B.C. Catholic covers the Cardus event, "Charity has a Political Problem" at the Rideau Club: Charitable organizations in Canada have a political problem, which has resulted in less contributions and volunteers, says the president of a Christian think tank devoted to the renewal of civil society. “A declining number of people are giving less—less time, less money, less of themselves—to their neighbours, their communities, and their country,” said Cardus president Michael Van Pelt, June 13, at a reception drawing politicians, lobbyists, and charitable organizations. “And nothing, at the moment anyway, seems to be on the horizon to change that.” Read all the coverage here.

The Ontario government's new legislation allows for the creation of Gay-Straight Alliances in all schools - including separate schools. Catholic leaders say this contravenes their religious teachings. Father Raymond de Souza speaks to Steve Paikin about Catholicism's stance on homosexuality. Watch the interview here.

Peter Stockland quoted in Charlie Lewis' latest piece on the gay-straight alliances debate. Quote: “I don’t think it’s just a reasonable strategy to rally the people in the pews, it’s an imperative strategy,” said Peter Stockland, a senior fellow with Hamilton-based Cardus, a think tank that studies the intersection of religion and society. “This is not about gay rights versus somebody’s else’s rights. This is about Charter rights to religious freedom — rights not only to believe what you want but to actually live your life according to those beliefs. “If you’re not prepared to defend that then what you are willing to defend? I think the Church had to get out in front of this in an activist way. It’s mystifying they didn’t.” Read the rest of the article.

It might help government backbench MPs in Ottawa to be reminded that the law of unintended consequences applies as much to their private member's bills as to any legislation. A prime example could be made of Conservative MP Russ Hiebert's well-intended, but potentially disastrous, legislative attempt to force labour unions to publicly disclose their financial records on the Internet. Hiebert's motives are undoubtedly honourable and perfectly understandable. It doesn't take an advanced degree to realize that unions are not the natural constituency of Conservative parties (although at least some union members are.) Part of the motive for this legislation comes from the active involvement of unions in recent election campaigns. In the last Ontario election, the Working Families Coalition, funded by unions, spent up to $10 million on anti-Conservative advertising. It was partly why Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals won. When union leaders are in a position to influence public policy, they tend to do so in a way that goes against the partisan interests of Conservatives and their friends. Vengeance may be the Lord's but humans, being political animals, are no slouches at striking back. The rational argument is that the legislation provides union members and the public with proper disclosure on how much is being spent influencing politics and public policy. Disclosure of all transactions over $5,000, the name and address of the payer/payee, the purpose and nature of the transaction and the individual amount for all expenses will be required. Although arguments are made that unions are simply being held to the same disclosure requirements as charities or public companies, the detail required is of an entirely different degree. Such detail is essential if exposing the political involvement of unions is to be effective. Effectiveness, however, does not automatically make good public policy. In fact, in order to weaken the political enemies of the Conservatives, the government seems to be engaging in very un-conservative policy that will probably produce the opposite of what is intended. The core question is what sort of institutions unions really are. The Left sees them primarily as political institutions designed to provide collective economic power for individual workers. A more conservative view sees unions as economic institutions. Rather than being anti-union (that is, relying exclusively on state intrusion to deal with marketplace injustice), a conservative labour-relations policy should create an environment in which workers have meaningful choice to be either non-union or represented by whichever union best serves their interests. Technically, choosing between competing unions is possible. Practically, most unions have no-raid pacts with each other. Interestingly, over the past few years, competitiveness between unions has increased through the growth of alternative unions, employee associations and other union-like structures outside with the Canadian Labour Congress. Infighting has even affected the CLC. This emerging competitive environment would suffer most under Hiebert's legislation. Those willing to spend time parsing the details of transactions will use them to make mischief in the campaigns that take place among competing unions. There might be justification for this if unions were public organizations. They are not. They are democratic organizations that belong to their members. In almost every province, those members have legislatively enforced access to the financial information of their union. If a union fails to properly disclose, labour relations boards step in. The effect of Hiebert's bill will be to rally union activists who resist free competition among unions. It will encourage them to create mischief against unions that support freedom of choice. It will also give left-wing unionists another chance to raise alarm at how Conservatives really don't understand unions and are out to alienate their base. Such legislation is shortsighted. It focuses on punishing enemies rather than building coalitions. It will likely prove ineffective in the short term and, in the long term, provide justification for a government led by a party other than the Conservatives to target the in-kind campaign contributions that trade and business associations, not to mention lobbying and consulting organizations, provide to political parties. This will be done in the name of a level playing field. Most ironically, the legislation's legacy will be increased government regulation and less opportunity for worker choice. The result will alienate the Conservative government even further from those in the organized labour movement whose help is required to develop a skilled workforce and support infrastructure projects. That would be a disastrous unintended consequence, indeed.

