Gilles Duceppe is a capable politician, but his reputation as a cagey campaigner is enormously exaggerated given that his is the easiest job of all the party leaders. While Stephen Harper, Stephan Dion, Jack Layton and Elizabeth May were all trying to support candidates and win votes across the country on Oct. 14, Duceppe only had a handful of candidates to worry about. The other parties were flying their exhausted leaders across the world's second largest nation. Duceppe could spend most nights in his own bed. The Liberals, NDP and Tories must deploy their efforts strategically in order to spend the most amount of time in areas of the greatest opportunities and threats. The Conservatives, for instance, need not spend as much time in Alberta and Saskatchewan where their seats are relatively safe, but must keep a high presence in Vancouver, southern Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes where threats and opportunities abound. Layton also has seats in Atlantic Canada he has to defend and seek, as well as Montreal, Toronto, various areas of Ontario and all across the West. Ditto for the Liberals. In fact, the Conservatives have seats in nine of the 10 provinces and one territory, as do the Liberals while the NDP are close behind with MPs from 8 provinces and one territory. Duceppe's task, on the other hand, is a walk in the park. The enormous northern riding of Abitibi-Temiscamingue is a Bloc stronghold as is the case with Manicouagan, the second largest geographical riding. This means the Bloc can focus entirely along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa valleys. But wait, it gets easier. Other ridings in the eastern end of Quebec such as Gaspesie-Isles-de-la-Madeleine and Rimouski-Neigette--T'miscouata--Les Basques are also safe and require lip service only, allowing Duceppe to focus only on contentious ridings while writing off the anglophone west end of Montreal. When the risks and opportunities are broken down, Duceppe only needs to aim his energy and resources at about 24 ridings. It then gets even easier. Duceppe's constituency is almost entirely francophone, which means he can target advertising primarily through francophone television networks TVA, TQS and SRC where, because of the relatively small audiences advertising rates are less expensive. And, because he is able to spend all of his time in Quebec, the Bloc leader is also guaranteed prominent if not dominant play on the election coverage broadcasts and front pages of Quebec media. Not only will his image appear far more frequently, so will his message which means that no matter how thin the gruel served up by his opponents, he may constantly attack and diminish them without having to worry too much about effective and repetitive counterpoints. It is not difficult to imagine that if Harper had the luxury of spending five weeks campaigning exclusively in Quebec and Atlantic Canada he wouldn't have improved his party's standings there, but it would have come at the expense of seats in Ontario or British Columbia. Similarly, if Dion were to have spent the bulk of his campaign in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the Liberals would have better representation in those regions but would have fared even worse overall. Duceppe may have a winning record as a coach, but he is behind the bench of a team that gets to play its entire schedule on home ice. Little wonder then that they win most of their games and ensure that there is little chance either the Conservatives or Liberals can win a majority. But in 2014 the world will begin to change. Due to population shifts, B.C. will get 7 more seats, Alberta 5 and Ontario 10. Were those in play in the election just past, that would roughly work out to 14 more seats for the Conservatives, 5 more for the Liberals and four more to the NDP. The Conservatives would still be shy of a majority with 157 of the 166 required in a 330-seat House of Commons. But for the first time in the history of Confederation a majority will be within reach with only a handful (12-15 seats) required from Quebec. British Columbia, with 43, and Alberta with 33 will have a combined total of 76 seats, one more than Quebec's 75. Then, no doubt, we will discover how good a team the Bloc Quebecois really is.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) 264 pp. $22.95. Religion is a problem, writes Elizabeth Shakman Hurd in her recent book, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations. She certainly isn't the first person to notice. Religion has been a thorn in the side of social scientists for decades and especially following the events of September 11. God is back on the international scene, and his inconvenient reappearance has vexed policy analysts, academics, and populists alike. According to Hurd, there are two reasons for this quandary. First, academics seem unable or unwilling to accommodate the "global resurgence of religion" in their international relations (IR) paradigms. The dominant theories of foreign policy and IR can't easily consider religion as more than a narrow veneer for more traditional materialist or Machiavellian explanations. Taking religion "on its own terms" is a prospect that is both confusing and borderline heresy in orthodox IR. The second reason religion poses an indelible problem is because foreign policy has proceeded from IR's religiously illiterate theories. Foreign policies are struggling to adapt to an international climate that now requires sophisticated, articulate, and shockingly rapid responses to God's perceived resurgence. Hurd deftly illustrates how religion's implications for global politics transcend armchair foreign policy analysis. Religious illiteracy is a root factor behind treaty failures, diplomatic posturing, and the application of international force. The politics of secularism may have helped forge a new global order, but such politics have their limits. According to Hurd, our secularist chickens are coming home to roost. Hurd's central question is, "How, why, and in what ways does secular political authority form part of the foundation of contemporary international relations theory and practice, and what are the political consequences of this authority in international relations?"