In a 39 page ruling this week Justice E.C. Wilson of the court of Queen’s Bench gave the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission a sound legal thrashing in overturning a 2008 ruling that a 2002 letter to The Red Deer Advocate by Steven Boissoin misapplied provincial law.  The acerbic Colby Cosh in Macleans:

The Charter of Rights can’t be used willy-nilly by content creators in magazines and newspapers as a shield against tribunal oversight, but

The tribunals have to confine themselves strictly to the powers granted them by statute, defer to Charter values, respect the presumption of innocence, and in general act a lot less like a cross between a military junta and a three-ring circus.

Interveners in the appeal were The Attorney General of Alberta,  Canadian Civil Liberties Association and  Canadian Constitution Foundation.

xtra
Canadian Constitution Foundation
Steven Boissoin website

Who is blogging?
BigCityLib Strikes Back
Equipping Christians for the Public Square
Persecuted Church Weblog
Catholic Dialogue
GayandRight

As part of the Marquee program, various festivals received larger amounts in funding. There are a number of Marquee festivals and events in Canada and $100m has been allocated over the two years of the program to boost them. As a Tier One festival (i.e. with attendance of more than 250,000) Pride Toronto qualified for 20% of last year’s expenditure budget up to a maximum of $3m. The figure of $397,500 constitutes 20% of the 2008 festival budget and this was the criteria for the program. Significant funds are needed to achieve enhancements that will substantially increase attractiveness to tourists, and all funding was allocated specifically for enhancements that encourage tourism. It was understood from the outset that the program would be managed by Industry Canada.

Pride Toronto is thrilled to have been able to participate in this program and we believe that the recent success of the festival shows that the funding was justified and the expenditure will prove to be worthwhile. As for the issues surrounding Minister Ablonczy, we have no ability to comment on the workings of government. We appreciate the Minister’s time and attention to this issue, and we wish her well at all times.

Pride Toronto in response to MP Brad Trost (C- Saskatoon-Humboldt) at Lifesite News.

“The pro-life and the pro-family community should know and understand that the tourism funding money that went to the gay pride parade in Toronto was not government policy, was not supported by – I think it’s safe to say by a large majority – of the MPs. This was a very isolated decision.”

The Toronto parade is in it’s 29th year. Macleans Magazine looks at the Conservative claims of fund allocation shifting from The Ministry of Small Business and Tourism to Industry. Applications for summer festival funding closed May8th. Diane Ablonczy’s name is still on the applications for Small Business and Tourism.  The Marquee Event Funding Program is part of the January federal economic stimulus package.  The spokesman for Industry Minister Tony Clement now says Ablonczy’s office wasn’t equipped to handle the 100 million dollar program.

David Aiken says out of 12 Conservative MP’s contacted only two would go on record.

“It’s a tourism event, like any other tourism event,” said Calgary Conservative MP Lee Richardson. “It attracts as many people in Toronto as the Molson Indy.”

Dona Cadman, a first-term Conservative MP from Surrey, B.C., said she supports Ms. Ablonczy’s decision.

“I’m proud to see this reaching out to all sectors of the Canadian mosaic,” Cadman said in an e-mailed message.

Charles McVety made an issue out of this two weeks ago.
McVety=Campaign Life=LifeSite

 Diane Ablonczy C- Calgary Nose-Hill

Who is blogging?

Montreal Simon: The Bigot Burning of Diane Ablonczy
Accidental Deliberation: Irresponsible
BigCityLib:  Has Diane Ablonczy Been Demoted For Being Too Gay Friendly?
Canadian Soapbox: Harperites Object to Money Offered Providing Homosexuals Or Bisexuals with Equal Status
Impolitical:  Governing Ugly
Baptist Potluck: Another reason to pray for PM Harper

Liberal Arts and Minds:  Think the Religious Right Has No Voice in Government?
The Galloping Beaver: The Reform Party Long Knives seem to be out
God Keep Our Land: Good on you Brad

Below the fold: The gay, lesbian and bisexual events funded by the federal government including in Brad Trosts area.

