Cardus Budget Analysis: Good news for Economy, Ho-Hum for Society   OTTAWA, March 22, 2011—Ray Pennings, Director of Research for Cardus, suggested that although the details of today's Canadian federal budget will likely be overshadowed by the immediate political considerations, the budget should also be examined for the vision of prosperity it presumes for society. "The progress made in reducing spending and restoring financial stability needs to be accompanied by the recognition that social enterprise, charities and natural communities including families also must flourish if Canadians will enjoy prosperity," said Pennings. Cardus focused its analysis of the budget on the impact it would have on four sectors: natural communities, the social enterprise sector, the private for-profit sector and the public sector. 1. Natural communities: This budget promises support for seniors and caregivers, and targeted tax measures that will help students. All other natural community elements will presumably be helped only by the government's job creation and overall low tax policy. Other measures, like family income splitting, remain ripe for election platforms at all levels. 2. Social enterprise, voluntary and charitable sector: There was relatively little here for the non-profit, charitable sector. It appears the House will wait for the report from the Standing Committee of Finance on charitable incentives. 3. Vocational, for-profit sector: The government has emphasized a reliance on the private sector as the engine of the economy. Continued low tax policy and targeted investments in particular industries are the policy mechanisms of choice. The government is also investing significantly in physical infrastructure designed to support trade. 4. Public, not-for-profit: The government is focused on restraining the growth of its expenditures and returning to surplus as originally projected in 2015. Little mention or allowance was made of public entitlements and their impact on budgets for years to come. In sum, this budget is good news for a deficit-economy, but ho-hum for Canadian society. Canada continues to perform as well, or better, than expected compared to other developed countries but very little in this budget could be called visionary or long-term. Despite a broad framework of relying on low taxes and a vibrant private sector, the role of social enterprise and charities is almost totally ignored and the impact on families (and particularly seniors) is only minimally addressed through tax gestures. There may be more creative energy in the government tank, but this budget didn't show it. Whether it will show up in an election to come, time will tell. Media Contact: Ray Pennings (403)479-4590 rpennings@cardus.ca

Slash or spend? Cut or conserve? The federal government will bring down its budget on March 22. What should be in it? We ask five prominent Canadian think-tanks to offer their fiscal fix for the coming year. Charitable giving in Canada involves some curious arithmetic. The dollars that the federal government returns to Canadians in the form of charitable tax credits are considered expenditures from the federal treasury. So when you donate less, Ottawa paradoxically "saves" more - making it (perversely) in its interest for Canadians to give less to charity. This is a problem -because Ottawa needs to do more to encourage giving. Eighteen percent of adults in Canada are responsible for nearly 80% of all money donated to charities, while 6% are responsible for one out of every three dollars. Eighty percent of all volunteer hours are provided by 9% of the population. One out of every five adults accounts for nearly two-thirds of all civic participation. Something has to be done to change these numbers and expand Canada's philanthropic base, because our society is facing an irreversible reality: the demographic shift caused by our aging population. Social demands arising from that shift will include costlier health care and elder care, while the ratio of workers (and their tax dollars) to retirees declines. These demands can be addressed in three ways: through collective, expensive taxpayer-funded government programs, through the individual efforts of affected seniors and their families, or through the community based, targeted, efforts of the volunteer and charitable sector. Take the last element out of the equation, and the burden on the first two groups becomes unsustainable. Canada's charity and volunteer sector today contributes 8.5% of Canada's GDP. Its slice of the GDP exceeds the combined GDP of Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan -and is larger than Canada's retail, automotive or manufacturing sectors. And there is more at stake than dollars and cents. In a far more profound way, reducing the role of the charitable sector comes at the expense of social cohesion, especially in urban areas where "good-works industries," invariably religious in origin, staff the "front lines" of social support, through food banks, meal and shelter programs, friendship centres and the whole host of other services essential to city life. For several years, my group, Cardus, has been pushing to increase the federal charitable tax credit to 42¢ on the dollar from its current 29¢. When we took our arguments to officials at the federal Finance Ministry in 2009, however, they politely told us the increase we were proposing would "cost" the federal treasury $800-million. In the curious arithmetic of Ottawa, this is the same amount the government "saved" when charitable donations came in lower than forecast, and it disbursed fewer charitable tax credits. I urge that the 2011 budget gives the government the opportunity to kickstart a charitable revolution. It's time Canadians let the minister know they're OK with him increasing the charitable tax credit.