(1). She provides a three-part answer. First, the secularist division between religion and politics is not fixed but rather socially and historically constructed. Second, the failure to recognize this explains why students of IR have been unable to properly recognize the power of religion in global politics. And third, overcoming this problem allows for a better understanding of crucial empirical puzzles in international relations, evidenced by contemporary case studies, including Iran and Turkey. Hurd's introductory chapters and her insightful deconstruction of the secularist narrative in IR theory are the most valuable portions of The Politics of Secularism. She writes that secularism "refers to a public settlement of the relationship between politics and religion" (12). This settlement, she argues convincingly, constitutes the political culture of international relations. Of course, even this settlement is too unstable to remain fixed. Referencing the work of William Connolly, Charles Taylor, Jose Casanova, and Talal Asad, she usefully differentiates between two basic trajectories of secularism. These are the laicist trajectory, in which "religion is seen as an adversary and an impediment to modern politics" (23); and the Judeo-Christian secularist trajectory, in which "religion is seen as a source of unity and identity that generates conflict in modern international politics" (23). This distinction carves out a careful history of secularism in IR, presenting us with a picture of religion as a privatized force separate from what is public and secular. It is Hurd's ambition to denaturalize this reification of sacred and secular and expose these distinctions as being socially and political constituted. The demarcation of the secular and the sacred is more than a movement of pragmatic politics; it is an intentional theological position. Secularism is not the opposite of theological discourse; it is itself "a particular kind of theological discourse in its own right" (35). Understanding secularism as a type of theological narrative is certainly one of Hurd's most powerful ideas. She insists that various metaphysical perspectives should inform international relations and foreign policy. Accordingly, she examines Islam and secularism in Turkey and Iran, flagging ill-fated policy orientations which ignore or contest the place of alternative political theologies. Conversations staking out the supremacy and inalienability of Enlightenment secularism stand little chance of success in a world surging with religion's devotees. Yet while Hurd creates a compelling argument for including alternative political theologies in international relations, it is difficult to determine how this inclusion could occur. If the traditions of secularism are socially constituted, then they are also subject to modification. But what kinds of modifications should or can be made to international relations theory to rectify this exclusion? In her conclusion, Hurd suggests briefly that one such option might be William Connolly's kind of agonistic democracy, perhaps mixed with her own approach based on Stephen K. White's weak ontology. Such an agonistic democracy could "elicit or seek out public expression of contending views of religion and its relationship to the political" (147). Quoting Connolly she writes, "a democracy infused with a spirit of agonism is one in which divergent orientations to the mysteries of existence find overt expression in public life" (147). Agonistic democracy would encourage contestation and interrupt any attempt to impose final or static solutions on the relationship between politics and religion. The need, she concludes, is to rewrite secularism to pursue an ethos of engagement among a plurality of controversial metaphysical perspectives. Though this is a promising idea, it falls short of an agenda for modifying traditional theories of international relations to better "explain and understand" global politics. Hurd argues convincingly that overcoming the "secularist problem" will make for better theory and practice, but exactly how or in what ways this transcendence might proceed is murky at best. The deconstruction of IR's secularist history is laudable, but the task of policy making abhors the academic luxury of stopping half-way. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd has made an exceptional contribution to the conversation, a critical initial step toward understanding religion in international relations. At the conclusion of her eighth chapter she hints that she believes as much herself. She writes, "How to think productively, on a case-by-case basis, about these contestants or resurgents in their own terms and outside the binaries produced and maintained by secularist rigid authority is the next challenge" (146). As such, this book is more accurately the introduction to a much larger project to be undertaken on a global and historical scale, the contestation and conversation over the secular and the sacred, between religion and politics, and ultimately the relationship between what we believe and how we live.