Dear pro-choice leaders: I followed the recent abortion debate via Twitter. I was convinced by your winsome and respectful reasoning on how anything other than having no abortion law would be retrograde and unCanadian. I was so convinced by the arguments that I was thinking of converting to the pro-choice cause. The clincher came in an Ottawa Citizen column that declared that socially progressive values are now “nearly a unanimous view” in Canada. It’s time to reform my second-class citizen ways, apologize for my previous unenlightened views, and do my part for the cause. Changing sides requires that I apologize for my part in the “old, divisive, angry debates about matters of individual faith and morals.” I was a bit slow to realize that “(w)e actually, finally may be living in a just society, as various past prime ministers dreamt we one day would.” My intentions were not as offensive as they seemed. Do understand, since I was a kid, I was taught that a pregnancy involved another person. In our family, we prayed for the not-yet-born children’s health, both physical and spiritual. Perhaps you have a re-education course available to help people like me. (Discouraging prayer for the unborn may be part of the solution.) We should pay attention to our schooling system as well. In my own experience, parental perspectives were reinforced by biology courses that did not always adequately distinguish between actual and potential human life. Am I allowed to admit that my untrained human eye can’t always tell the difference, especially in the second and third trimester? It’s not just biology that’s a problem, either. I grew up thinking human beings had dignity and worth because they were created in the image of God. Only now do I realize this should only be taken as a private belief and that thinking too much about its logical and philosophical implications is problematic. Has a history editing project been considered? Almost all of the philosophers I studied seemed to work from an understanding of human nature that seemed consistent with my childish perspectives. Or might it be better just to eliminate philosophy and history from the curriculum? I trust my newness to the cause will allow for a few questions of clarification? I was reading the Toronto Star last Friday and wasn’t sure how to deal with the relationship of abortion rights and multiculturalism. I presume Haroon Siddiqui isn’t being totally heretical when he asked, “On what basis do we say women cannot abort female fetuses? Or, are we saying that Canadian women from certain ethnic communities have only a partial right to abortion?” He was responding to the habit of certain Toronto-area hospitals that withhold gender ultrasound results for women from nationalities where gender selection is practised. I also came across that article that appeared in the Journal of Medical Ethics in February. The abstract laid out the argument cogently: By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call after-birth abortion (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. I am sure neither racism nor infanticide is part of the just society. I presume there are logical answers to these questions that you will pass along. If I might be so bold to suggest, however, these issues are not as broadly understood as they might be if our just society is to be fully enjoyed. Have we thought about a continuing education program? Unfortunately, both the French and the Swedes have laws of the sort that were described as unreasonable during the Canadian debate, so that nixes them as co-sponsors. In fact, the only enlightened countries by the standards described in Parliament last week are North Korea, Vietnam and China. Which should we ask to co-sponsor the conference? When it comes to indoctrination — sorry, edit that; public re-education is what I meant to say — I think there is some experience there to help reform those with backwards views of the sort I had until yesterday. Maybe we can yet transform them into contributing members of society. Let me know if I can be of any help. — An apologetic ex pro-lifer

