Parliament Hill
Paul Wells, Macleans: second thoughts on Canada’s religious right
In this old column I made extravagant fun of the notion that the Harper government was overly beholden to an assortment of picturesque Christianists. Tonight I’m not so sure I was right. Paul Wells He is rethinking his 2006 article on Marci McDonald’s Walrus article which is the defining piece which this site uses for [...]
Who is Tom Flanagan?
A new Tory operative, University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan, recently weighed in on the continuing Human Rights Commission debates, predictably arguing that the Commissions should be sent to the junkyard, but adding the novel, anti-historical, ideological twist that the free market is a better cure for discrimination. A trio of Canadian bloggers promptly leaped [...]
The Parlimentary Pro-Life Caucus: Identifying the Members
From Terrible Depths As promised, the following updates my previous post on the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus, a secretive group of pro-life parliamentarians in Ottawa. Interestingly, the article, after being cross-posted at Religious Right Alert, was picked up by the blog of Equipping Christians for the Public Square, a religious right political advocacy group currently headed [...]
Campaign for Life Ottawa March coverage
The Campaign Life Coalition’s Exodus 2009 (I googled Exodus 2009 and hit stories of Sri Lankan civilians displaced in civil war) March for Life held it’s yearly Parliament Hill rally. Just about every year they complain the group claims it doesn’t get either any/enough/favorable/inaccurate media coverage. As mentioned Michael Coren wrote a piece for them in The National Post, [...]
Finding the Pro-Life Caucus on Parliament Hill
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 [...]
Michael Coren and Garth Turner
Sun columnist and CTS TV host Michael Coren doesn’t like something in former MP Garth Turner’s new book: Sheeple: Caucus Confidential in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa. One particular issue Coren takes issue with was beaten to death at the time and was recently resurrected by Coren as fodder for two columns. On May 2nd Coren wrote [...]
New Horizons for Seniors Funds Chuck Strahl’s Church
I was a little bit disturbed when I made my daily patrol of the news sites and discovered Lloyd Mackey of CanadianChristianity.com suggesting that there was “a compassionate and entrepreneurial iceberg” of government funding (interesting metaphor) hidden behind a March 18 announcement by Conservative seniors minister Marjory LeBreton, and that the intentions behind these projects [...]
The Cry, Charismatics, and Parliament Hill
Dennis Gruending of Pulpit and Politics, in 2008, explored the charismatic and reconstructionist religious youth organization The Cry, which draws together Canadian youth through prayer rallies in Ottawa and other major centres. The Cry is linked to 4 My Canada, the National House of Prayer, Christian Zionist groups like the Watchmen for the Nations, and a [...]
Framing
From The Harper Index: Framing is the practice of influencing how people think and feel about issues by encouraging them to think about them in a particular way. This is done with language that conjures up and appeals to images and values that people know and understand deeply. The political Right is masterful at framing [...]
Peter Kent and the Canadian Coalition of Democracies
When he was running as a candidate in the fall 2008 elections, several bloggers commented on the background of Conservative MP Peter Kent, now Minister of State for the Americas. Kent was revealed to be a senior member of the neoconservative outfit Canadian Coalition for Democracies. Wrote Dr. Dawg: It’s a group that appears to [...]