The Work Research Foundation has become Cardus: a new unique name for the same unique organization. Our wide-angle periodicals, policies and punditry come together for a renewed vision of public life, up and down the Cardus—the Main Street. Why Cardus? The Cardus was an ancient north-south road that connected the people of Roman cities to their major public spaces. On the Cardus Maximus governments, markets, temples and more lived and worked to build a common life for the good of the city. Today’s North American cities are connected by high speed highways, and asphalt roadways, bringing their occupants in encased metal bodies from point A to point B. Global culture generates a huge amount of data, but it is segmented, disconnected and isolated. Our think tanks have concentrated on politics, but forgotten the importance of culture. Professors and policy advocates are world leaders in minute areas—but who paints the bigger picture? Our institutions, like our people, function in a new kind of social and intellectual isolation. Policy is made without a place for religion, religion is practiced with little thought to the common good, and work is done without connecting the "why" to the "how". What is Cardus? Enter Cardus. We believe that economic, social and religious patterns have a deep influence on each other, and that we ignore these to the peril of each. These forces do not operate independent of each other, and neither do their institutions. Public life is sustained not just by social or political effort, but by a plurality of institutional cooperation. Thus—this is the moment for a think tank to bridge politics and culture, to rethink, research and rebuild an integrative vision of North American social architecture. And Cardus isn't merely rethinking and researching an alternative vision for public life—we're actively working to renew and rebuild. Cardus is a North American public policy think tank, equipping change agents with a strategic public theology to renew North American social architecture. Explore Cardus You have several ways to explore the new Cardus: Join Cardus for our Hamilton, Ontario relaunch event! Enjoy an evening lecture with our first Senior Fellow, and editor of worldview journal Comment, Dr. Gideon Strauss. For the first time, Cardus' new look will be unveiled in the city of our home office! Co-presented with Redeemer University College, Gideon's lecture will be part of the 2008 Bernard Zylstra Lecture Series, an annual presentation by Redeemer. Featuring a standing reception from 7:15 to 8:00 pm in the Redeemer art gallery, an intimate discussion in the auditorium, and plenty of social and networking opportunites, Cardus' Hamilton launch must not be missed. Location is 777 Garner Road East, Ancaster, Ontario L9K 1J4. Registration is complimentary. Register here. Browse our rich new website (www.cardus.ca), drawing together everything we do into a stylish, easily-navigated headquarters. Listen to our newest think audio lecture, #18: About Cardus. The architects of Cardus join forces to (re-)introduce our mission, our strategy and our dream. At the end of the day, the best way to get to know Cardus is to talk to us. Visit our team page, and get in touch with us—we want to hear from you!.

Cardus welcomes aboard a new Director of Operations in Milton Friesen, joining Hamilton head office from Calgary, Alberta. With his heart and family still back in Alberta we look forward to welcoming both Milton and his family into the Hamilton area in coming months. Have a look at Milton's gifts and experiences on his staff page .

There has been a great deal written and even more spoken over the past months about why we don't vote, yet the answers are less likely to be found in current behaviours than they are in the subtleties of post-modern thinking. We live in a consumer society; one in which the dominant although not exclusive trend is to assess the value of the products we purchase and the activities we engage in by the benefits they bring to us as individuals. This articulates itself in the reasons for low voter turnout that I hear in the course of my studies and travels across the country. The most frequent is that "I don't know if I'll vote because I don't agree with everything any of the candidates has to say" or, in other words, there is no single party or candidate that affirms us individually -- at least not at the level required to inspire us to return the favour by going to the polls and affirming the ambitions of one of the candidates. When we don't see ourselves fully represented in the choices placed before us as consumers, we therefore fail to see sufficient value in the exchange of goods or services and choose not to buy into or participate in the process. Further degrading the value of this exchange is that the nature of our parliamentary democracy dictates that most of us will be dissatisfied with the outcome of any given election. With four or more candidates in each of our ridings or wards, the majority of us will typically not vote for the person, or party, who wins. In fact, if current polls are any indication federally, at least six out of 10 Canadian voters will vote for a party or candidate other than the one that forms government on Oct. 14. The vast majority of us are therefore asked to participate in a process in which we will -- so long as we only value it in terms of the satisfaction we gain from it -- feel as if we have "lost." Hence, the popularity of reforms that would attribute seats in the House of Commons based on a percentage of popular vote -- a process that would allow more of us to see "ourselves" reflected in the parliamentary potpourris. To a great extent, there is nothing particularly new about this. Canadian society has, however, always defined itself in terms of the balance of the tension between collective and individual rights, i.e. the right of the majority to define the sort of community we will share versus the rights of each us individually to determine the course of our own lives. There is little doubt that the Baby Boom's powerful cultural influence and desire to lead lives of self-affirmation in contrast to their parents' embrace of duty and sacrifice has shifted the balance in favour of individualism. Rightly or wrongly, that was a driving force behind the installation and interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that has made many changes in our society. All of this has consequently combined to reinforce or "affirm" the tendency to assess political and other behaviours in terms of the satisfaction it offers to us as individuals. In other words, not only do we have a right to vote, growing numbers of us are inclined to feel entitled to see our individualism affirmed by the process. This tendency to take a consumer approach to life is also reflected in other ways. The most common cause cited for irregular church attendance, for instance, is not lack of faith in God, it is the churches' inability to meet our individual needs. So, while we once went to church in order to serve and praise God, we are now more inclined to assess the value of church attendance based on the service it provides us. We shouldn't be surprised, therefore, that we would take the same approach to politics; it's not as if we don't believe in it anymore, it's just that we are more interested in what it can do for us than what we can do for it. Having established a reputation for excellence in promoting the not inconsiderable value of individual rights and freedoms, our leaders, media and educators may, if they value high levels of political engagement, consider also promoting the idea that with each right comes an obligation and with each freedom comes a responsibility. That won't solve the entire issue of low voter turnout, but it's as good a place as any to begin. Ray Pennings is vice-president of the Work Research Foundation.