I can't shake the feeling that we need to do something different here, something different from the usual work of a review, you, the reader, looking for insight on the fourth and last novel in Jeffrey Overstreet's Auralia Thread, and me trying to talk about what it all means and why you should find it important. The Ale Boy's Feast would have us read a different way, to be more bent on mystery and joy than on dissection and cold analysis, to be focused not simply on what it does but what it is.

Instead of trying to prompt a debate on euthanasia by killing his wife with an injection of lethal drugs, Nova Scotia resident Stefan Bolton should have bent an ear toward Quebec. He would have heard abundant reasons to stay his hand. He would also, if he'd been able to closely follow Quebec's public consultation on euthanasia and assisted suicide, witnessed growing coldness to the initial fervour for normalizing them as medical treatments. When he went public with a confession and turned himself over to police last week, Bolton said he was wracked with grief and wanted someone "in authority" to say he'd done no wrong when he killed Barbara Jean Jollimore-Bolton on Jan. 22. He's unlikely to hear that from anyone with real authority in Quebec. Au contraire. A year after an all-party committee of the National Assembly began provincewide public hearings on the issue, euthanasia and assisted suicide appeared precisely nowhere in Premier Jean Charest's speech this week setting out his government's agenda for a new session of the legislature. Besieged by crises ranging from allegations of government corruption to a strike by woefully underpaid Crown prosecutors, Charest has let the special committee disappear beneath the political waves. Even the committee chairman, Montreal Liberal MNA Geoff Kelley, began publicly insisting several weeks ago that the hearings were not a government initiative but rather something the opposition Parti Quebecois cooked up. Shortly afterward, Kelley was appointed to cabinet and the proceedings went on without him. What was supposed to have been the final public session Thursday was abruptly cancelled because of Charest's recall of the legislature. It's not clear what the effect will be on a report and recommendations expected in early spring. Some Liberal MNAs say they're committed to listening but nothing else. None of which says definitively that the euthanasia debate is dead in Quebec. Self-styled dying with dignity aficionados have two forms: stubborn and fanatical. The truly hardcore will expire before they give up their thanatic fixation. Evidence of that is the way the public hearings came to be held in the first place. Canada's Criminal Code prohibits euthanasia and assisted suicide. It is a federal matter. A bid by a Bloc Quebecois MP to decriminalize them was crushingly defeated in the House of Commons. Even as it became obvious the bill was going down, however, a crude propaganda campaign began claiming Quebecers supported making the medicalized killing of adult patients as a routine a part of hospital life as pre-natal ultrasound. The argument advanced was that since provinces have the constitutional authority to define medical treatment, Quebec should simply ignore Ottawa, declare euthanasia and assisted suicide to be normal health care, and direct Crown prosecutors to stop laying charges. (It's an approach that makes the Quebec debate as critical in Calgary as Chicoutimi, as menacing in Medicine Hat as Montreal. If it ever is accepted in Quebec, Albertans and all Canadians risk witnessing the opening of new homicide wings at their own local hospitals.) But the public hearings have provided the opportunity to ask whether Quebec really wants to join countries such as Switzerland, Belgium and Holland in the unqualified disaster of legalized medical killing. The question has raised an even more compelling question: how do you get out of this social cesspool once you've plunged in? There's an even more compelling question from that: if you suspect it might be a cesspool, why plunge in at all? At an early February session in Gatineau, across the river from Parliament Hill, palliative care specialist Dr. Jose Pereira detailed the nightmares now facing the Swiss, the Belgians and the Dutch. He was then asked why, if the situation is so grim in those democratic countries, legislators don't just go back and re-criminalize euthanasia and assisted suicide. His brief, simple answer went to the heart of, and took the heart out of the case for social sanctioning of medically administered death. Once authority structures convert from protecting human life to being complicit in its destruction, their vested interest lies in perpetuating normalization of the change. Once societies cross the threshold from venerating human life to casually disposing of it, there is no just going back. History does not have a reset button. Of course, democratic societies can change their minds and their course in numerous respects. Taxes can be raised, lowered and raised again. Even something as significant as capital punishment can be introduced, abolished, re-introduced and abolished yet again. The self-evident difference is that administrative matters can be undone. Death cannot. Over-taxation can be remitted. Blood shed by state killing forever stains the society that condoned it. The impossibility of erasure is what makes the progressive mania for uncontrolled social experiment so historically dangerous. Relying on generational change to recover from today's recklessness is the epitome of social fecklessness. Slavery ended in the United States almost 150 years ago. Its evils still contort American political and social life. An estimated 50 million of the unborn have been aborted in the U.S since Roe vs. Wade in 1973. At that rate, if society discovers in 30 years that abortion really is wrong after all, more than 100 million lost lives will have to be explained. Where political life is not merely administrative, its purpose is to safeguard the moral thresholds of the past against the predations of the present for the sanity of the future. Its habit is debate, true enough, but its essence must be the conviction that wrong is wrong no matter how much agitated individuals, or fanatical opportunists, want to have it declared right. Had he been able to listen closely to the euthanasia debate in Quebec, Nova Scotia's Stephan Bolton might have heard that difference between wrong and right being affirmed. Tragically, he was otherwise engaged.