Saskatoon Star Phoenix – The Saskatoon Diversity Network received $9,000 from Canadian Heritage this year for last June’s Pride Festival.
David Akin’s On the Hill:

• Recipient: Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives
  Minister: Hon. James Moore
  Funding received – $175,000.00
  Purpose: Arts in Communities
  Date: 2009-03-26
• Recipient: Vancouver Out on Screen Film and Video Society, Vancouver, British Colombia
  Minister: Hon. Josée Verner
  Funding received: $32,000.00
  Purpose: Project: 20th Anniversary Vancouver Queer Film Festival, Programming
  Date: 2008-2009, March 4, 2008
• Recipient: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgender Pride Toronto
  Funding received: $21,000.00
  Date: ** Last modified, 2008-02-19
• Recipient: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, and Transgenderal Pride Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  Minister: Hon. Josée Verner
  Funding received: $35,000.00
  Purpose: Arts in Community
  Date: 2007-04-23
• Recipient: Inside Out Lesbian & Gay Film Festival Inc. Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  Funding received: $20,000.00
  Purpose: Project: Toronto Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival, Programming
  Date: 2008-2009
• Recipient: Winnipeg Gay & Lesbian Film Society Inc, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
  Funding received: 4,000.00
  Purpose: Project: Reel Pride Film Festival, Programming
  Date: 2008-2009
• Recipient: Reelout Arts Project Inc., Kingston, Ontario, Canada
  Funding received: $7,000.00
  Purpose: Project: Reelout Queer Film & Video Festival, Programming
  Date: 2008-2009
• Recipient: Queer City Cinema Inc, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
  Funding received: $13,000.00
  Purpose: Project: Queer City Cinema 7, Programming
  Date: 2008-2009
• Recipient: Inside Out Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Inc.Funding received – $26,000.00
  Date: 2008-2009 Last modified, 2008-02-19
• Recipient: Darren McAllister, Ontario Canada,
  Minister: Hon. Peter MacKayFunding received – $550.00
  Purpose: To allow Darren McAllister to present his short film “Confessions of a Drag Queen” at the Outfest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Los Angeles, California from July 6 to 17, 2006.
  Date: 2006- 2007
• Recipient : Michael Mew, British Columbia, Canada,
  Minister: Hon. Peter MacKayFunding received – $900
  Purpose: To allow Michael Mew to present his short film “Peking Turkey” at the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in London, United Kingdom from March 28 to April 6, 2007.
  Date:2006-2007

…Jim Hughes, president of our own Campaign Life Coalition, said that “Those of us in the pro-life movement do not want to see abortionists die, we want to see them convert.”

A charming, coy thing to say, no doubt, but the everyday rhetoric of the CLC would have us believe that abortion is murder, and that abortion clinics are therefore ethically equivalent to concentration camps. The Coalition strongly supports, for example, the so-called “Genocide Awareness Project” being run on Canadian campuses by the California-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform. Are we to believe that if Mr. Hughes stumbled across Auschwitz, he would try to “convert” the guards first? Is he opposed to taking up arms against “genocide”? Can he consistently condemn someone who did so?

No: Like most pro-lifers, he is simply a purveyor of beliefs whose literal truth he does little or nothing to act seriously upon. (As I’ve pointed out in this space, you can make Henry Morgentaler a member of the Order of Canada, thus offering the grossest provocation imaginable to Catholics and evangelicals who have received the honour, and literally 99% of them will suck it up.) But, very occasionally, some ardent religious loner is confused enough to hear those beliefs, conclude they are true, and follow through. And a doctor somewhere ends up maimed or dead. And we blame only the individual who pulled the trigger

When copy/pasting the link to this article, I noticed with some amusement that the original title of this post was “Don’t Blame The Shooter”.  I guess the editors considered that a little too hot for the socons in the audience.

Cosh is 100% right:  we are all influenced to varying degrees by external stimuli and input from our information sources.  If those sources repeatedly deliver the message that “So-and-so is a depraved maniac of a baby-butchering killer”, that will eventually flip someone’s batshit switch.  The worst thing is, these people know it.  Their hollow, weasel-worded denunciations of Dr. Tiller’s murder, always qualified with a “but he had blood on his hands” kind of statement, prove it.

Look at it this way:  if Dick Cheney ever kicks the bucket, the only people who’ll be talking about the “blood on his hands” will be the ones cracking open a bottle of bubbly to celebrate.

Now somebody go log in to the NatPo and tell them the news.