Word arrives that newly re-elected Premier Alison Redford is being described as a political centrist in the image of Peter Lougheed. There is a word for that kind of word. It is nonsense. If Redford is, in fact, the keeper of the Lougheed legacy, by definition she is not centrist — because neither was he. Judging the full record of his years in office from 1971 to 1985, Lougheed was unquestionably a great premier for Alberta. Scratch that. He was a great politician for Canada. When I covered his government as a legislature journalist, he became one of the top three Canadian political leaders I’ve most admired. Later, encountering him during my years working at the Herald and the Sun, I discovered a thorough and naturally decent man. I once witnessed him using his elder statesman status in a room full of swashbuckling, rich, young Calgary entrepreneurs to challenge each of them, pointedly and by name, to do more, give more, for their community and their society. It demonstrated the truth of who Peter Lougheed is. Equally true, however, is that he has never been a man of the centre. From training and disposition, he governed as a believer in the marriage of technocratic decision-making and limitless expansion of the state to assist (manage?) the lives of ordinary citizens. His instincts, and his initiatives, went far beyond so-called Red Tory balancing of market forces and the human need for collective help. In the mid-1980s, one of Lougheed’s last acts as premier was a white paper on science and technology that proposed government “pick winners and losers” in the economy. Even as Alberta’s economy was hitting the bottom of the metaphoric well because of the nefarious National Energy Program, the blowback from business leaders and the political class was ferocious. The broad centre of Alberta society opposed the state making such determinations. It fought back against Lougheed’s visionary excess. No matter. The dream articulated in the white paper became the marching orders for Lougheed’s hand picked successor, Don Getty. Lougheed-legacy statism became the intellectual and economic ground on which the fiscal fiascos of the late 1980s and early 1990s played out. Ralph Klein is caricatured as a neo-con revolutionary who inflicted a Chicago School, market uber alles ethos on Albertans. But Klein began political life as a rough-and-tumble Liberal populist/pragmatist and never strayed far from those origins. Asked once what he thought of a particular passage in libertarian god Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Klein reportedly replied: “Do I look like a guy who reads books?” What he did read were the times and Alberta’s finances. He recognized the necessity of bringing the province, not hard to the right, but back to its natural political centre. He restored the balance by which government leaves undone those things that it ought not do, and steps in to do those things that only it can do. Enter Premier Redford, stepping deftly over the political corpse of her preternaturally cold and stiff predecessor, Ed Stelmach. If her eye-popping promises of increased spending come to pass, she will, indeed, revert to Lougheed-era winners-and-losers dirigisme, but with a carny-barker, Stampede midway twist: “Everyone’s a winner, folks. Step right up.” As a friend of mine e-mailed following Redford’s victory, “the left wing of the NDP is now in charge. (NDP Leader) Brian Mason had a far more sensible economic platform than Redford.” Curiously, it is on so-called moral concerns rather than mere economics that Redford reveals how far beyond the centre she is, even compared to her decidedly non-centrist mentor. Lougheed, after all, acceded to the adoption of Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights in 1982. He did not give in, though, before winning a clause in the charter designed to sustain proper balance between legislatures and courts. Redford seems to have no taste for anything like proper balance or, for that matter, the charter itself. From the beginning of the campaign, she seemed partial to fiat rather than full democratic discussion. If I understood well, she declared issues such as abortion and gay rights off the agenda not because they are beyond provincial jurisdiction, but because they are not permitted in political conversation. The phrase “Stalinist instinct” must be used very sparingly, but still. Most disturbing was her insistence that conscience rights provisions exempting certain doctors from prescribing contraceptives, or certain marriage commissioners from officiating at gay weddings, are an unspeakable, foreign concept in Alberta. Conscience rights are charter rights. There they are, the first rights enumerated in the fundamental rights protected by the rest of the document. Nor is it true, as Redford claimed, that those rights have been settled one way (read: her way) for ever and all time. On the contrary, the courts have worked continuously for decades to balance conscience rights against other rights that might offend them. Whether one agrees or not with outcomes in particular cases, the courts continue struggling to find the centre point of fairness and equity in matters of conscience. Both by her attack on conscience rights and her claim to descend from the House of Lougheed, then, Premier Redford shows the centre is far from her natural home. Let us have no more nonsense about it.

Cardus president Michael Van Pelt, whose think tank researches the role of religion and religious institutions in the public square, told the gathering that the importance of religion is often not reflected in current human rights discourse, which tends to ignore the importance of civil society. Van Pelt cited a number of examples where ignorance of religion or fear of religion raise concerns about religious freedom at home in Canada. He noted that in some modern city plans there is no reference to religious institutions or places of worship. In a recent Ontario election, the issue of funding of religious schools became the trump card that defeated Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory, he said. The subtext, was fear of radical Islamic schools, he said, and a willingness to “make other religions pay a price to prevent them.” Read the rest of the coverage here.