Introduction Let me begin on a personal note. I live between the realm of ideas and the frontline of action. I spend just enough time with ideas to be periodically dangerous and just enough time with actions to never cut a perfect mitre in my home renovations. Maybe this explains my fascination with the architect - the person who steals ideas from musicians and philosophers but knows he or she can't be a master carpenter. I love architects. Most days, I am better suited to a marketing meeting than reading Augustine's Confessions. But other days, I would rather pour a concrete floor than read the auditor's report. I was born with too many interests. Finding beauty in art and ideas has me taken, and so does the pleasure of building the back shed. For this, the folks at Cardus have given me two straightforward tasks: first, to seek out the public intellectuals that will together paint the picture of our new social architecture. Second, seek out the resources, money, networks, community, other ideas, and people - that will give movement to our ideas. Why is this project called Cardus needed at this moment? Here lies my central argument. Civic, social, cultural and economic flourishing requires a new and different arrangement of our social institutions. This can only happen with a different understanding of culture-change and a new openness to public exchange which allows the sharing of our most deeply held convictions. Surely, these are not only my ideas or my arguments. They are the arguments of the staff and senior fellows at Cardus and they are the ideas of a broader community of thinkers and doers. At Cardus we live in a tradition - a tradition of Jewish and Christian public intellectuals who have established powerful foundations upon which we build and nuance the ideas of tomorrow. Social Architecture - A Structural Argument Let's think about the first argument: that civic, social, cultural and economic flourishing requires a new and different arrangement of social institutions. The last two generations have increasingly built an undifferentiated society. What do I mean by this? Simply put, we naturally default to fewer and fewer institutions to solve the problems of the day. Today our default is toward the government or the markets. The coinage of our contemporary debate is the left or the right - what governments should do and what they shouldn't do. The result of this debate has produced the pan Canadian consensus of the last few decades in Canada. This conversation has run its course. These deep assumptions about the possibility of governments and the markets are simply unable to tackle the challenges we face. There are a multitude of examples of this, but let me note two of them. The first is the challenge of demographics and future economic growth. Jonathan Wellum, Chief executive of AIC and also a Cardus Senior Fellow, makes this argument in his most recent lecture on short-termism: the demographic trends of some of our major global economies cannot sustain economic growth into the future. Countries including Japan, Russia and even China do not have the cultural fortitude to reproduce themselves, to create new producers, consumers, GDP creators, or knowledge workers, - all economic terms for our children. The majority of our economic measurements are premised on the assumption of growth. But what really is behind this assumption? The next big economic question is, problematically, not an economic question and I am not sure that we even know how to converse about this as a society. Let me add a practical example. I recently observed a roundtable consultation with a number of government officials, related social agencies and many seniors. Two conversations struck me with their sadness. The first was the difficult challenge of unethical telemarketers selling to vulnerable seniors. The second was the troubling recognition that the community service vans could not even come close to meeting the needs seniors had to get to the doctor, buy medicine and visit Tim Horton's. The default for this conversation landed on two public policy fronts: one being the consumer protection legislation and the other being increased funding to municipalities and the problems of downloading. The essential problem was never mentioned. Who could have imagined that loneliness and family breakup would create difficult public policy issues such as consumer protection and municipal mobility for seniors? These are only case study examples of the limits of both the markets and the state. A recent Globe and Mail article poignantly illustrates the broader habits we have cultivated around who the next saviour will be. The headline read, "Market Meltdown: the Buck Starts Here." The article was an interesting book review of the just-published Chain of Blame. It stated, Most of us turning to this book would hope to find a single culprit. But the authors argue, in their book's title, that it is a chain of blame. They give full-fledged portraits, not villainous caricatures. People who meant well. People who didn't mean well. People who sensed something was wrong. People oblivious to the coming storm. All tied together in a chain of profit. Our blame-game has largely led us to tackle two instititutions: the office of the CEO and the government. To be sure, there is much blame to be distributed. Additionally, it will now require much wisdom on the part of our business and government leaders to bring us through this tangled web of international finance, regulated environments and highly complicated relationships. However, our default of blame has ironically overlooked two other major players. The first is the institutional and governance infrastructure of the very companies that have so dramatically come upon this trouble. They are the thousands