A friend, fellow frequent traveller and cultural observer was talking recently about the small incidents in life that illustrate the value of empathy and how it helps define what it means to be a human being. A couple of minutes or so before his plane, which had departed Calgary a half hour late, was to land in Toronto a flight attendant made an announcement to ask a favour. There were, she said, a few fellow passengers on board who were struggling to make their connecting flight to Moncton. As a courtesy to them (and no doubt the other passengers on the waiting flight) the flight attendant asked that if others could just remain in their seats for a minute or two once the plane docked, then the Moncton-bound people could deplane first. No one would really be inconvenienced by this, and the handful of passengers bound for Moncton, which included a young mother and her baby, would be able to proceed more swiftly to their connection. Courtesy would be served. And so, when the plane docked at Pearson and the door opened and the seat belt light turned off, almost everyone in the plane summarily ignored the flight attendant's request and stood up to clog the aisles and ensure that the Moncton-bound passengers would be late. My friend, who was seated towards the front of his plane, says he and the person next to him had stayed seated but could do nothing other than look towards the plane's business class passengers and ask, out loud "Are all you guys really going to Moncton?" Their responses, he said, were neither glances of anger nor embarrassment. "It was pure disinterest," he said. "It was as if my attempt at admonishment or shaming simply did not make any sense to them. It was kind of shocking." Empathy has a number of definitions but all work to illustrate its essence, which is the capacity to share the sadness, happiness or other emotions of fellow human being or, in other words, to know what it feels like to be in their shoes and respond with compassion. It is a commonly accepted public virtue which, while invisible physically, can be illustrated through the every day actions of each of us. It is an ethic of reciprocity as old as civilization itself, widely illustrated through the 'Golden Rule' of treating others the way one aspires to be treated oneself. It is promoted by virtually every faith known to humankind and when it is absent in society, people don't just miss their flights to Moncton. Capt. Gustav Glibert, the U.S. Army psychologist assigned to interview leading Nazis in the months following the Second World War, put it this way: "In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men." This year, Cardus will conduct a study in Calgary that will touch on how commonly accepted social virtues such as empathy and its close relatives, mercy, forgiveness, compassion etc., are incubated and nurtured within our societies and our communities. They are not, as history shows, necessarily inherent to human beings although they are widely considered vital to the progress of civilization which itself, to borrow a phrase, is never more than one generation away from decline if its most cherished virtues are not nurtured and inherited. Our mission this year is not, however, quite that broad. Cardus, a think tank dedicated to the study of social architecture, will examine the role institutions of faith, temples, mosques, synagogues, and churches, play in the development and nurturing of our cultural aesthetic. That the ethereal virtues of the arts are essential to a city's flourishing is widely accepted. What we will study is how a parallel intellectual pursuit, the search for what it means to be a human being, can influence not only those engaged in that quest but the culture of the communities within which they do or do not exist. This, we hope, will further contribute to the health of the Heart of the New West, as we in Calgary describe ourselves. This city has built a reputation for innovation. It leads economically and in public policy development. Its arts community stands in no one's shadow. So, we believe, can its soul.

