortions. Once in a while the group pops up and garners a couple of headlines, but for the most part, it toils in obscurity. Those members who achieve political success, like Jason Kenney, probably had to sever their ties to the Caucus on their way up the ladder.

The encouraging thing about that is that it suggests, at least for the time being, that the anti-choice movement is having minimal success. Its representatives on the hill can’t even operate in the open, let alone put up legislation beyond a few disturbing fringe bills like Epp’s “murder of the unborn” law last year. This despite the fact that Lloyd Mackey, at least, believes our current prime minister might even be a former member of the Caucus. So, what do we actually know about this group?

The Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus seems to operate in the shadows as a sort of open secret organization. After chairman Rod Bruinooge’s inflammatory “kidneys outrank fetuses” op-ed was published last December (h/t Dammit Janet, Unrepentant Old Hippie), Ignatieff’s spokesperson refused to answer whether he would permit Liberal MPs to sit in the Pro-Life Caucus, and even suggested the group might not exist. This was, as socon blogger Big Blue Wave immediately pointed out, probably a lie: there’s no way the Liberal leadership wouldn’t know about the caucus. But no membership list was forthcoming, either. Bouquets of Gray expressed some well-deserved disapproval:

A secret AA chapter? Fine. A quilting klatch? No problem. A Dungeon-and-dragons cell? Whatever. MPs have a right to keeping their personal lives personal. But Bruinooge’s caucus advocates a change to public policy, and as such it should be operating out in the open.

Indeed, it is rather surprising that they do not want to operate in the open, because they can hardly hope to change public policy otherwise. If they are not going to argue their case in public, how do they expect to persuade anyone? win any votes? pass any laws?

Personally, I find it particularly bizarre that the group operates in secret and doesn’t get called on this. Its leaders claim this is because MPs who are members fear retaliation from their party leaders and from the public. The first I can understand. Maybe. But the second? If it’s something so seriously unpopular that you have to do it in secret, then as an elected representative you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. We wouldn’t stand for such convenient cynicism in other issue areas. Why should we on this one?

In honour of next month’s swiftly approaching March for Life parade, put on by the Campaign Life Coalition (a close ally of the Pro-Life Caucus), I intend to dig a little deeper into the mystery of the caucus. This is the sort of occasion when bloggers like myself just can’t match the resources of the declining mainstream media. I’m sure a few well-connected members of the press gallery could find out what I’m looking for in a single afternoon. I wish they’d do their jobs instead of leaving it to people like me and Unrepentant Old Hippie. Nevertheless, she called on bloggers to “ferret them out,” and that’s what I’m going to do.

The first Pro-Life Caucus emerged in the 1980s, during the first debate over abortion surrounding the Morgentaler decision in 1988. It collapsed in 1991 during debate over the Mulroney government’s failed Bill C-43. In 1998, Campaign Life Coalition president Jim Hughes played an unknown role in bringing together chairpersons for a new Caucus: Progressive Conservative Elsie Wayne, Liberal Tom Wappel, and then-rookie, now-immigration minister Jason Kenney, whose reactionary views at the time are probably best expressed by this article from his San Francisco Catholic university’s newspaper.

Tim Bloedow, then a Campaign Life lobbyist and writer for its paper The Interim, remarked that his group planned to step back and “work more behind the scenes” in the work of the new caucus. These intimate connections to Campaign Life may remain in place, though it is unclear. CLC is certainly an active defender of the Caucus; it fell to Mary Ellen Douglas to defend the group’s secrecy in December 2008. For his work in this regard, president Hughes was given a Catholic Civil Rights League award in 2007.

Reflecting its close connections with Campaign Life, the most significant event for the Caucus appears to be the annual March for Life demonstration, during which its chairs – and, from time to time, a few members – hold a special press conference highlighting an issue related to abortion. In 2003, the trio of co-chairs (Elsie Wayne, Paul Steckle and Maurice Vellacott) demanded the outlawing of embryonic stem cell research.

In 2005, Vellacott and Steckle suggested that an unknown but enormous number of women were being forced into abortions by abusive partners. The next year, they argued that abortion causes breast cancer, backed by American surgeon Angela Lanfranchi. Vellacott later added that the Canadian Cancer Society was refusing to study this link because it was funded by pharmaceutical companies and therefore did not genuinely want to prevent cancer. In 2007, they were criticizing sex-selective abortions, using research supplied by Andrea Mrozek of the Focus on the Family Canada-funded think tank, Institute of Marriage and Family Canada. In none of these cases have firm statistics on the alleged Canadian “violence” been presented. In their last conference together, in 2008, Steckle and Vellacott brought in Alveda King to speak on abortion as a civil rights issue (fetus civil rights, not women’s civil rights, naturally).