of directors across this world who approve the paycheques of CEOs and the credit risk policies of their corporations. They are the hundreds of thousands of shareholders who dutifully attend the shareholder meetings and carefully steward their investments. The second gets closer to home. It is you and me and our shared cultural, social and economic assumptions about life. Might our cultural values of consumerism and short-termism have contributed to the situation we are in? Might the social lessons we learn in our families, received from our parents and given to our children, have anything to do with credit trends and stewardship? Have our faith institutions and our educational institutions taught us the basic virtues of thrift, of thinking long-term and of the fundamental principles of loving our neighbour when we are making business transactions? And let me probe deeper yet: can the principles of the market driving our economic sphere sustain themselves without the key social, cultural and religious values that we hold so deeply? My point is that this kind of questioning changes the default blame or responsibility. It differentiates the architecture of our economy beyond the market, the individual and the government, to other spheres, social, cultural, and spiritual. And this is the very mission of Cardus. What then of the new social architecture? Canada's new social architecture must come with a commitment to the distribution of authority and responsibility within a re-invigorated civil society and throughout the old and new institutions that form the foundations of that society. Institutions are not the sum of individual rational choice for reward or for association. They have meaning and purpose and order in their own right. The free association of individuals in a place of worship does not make a church. The grouping of people in a single detached home does not make a family. Canada's new social architecture is the recovery or discovery that institutions can play a vital role in mediating between government and the individual, between business and labour associations, volunteer associations, cultural institutions, families, faith communities and educational institutions. Unfortunately, many of these spheres of society have deferred their authority and public space to the state, the market, or the individual. It is relatively easy to speak at the level of principle and broad ideas. What might this new social architecture actually look like in practice? Let me illustrate this new social architecture through the questions we are exploring and cultivating at Cardus, and expressions of the notions we have about the possibility of Canada's new social architecture that we plan to explore. Idea: We think trade associations will find new life and authority – leveraging a knowledge network economy, cross-fertilizing ideas in a market economy, setting standards to live by. Not long ago, I spent a day consulting with a construction trade association. Even in this rough and tumble frontier, industry ideas of competition are changing dramatically. The idea of building communities of competitors in the construction industry was a completely foreign idea 10 years ago. Today, not so. The future of institutions like the Chamber of Commerce is bright. It is not that the Chamber needs go back to its job of keeping the integrity of weights and measures as it did a century ago, but rather that this very principle must again come alive in a more complicated and global economy. Idea: We think families will be a new unit of the economy. Can you recall in the last three decades a Finance Minister of the government of Canada in a federal budget presentation selling the idea of having babies? Welcome to Minister Flaherty's 2008 budget. The young growing family will become the new creative class, creating new and innovative pools of intellectual capital and know-how. Idea: Labour Groups will get over their ideological fantasies and realize that work is more social than ever, creating economies of scale for training and benefits, building communities in non-traditional employment and devising alternative work arrangements for the provision of social benefits. Idea: The public school system will be challenged by diverse educational models creating space for alternative educational philosophies, for charter schools, arts schools and faith-based schools. The argument will be a business argument and not just a religious one. Idea: Is it really churches and other faith institutions that build the richly textured and diverse communities so eloquently described in official plans and city-building documents? How do we create the new urbanism ideal where the rich talk with the poor, the single mom with the local business leader, the academic with the house framer and the grade seven boy with the elderly couple seeking to share in the vitality of life? What institution will be best suited to deliver this dream? Idea: Will church minivans be the public mobility bus expansion strategy? Idea: As government capacity creates limits for community services, what will be the increasing effect of philanthropic choices in shaping community? Will the next philanthropists become the new policy makers? All of these questions engage the possibilities of civic society and of non-state institutions. Would this kind of civic vitality create cultural flourishing? Cultural Change, Cultural Flourishing Against Politics First The second part of my argument is that re-thinking, researching and renewing Canada's social architecture requires a different perspective on cultural change. Peter Menzies, a Cardus Senior Fellow and CRTC Commissioner, gets at this question by contrasting what he calls a "cultural flourishing approach" to a "politics-first" approach. He