International relations is a Christian minefield but we've made a long history running right in. Did God send ruin across Haiti for its demoniac dealings? Did President Bush extend evil imperial oil interests and the dark shadow of corporate America across the globe? Running along we go, with knee-jerk moralism, where angels fear to tread. Reading the Bible in international relations is too easy for some, and too hard for most. One thing it certainly is not is normal, my friend Scott Thomas tells about Bible studies in CIA basements during the Cold War reading Joshua to discern theology of espionage. But if the Canaanite conquest is a bad story to lift out of the Old Testament and slap onto the War in Iraq, what are the principles and ideas we should be understanding? Here are three very basic, orthodox Christian sign posts. More than a few Christian traditions would say we have no business reading the Bible politically, at least not in a way to baptize secular political structures. The polis of the Christian is the church, according to people like Stanley Hauerwas. By contrast, Oliver O'Donovan in The Desire of the Nations set out to discover the kingship of Christ and ended up with defense of Christendom. Jonathan Chaplin finds Christian Democracy at the intersection of Calvinist and Catholic social thought. All three make profoundly different stakes for a Christian approach to international relations. These traditions exist along a very ancient continuum of Church teaching, what the Catholics call the Magisterium. Traditions organize and discipline Biblical teaching in consistent, communal and historic ways. Choosing which tradition opens up the melancholy postmodern quandary, an intractable problem if the highest authority and end of tradition is human beings. All of which means that the Spirit, a belief and encounter with an historically active, personal God, must surely be a consideration that shapes the Christian approach to international relations. If the tradition of the Christian faith is nothing more than a protracted theo-political Hobbesian spat, then these three traditions are some awfully sad sign posts. But if the Spirit is alive and active in history, guiding and reforming the people of God, then everything is changed. We become a people characterized by hope in troubled times. Hope is not fatalist. Hugh Gusterson tells the story in Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War of fatalist Christian eschatologies embracing nuclear weapons as a fast-lane to the end of times. There might be good reasons to support the possession of weapons of mass destruction, but this is not one of them. Nor is hope naive; it compels us to see tyranny and injustice and work for a better justice, a truer beauty and a more lasting peace. A personal, active God means none of it will ever be lost. None of it is meaningless. Hope makes the present pregnant. It means no reconciliation is too hard, no system too complex or powerful, and no problem too intractable. Audaciously, gratuitously, God continues to act in the now of human history. He still shows the strength of his arm, still scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts and still pulls down the mighty from their seats. Still, he exalts the humble and meek, fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich empty away. We expect the miraculous in an Easter morning world. So this is no time for perfunctory hand-wringing or smug Christian denunciations. We may be cloistered Benedictines or transformative neo-Calvinists, but a belief in the personal, powerful presence of God always resists apathy, cynicism and hopelessness. Hope is not a political monopoly. It is a Biblical virtue. And that hope, read in the Scriptures, understood in the tradition and encountered in the living God, shapes any Christian approach to international relations.

President Obama's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast last Thursday serves as a reminder of the hazards of relying on easy or settled conclusions about the complicated relationships between religion and politics in the US. Darn it, things were a heck of a lot simpler under his predecessor: George W. Bush was the standard bearer for an aggressive and corporately financed fundamentalist Christian right bent on restoring a Christian America, even establishing a "theocracy", and rolling back the frontiers of secularism. We Europeans knew where we stood. In a single sweeping repudiation, we could set our faces simultaneously against his crass religion, his heartless economics and his militaristic adventurism (along with his stupid grin). Of course, we then rejoiced to see the White House occupied by a recognisable European-style social liberal, economic interventionist and articulate global statesman. We thought we knew where we stood with him. But then, for goodness sake, we find the president cosying up to the religious right all over again, flattering them year after year by showing up at their annual prayer jamboree, allegedly organised by a shady fundamentalist outfit, and, worse still, talking in gushing terms about his faith in "Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour". When we examine the actual content of Obama's speech we are plunged into yet deeper anxiety. This year it was unusually personal, a disturbing fact reported without comment by the Guardian: "My Christian faith, has been a sustaining force for me, All the more so, when Michelle and I hear our faith questioned from time to time, we are reminded that ultimately what matters is not what other people say about us but whether we're being true to our conscience and true to our God. 'Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.'" "My conscience before God"? Wasn't that what Tony Blair appealed to when justifying his decision (and we now know for sure it was essentially his decision alone) to invade Iraq? Now we discover that Obama's faith is also more than a mere source of personal succour. It informs his political decision-making. He makes clear his belief that "our values, our love and our charity must find expression not just in our families, not just in our places of work and our places of worship, but also in our government and in our politics". In case you missed that, the president of the US is implying that he thinks his Christian faith can legitimately shape the way he governs the nation. It gets worse. Obama reveals that the director of his Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnership's office, Joshua DuBois, "starts my morning off with meditations from scripture". Just imagine what would happen if Obama actually decided government policy as if "one day the world will be turned right side up and everything will return as it should be".  Suppose he was even driven to the crazy conclusion that, "until that day, we're called to work on behalf of a God that chose justice and mercy and compassion to the most vulnerable". Might that actually lead him to seek to use the law to guarantee healthcare for every individual citizen, coercing even secular healthcare providers and insurance companies to fall in line with his irrational biblical utopianism? Or to increase social welfare spending by raising taxes on the corporations on whose profits the economic growth of the whole country depends? What could be a more blatant example of "imposing religion" on a secular society? I wish there were some relief by the end of the speech. It was bad enough when Blair hinted that he turned to God in prayer to guide his major decisions. But Obama seems to claim a direct channel to the Almighty and to see himself as God's representative on earth. "When I wake in the morning, I wait on the Lord, and I ask Him to give me the strength to do right by our country and its people. And when I go to bed at night I wait on the Lord, and I ask Him to forgive me my sins, and look after my family and the American people, and make me an instrument of His will." It's just too much. Can't America come to its senses again and put someone in the White House we secular Europeans can make sense of?