Living in a heathen state might not be as bad as religious believers had feared. If I've understood article eight of Julian Baggini's heathen manifesto correctly, many religious citizens should be able to affirm quite readily three features of the secular state that he summarises. First, religion has a legitimate place in politics. Unlike those on the control-freak wing of secularism, Baggini has no desire to banish religious or other worldviews from public life or to stop their adherents invoking such beliefs in policy debates. So presumably it's fine, then, for Operation Noah's recent Ash Wednesday Declaration not only to cite the familiar grim statistics about climate change, but also to quote ancient Jewish sacred texts and lobby the government accordingly. By implication, it's equally legitimate for secular humanists seeking the legalisation of assisted suicide not just to confine themselves to the prosaic legal language of rights, but also to appeal to deeper and more expansive convictions such as that human dignity ultimately resides in the capacity for moral autonomy (a view represented in chapter 2 of the Falconer commission report). Second, while democratic debate should thus not be arbitrarily hampered by restrictions on religious or other worldview-based ideas, the state "should not give any special privilege to any particular sect or group, or use their creeds as a basis for policy". Actually, the two parts of that claim are distinct. One is that the state should treat groups holding various worldviews even-handedly, for example by avoiding funding or granting access to one while arbitrarily excluding others. The other is that the state should refrain from officially invoking any worldview or creed in publicly justifying any of its policies. So state officials shouldn't quote the Bible as official justification for the 2008 Climate Change Act, and nor should they cite a humanist doctrine of the primacy of moral autonomy in support of a law allowing assisted suicide. In other words, while we citizens can appeal to such grounds, ministers and civil servants shouldn't, even if they personally endorse them. Third, in democratic politics, people should "formulate and justify policy in terms that all understand, on the basis of principles that as many as possible can share". Christian philosopher Christopher Eberle calls this the "obligation to pursue public justification" and commends it as part of a wider "ideal of conscientious engagement". That is, citizens who respect each other as equals should do their best to appeal to public norms their fellow citizens can affirm or at least acknowledge as valid, and not just for the obvious pragmatic reason that they might actually be listened to. Many religious citizens will thus be grateful to Baggini for marking out some promising shared ground. But when we try to specify the precise meaning of the second and third features of his secular state, we rapidly find ourselves in territory that is hotly contested both within and between religious and secular worldviews. "State neutrality" implies some notion of equal treatment. But while it plainly rules out the official "establishment" of a worldview – Christianity in the Roman empire, Islam in Iran, or atheistic communism in the USSR – it is far from obvious what else it implies. Does it exclude all and any state funding of faith-based schooling, as in the US, or does it require a pluralistic European model in which several religious and worldview-based schools are funded proportionately? Does it mandate equal recognition of all conceptions of "marriage" or only those honouring the equality of men and women (or men and men, and women and women)? Appealing to "neutrality" doesn't solve questions like these, but merely prods at a hornets' nest of vigorous disagreement. Neutrality itself is an empty concept that is parasitic upon a prior social ontology that takes a view on the nature of the entities among which the state is supposed to be neutral. Specifying what "public justification" amounts to is no less demanding. After an exhaustive analysis of what the term might actually require of participants in democratic debate, Eberle concludes that both religious and secular citizens may, despite their best efforts, find themselves coming up with justifications that turn out to seem invalid by many members of the public. And this isn't a sign of epistemic failure, only of the inherent limits of rational communication in a morally fragmented culture. The problem isn't unintelligibility: any passably educated secular humanist can make sense of an appeal to an ancient Hebrew text, just as a reasonably well-informed Muslim can make sense of a Kantian conception of human dignity. The problem is incompatibility; the deep chasm separating one citizen's deepest worldview commitments from another's. More troublingly, the requirement to justify one's policy commitments only in terms of supposedly "shared principles" can serve to entrench the discursive hegemony of whatever happens to be the current majority position – such as the stubbornly persistent yet irrational faith, shared by every party except the Greens, that endless growth of GDP is the only way out of recession and even the only route to address global warming. Marginalised minorities know all about the power of such hegemonic convictions when their dissenting demands run up against what a complacent majority takes as self-evidently true. The high principle of article eight of the heathen manifesto has flagged up an important debate. Let's now take up the difficult work of analysing what it might actually mean on the ground.