Used by permission. June 2, 2009 unrepentant old hippie

If “religion” was going to be defined in the broad Gary Goodyear-ian sense, then it wasn’t hard to imagine what sort of trouble could result from this legislation: sexists objecting to women’s equality, atheist parents with kids in Catholic schools, or just “legal and administrative chaos.” In retrospect it’s not surprising that the government decided to cut its losses and get out of the “evolution is religion” game before things got out of control.

Even if evolution was out of the picture, though, “parental rights” – and by implication family authority – is near and dear to the religious right, so it wasn’t surprising to see a swarm of enthusiastic endorsements from that sector. The Canada Family Action Coalition is now in the game, for example. Equipping Christians has also leaped to the government’s defence.

There is, however, a deep irony here. The parental rights law is being introduced via the Human Rights Act, so presumably it would be enforced – if necessary – by the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The Chumir Foundation, to its credit, has opposed the amendment for this reason. However, the Christian right is going to run smack into a wall on this issue.

The Human Rights Commissions first attracted the ire of the religious right on gay rights issues, and many organizations have more recently hitched their wagons to Ezra Levant’s public relations crusade against the Commissions. With the fallout from Shakedown, it actually looked like the anti-HRC battle was beginning to make some gains. The Commissions haven’t been totally discredited yet, but they’re probably closer than ever before. And now the religious right might have to defend the Commissions, after all!

Just this morning, Catholic right-writer Raymond de Souza was expounding on the “abuses” of the Commissions in the National Post. He also points the way to a factless but possibly effective way out of this problem for the religious right: he advances the rather paranoid notion that on the basis of “parental rights” the Alberta Human Rights Commission might be pushed by gay activists or other evil-doers into “radicalizing the curriculum.”

Cross-posted at Birchbark Bible.

BD describes the context and what came next:

For a small conservative evangelical Canadian ministry to tell the mighty Focus on the Family they can no longer walk together is not a small thing. To do so means facing retaliation, be it financially or in US religious media.

The men running Exodus play political hardball. They do not accept or tolerate disagreement, their ministry is about conflict, their politics are about conflict and their lives are conflicted. God help anyone who in their eyes and parlance “err too much on the side of grace”. If evangelicals keep doing that, they’ll be out of the spotlight and out of a job.

Now I read that if New Directions hadn’t made a thoughtful and I think theologically wise discussion to leave the umbrella of Exodus, they would have been kicked out. Good. I’m glad to read the New Directions board made the choice they made when they did. They are now free to help those they are meant to help and carry their own knapsack. The games and bullying of politicized fundamentalism do not have to weigh them down.

Read more at Benediction Blogs On.

Religious Right Alert and Slap Upside the Head have in the past couple weeks been covering some surprisingly petty social conservative policies of Ed Stelmach’s government, like the official statement that the government is not going to recognize public-sector employees’ same-sex spouses as legally married because it believes gay people shouldn’t have that right. Now, however, it’s getting even more bizarre. And I thought creationism was just something that Americans had to worry about.

Years behind everyone else, the provincial government is only now getting around to passing an amendment to the Human Rights Act to protect sexual orientation from discrimination. Culture minister Lindsay Blackett offered the odd explanation that the move is being done to promote tourism and that much of the Conservative caucus was opposed to the move altogether. (Despite the fact that according to the Supreme Court the province has no choice in the matter anyways.) So, a compromise was reached. A particularly Orwellian one.

You see, in the midst of the bill that would grant equality to gay people is a clause that would require schools to give parents advance notice, and an opportunity to pull their kids out of the classroom, if any of the following topics will be discussed (see text of Bill 44 here):

1. Religion
2. Sexuality
3. Sexual Orientation

It should go without saying that if your sexual orientation is something that can’t be discriminated against, it doesn’t make sense to say that parents are going to be allowed to yank their kids from a school classroom where the issue is just being discussed. Using a human rights bill to chill classroom discussion of sexual orientation is pretty Orwellian, and pretty terrible.

In the title of this post, I mentioned creationism. I did that deliberately. You might think that this list of parental rights is irrelevant – science is still science, after all, and not religion. The Albertan government, however, does not agree. Blackett in fact has specifically stated that, at least under his interpretation of the law, “parents would have the right to opt out of evolution classes.”