While scientifically dubious, these sessions are arguably less provocative than the comments some Caucus members come out with in their speeches to the annual March – Cheryl Gallant, for example, once notoriously claimed that abortions in Canada were “absolutely no different” than beheadings of Western journalists by terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Other than being a clearinghouse for information and a hosting service for pro-life speakers, it’s unclear what function the Caucus currently serves, however. Information on the website of Conservative MP Gerry Breitkreuz implies that in 2002 the Caucus canvassed all thirteen provincial and territorial governments, asking whether they had officially defined “medically necessary” abortions. That was followed in 2003 by a letter to health minister Anne McLellan “on the topic of medically necessary abortions.” Given Breitkreuz’s comments at the end of the page, the letter probably argued that public funding for abortions should be withdrawn in the absence of a definition of medical necessity.

The merger of the Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties reduced the number of chairs of the Caucus from three to two – though according to Lloyd Mackey, the caucus did consider naming a third from the New Democratic Party, Bev Dejarlais, which would suggest that at least at that point there were NDP members of the caucus. In fact, several writers, like Kady O’Malley, believed that longstanding NDP MP and United Church minister Bill Blaikie was a member of the Caucus.

In 2008, Vellacott stepped down and was replaced by Winnipeg Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge. Bruinooge linked his pro-life stance to his aboriginal heritage, and was welcomed warmly by the Canada Family Action Coalition, the Association for Reformed Political Action and the Campaign Life Coalition.

Bruinooge announced his new chairmanship in November, then, on December 29, published a widely reported and controversial op-ed in the National Post, “Why I Am Pro-Life,” in which he suggested that abortion was hindering population replacement and that fetuses had less rights than kidneys, because you can’t take out your kidney and sell it on eBay. (You can’t actually do that with your fetus either, by the way.) The article was welcomed by such writers as Andrea Mrozek of ProWomanProLife and the Institute of Marriage and Family, panned by more pragmatic conservative bloggers like Raphael Alexander, and angrily denounced by Shameless, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, and others. In a particularly odd post, Dr. Roy suggested that “radical feminists” would dismiss Bruinooge’s remarks because he was of First Nations descent!

In running the caucus, the co-chairs are assisted by one and possibly more staffers, paid by a pool of money submitted by the MPs out of their legislative office budgets and given a desk in one of the chair’s offices. In 2001 Campaign Life Coalition lobbyist Tim Bloedow took the job, which he held for at least three years, though he remained in Vellacott’s office until 2007, moving over to John Earnshaw’s job as legislative assistant.

Bloedow’s Conservative Party duties were not so onerous, it seems, to prevent him from also running as a Christian Heritage Party candidate in 2004. He then went on to write the extremist website ChristianGovernment.ca, and is now the president of Equipping Christians for the Public Square. Bloedow, it must be said, has always been good at getting into apparent conflicts of interest: he worked as a Campaign Life lobbyist while also as a religious journalist, and more recently published grand praise of Vellacott on the website of the Association for Reformed Political Action without mentioning that he was working in Vellacott’s office and had been for years.

After Bloedow moved over to become Vellacott’s personal assistant, Barbara McAdorey, administrator of Canadian Physicians for Life, then moved in to take over some of his former duties. Among her activities as the caucus administrator, it seems, was supplying information to Lutherans for Life Canada in 2006 to help them in their attempt to win charitable status.

The caucus would also seem to maintain amiable relationships with various organizations within the religious right, and especially, pro-life, communities. Lloyd Mackey says that “pro-life volunteers” supply Caucus meetings with coffee and sandwiches. They have worked with, and heard presentations from, José Ruba of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, among others. Alberta Pro-Life has been invited, too. After Bruinooge’s National Post article came under fire, Joseph Ben-Ami of the Charles McVety-linked Institute for Canadian Values leaped to his defence, arguing unconvincingly that even though the Caucus’s membership was secret, the fact that it included both Liberals and Conservatives meant that it was open and bipartisan (great, more fucking bipartisanship).

Despite Bruinooge’s inflammatory and highly publicized remarks in December, the influence of the Caucus would seem to be waning – not that it was ever overly influential in the first place. Before the 2008 election, Campaign Life president Jim Hughes somberly lamented the loss of some of the caucus’s leading lights, including Wappel, Steckle, and Norman Doyle. Shortly after his retirement, Tom Wappel told a gathering of Catholic clergy organized by Campaign Life that the caucus had never properly cultivated relations with the Catholic community. It remains to be seen what will happen to this organization in the coming years.

Tomorrow I’ll be publishing a tentative list of known and suspected members of the Caucus as a public service, since the Caucus itself apparently feels no need to make that sort of information publicly known.