Whatever we make of the substance of Judge Andrew Rutherford's ruling in the Cornish private hotel case, his citation of a striking and controversial opinion by Lord Justice Laws, delivered in another religious freedom case in 2010, is worth pausing over. The owners of the Chymorvah hotel were found to have discriminated against a gay couple by refusing them a double-bedded room. They had appealed to their right to manifest their religious belief by running their hotel according to Christian moral standards. Given the drift of recent legal judgments in cases where equality rights are thought to clash with religious freedom rights, it is no surprise that the gay couple won their case. But quite apart from the merits of the case, judges should be warned off any future reliance on the ill-considered opinions about law and religion ventured last year by Lord Justice Laws. Laws rightly asserted that no law can justify itself purely on the basis of the authority of any religion or belief system: "The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other." A sound basis for this view is Locke's terse principle, in his Letter on Toleration, that "neither the right nor the art of ruling does necessarily carry with it the certain knowledge of other things; and least of all the true religion". But Laws seemed to ground the principle instead on two problematic and potentially discriminatory claims. One is that the state can only justify a law on the grounds that it can be seen rationally and objectively to advance the general good (I paraphrase). The question is, seen by whom? What counts as rational, objective and publicly beneficial is not at all self-evident but deeply contested, determined in the cut and thrust of democratic debate and certainly not by the subjective views of individual judges. Religiously inspired political views, such as those driving the US civil rights movement of the 1960s or the Burmese Buddhists today, have as much right to enter that contest as any others. In this sense law can quite legitimately be influenced by religion. Laws' other claim is that religious belief is, for all except the holder, "incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence", and that the truth of it "lies only in the heart of the believer". But many non-Christians, for example, recognise that at least some of the claims of Christianity, historical ones, no doubt, or claims about universal moral values, are capable of successful communication to and critical assessment by others. Laws' assertion is also inconsistent with his own Anglican tradition, in which authority has never been seen as based on the subjective opinions of the individual but rather on the claims of "scripture, tradition and reason" acting in concert. By relying on a dated epistemology, itself the product of the very kind of secularist "belief system" he claims has no place in the justification of law, Laws has obscured the proper relationship between religion and law. Judges would be well advised to give his opinions on law and religion a wide berth. Instead they should rely on Locke's more limited and better-established principle of the limits of what the state can know. That principle won't in itself resolve any future equality rights cases, but it will mean that controversial rulings on the scope of religious freedom will not be discredited by resting on an erroneous view of religious belief.

A note from C2C's editorial board chair: Canada's Journal of Ideas, C2C Journal, asked two of Canada's leading thinkers to consider the question of whether capitalism needs an outside morality to survive. So we asked Michael Walker, the founder of the Fraser Institute and now head of the Free Market Foundation, and Peter Stockland, president of the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal and a longtime journalist, including as editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald and editor of Reader's Digest, to debate this question: "Be it resolved that markets cannot function without a basis in shared religious belief." Peter Stockland goes first; check back soon for Michael Walker's column. -Mark Milke, editorial board chair, C2C Journal.ca, Canada's Journal of Ideas Read the debate here.