Are there connections between the religious right and the Stelmach government in Alberta?

• Pope Benedict XVI has issued a statement of “sorrow” but not an apology, after meeting with First Nations leaders to discuss the residential school system. (h/t Dammit Janet!, Unrepentant Old Hippie)

• David MacDonald and 4 My Canada director Faytene Kryskow have presented a 18 222-signature petition to the Governor-General, demanding she revoke Henry Morgentaler’s Order of Canada (h/t SoCon or Bust)

• Martin Cohn of the Toronto Star reports on Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation, which recently brought him to speak in Toronto.

• The Liberal policy convention will apparently consider overturning the Harper government ban on organ donations from gay men (h/t Slap Upside the Head

• On the National Post blog Holy Post, John Stackhouse argues that evolution has taken an unacceptable turn and become “a religion, an all-encompassing wolrdview and a ‘myth’… – the governing story of a people.”

• The government of Alberta is refusing to permit employees to list their same-sex spouses as, well, spouses – they must be registered in the more limited category of “benefit partner.” Treasury Board president Lloyd Snelgrove says his government has “no intention of changing the definition of spouse to include people in same-sex marriages.” (h/t Slap Upside the Head)
  

• Pundit Michael Coren has attracted justifiable attacks from the likes of Dammit Janet! and the Galloping Beaver for a recent column suggesting that women should not be permitted to enlist in the army – they’re too small, too weak, and in general should be “laughing with college friends rather than fighting theocratic madmen.” Not finished with that, he goes on to add that women couldn’t possibly fend off the “Taliban tribesmen” and the “thrust of their long knives.”

• Brampton religious groups are tentatively declaring victory in a campaign to overturn proposed new bylaws that might, they say, threaten the tax-exempt status of large churches

In the (Think) Tanks

• The Focus on the Family-funded Institute of Marriage and Family Canada’s weekly family issues report, prepared by in-house researcher and former Conservative Party official Derek Miedema, says that the growing number of senior citizens will overwhelm Canada’s healthcare and social safety nets unless we shift more responsibility for their welfare away from government and onto their families. (Presumably this is more “sustainable” because it would involve more unpaid work by relatives, especially women.

• Equipping Christians for the Public Square will be holding an Ignite Our Culture convention at Trinity Western University in Vancouver on May 8-9. The theme, and subject of the keynote by anti-Muslim “scholar” Sam Solomon, will be: “A Veiled Threat? Islam in the West: Polygamy and Jihad.” ECP will also soon be holding several fundraising dinners in Alberta, featuring Ezra Levant.

• The Manning Centre for Building Democracy has created a “municipal campaign school” for Saskatchewan electoral candidates. Looks like it’s being run by Richard Ciano, the Conservative Party official previously implicated in previous attempts to boost right-wing voices in student politics

We’re looking for a name for this feature of links and we’re stuck.
A name themed around rocks, stones…any ideas?

The Religious Right, Stephen Harper and The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada

Gary Goodyear’s suggestion that evolution was a theological issue of faith got several bloggers, including myself, interested in the growing influence of the religious right in Canadian politics. At the time of the comments, bloggers hit the roof. The issue died down very quickly, though – now there are just a bunch of leftists, atheists and agnostics quietly simmering and waiting for some other Conservative MP to make a misguided remark so that they can blow up again.

In the meantime, therefore, I thought I’d stir the pot again – and simultaneously extend my Following the Money series in new directions. The occasion for these remarks are a pair of op-eds which appeared in major newspapers last week, each written by Andrea Mrozek of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada: “Marriage Benefits Us All” in the National Post (since syndicated throughout the Asper network, e.g. in the Windsor Star and the Calgary Herald). Incidentally, Mrozek also writes at the conservative group blog ProWomanProLife, which, despite the name, doesn’t always seem overly pro-woman. But whatever. Both of these articles argue in favour of the traditional family – one against divorce, the other against gay marriage.

Mrozek works for the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, an Ottawa-based think tank, and in fairness, her pieces are a far cry from the work that the IMFC used to do. That’s because, a year and a half ago, the organization officially stopped its lobbying program on gay marriage. Director David Quist, at the time, suggested that there were few gay marriages going on and that the issue was done and dead, so his little advocacy group was moving on to other issues. The fact that polygamy is now in the Canadian courts, thanks to the fundamentalist Mormons out in B.C., presumably gave them the window they wanted to jump back into the fray.

So, who is the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, anyways? The connections it holds are intriguing and disturbing: American family groups, Canadian right-wing think tanks, and – wait for it – the Conservative Party of Canada, right up to the level of Stephen Harper:

The IMFC is the offspring of the American-controlled pro-family, anti-gay marriage lobby group, Focus on the Family, until recently controlled by evangelical power figure James Dobson. It was founded in 2006 with an agenda that could basically summed up as “everything the religious right cares about”: family laws, age of consent laws (those went up under the Conservatives, incidentally), divorce, euthanasia, taxes, and palliative care. Its founders gave some interviews to the sympathetic evangelical periodical Christian Week at the time, and the weekly reported that these positions would be approached “all from a Christian perspective.” Interestingly, the IMFC itself is no longer in any hurry to promote its Christian background; its official introductory pamphlet says merely that it exists to take “a growing body of scientific research” and turn it into “practical ideas.”

In 2006, the Edmonton Journal covered the creation of the new group and wrote that “their mobilization was not ignited by Harper.” Oh, really? Well, maybe not directly. But let’s move through the list of employees. The first is executive director Dave Quist. For six years, Quist was the executive assistant to Alliance and then Conservative MP and former Baptist pastor Reid Elly. He ran for the Conservatives in 2004, lost, and then spent a year working as Stephen Harper’s director of operations. There’s about a five-month gap between the time he left Harper’s office and the time that the new think tank was announced in the media. Quite a number of his old Conservative colleagues were in attendance at the grand opening, including Stockwell Day and Jason Kenney.

Mrozek, the author of the recent newspaper op-eds, is listed as the Manager of Research and Communications. Her background is in journalism, but her recent work was at the right-wing Western Standard (her bio on IMFC generalizes to only “an independent news magazine in Calgary,” just to make sure people don’t make that connection), and at the even more right-wing Fraser Institute in B.C.

The researchers are a mixed bag of right-wing evangelicals. Peter Jon Mitchell is actually imported from the parent Focus on the Family organization in the U.S. – he used to work at their Institute in Colorado. Kelly Dean Schwartz is a psychologist in Calgary. Frank Jones is a retired StatsCan number cruncher who is also listed at another religious right think tank, the Christian Commitment Research Institute.

Derek Miedema, the last researcher, used to work for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, with its own possible ties to the Harper government. His bio on the Institute webpage says merely that that was preceded by a stint as a legislative assistant for an unnamed MP. I instantly suspected Conservative, and my suspicions were confirmed by a jog over to the website of Miedema’s alma mater, the religious school Redeemer University College, which is less circumspect. Miedema was the legislative assistant for Mr. David Sweet, the Conservative MP for Ancaster-Dundas. Sweet, not incidentally, is the former CEO of Promise Keepers Canada, in which function he told a journalist in 2001 that men were “natural influencers” and women were “natural followers” (his explanation for the notably unbiblical claim that “Jesus called men only”).

Interestingly, both Miedema and Jones have links to another evangelical group, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. That group has its own ties to the Conservative government – and one of their former anti-gay marriage lobbyists in Ottawa recently got appointed to the Immigration and Refugee Board. Jones served on the Fellowship’s Advisory Council on Research, and Miedema was a researcher for them.

Sunday March 29, 2009
Terrible Depths Used by permission

Have you blogged about The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada? Drop us a line and let us know if we can use and link your post in full or in part.

Blogs:
Pulpit and Politics: Harper promotes religious rightists
Douglas Todd, The Search: Evangelicals promoted to top jobs by Harper
Chyco: The Evangelicalization of The Conservative Party
Bene Diction Blogs On: 2008 Ottawa Focus on the Family fellow rebuked by American Anthropological Association
Slap Upside the Head: 2008. Anti-Gay Lobbyists warn Canada not to sign UN Initiative

Frank Stirk ChristianWeek, February 3, 2006. Focus on the Family Opens Ottawa think-tank
Richard Foot The Edmonton Journal, Febrary 18, 2006. Christians eager to flex political muscle
Gudrun Schultz Lifesite, February 2006 Focus on the Family Opens Institute of Marriage and Family Ottawa