says, "Politics is rarely capable of guiding culture. More typically it responds to it. Culture, or shared community spirit, cannot be (politically) manufactured." Politics follows culture, not the reverse. This is a deep irony here in Canada. Scan the Canadian government ministries and you will see how deeply embedded politics are in much of our civil society. On the culture and arts front, Robert Fulford, would still characterize this investment of money and administration as following the creative spirit rather than leading the various expressions of Canadian culture and art. If you want to get close to the production of culture, the real frontlines of cultural change that will paint our future reality, you might want to consider the National Art Gallery in addition to Parliament Hill. The American evangelical Christian political right failed for this very reason. Its over-optimistic belief in political power and service to change culture is an experiment with troubled results. What sustaining cultural change can now be attributed to the largest political movement in the history of North America? Ironically, it is this very community that has deep in its character the stuff of culture making, namely, strong and vibrant families, active faith institutions increasingly committed to community, a music and arts realm that is able to dream of a new reality, an international passion for relief and education and a culture of donation-giving unrivalled in the world. If these are not the basics of cultural production and culture making, then what is? Do not mistake me. Political responsibility is deeply important. Our democratic impulse is the spark plug. Protecting a civil society and political engagement is the energy to strengthen that impulse. I hold this as fundamentally true and can prove it with political scars. Cardus is not, however, a primarily political project but is instead committed to the entirety of our social architecture. Deep Convictions This leads me directly to the third piece of my thesis tonight; that new arrangements of our social institutions with a different understanding of culture change require new openness to public exchange which allows the sharing of our most deeply held convictions. Listen to Jeffrey Simpson explain the seat of our deepest convictions. In commentary on the multi-cultural character of Ontario he says, Multiculturalism is Ontario's creed; integration is Ontario's practice. Politics is supposed to assist that integration and, in fact, it does rather wonderfully. True, the province has not yet had a visible minority premier or party leader, but that day will come. When political (or administrative or judicial) decisions are deemed to thwart integration, the public will react against them. In their private spheres of family and religion, or even in their own communities, people can practise their own creeds and exercise their own cultural preferences. Bring these into the public domain and insist that it be changed, and the reaction will be overwhelmingly negative. (The Globe and Mail, Oct 11, 2007) Simpson here presents the view that not only must the public square be secular, but only the secular must be brought into it. His argument, at least as presented here, insists that personal views on matters relating to family and religion, the defining structures of cultural belief, do not belong (or more accurately will be rejected as inappropriate) in the public square. It is true that the cultural flourishing model requires some necessary distinctions between the public and the political (i.e. public is much more than political) and between the public and the private. The mistaken, though popularly-held pan Canadian consensus approach so aptly described by Simpson is that belief is private and therefore publicly inappropriate or irrelevant and that public issues can always be resolved with neutrality and process. This unwillingness to engage in or even talk publicly about our deepest convictions has widespread effects in community groups, churches, foreign aid, immigration, social services, the arts, racial issues, community services and the like. Pieces of the debate are missing. Official plans are made without reference to faith institutions and corporations are hesitant to donate to charities with a religious foundation. Global corporations understand little about the strengths and weaknesses of religious commitment and passion, a missing piece of their risk management strategies. Superficial political dialogue is plagued by the fear of media contempt. And the list could go on. Is this what you make of the world today? Cardus does not. Canada's new debate and that of the world will be one of faith and belief. It will be one of a religious character. Tony Blair's discovery as he left the political arena that religion is public is, I imagine, a discovery that many of you have always known to be true. And this is good. Within our religious traditions are to be found the building blocks of productivity, of exchange, of creating and building good things. These are the makings of great economies and civil society. Surely this kind of public dialogue is no easy task. Pluralistic engagement needs to be affirmed, and the capacity for non-state institutions to make public contributions needs to be celebrated and released. You and I both know that history stores many shameful examples of the end of dialogue and of our collective failures to dialogue with humility and grace. Yet this is the task to which we are all called. In conclusion let me go back to where I began. The Cardus project is cultivating civic, economic and cultural flourishing with new and different arrangements of our social institutions. This can only happen with a different understanding of culture-change and a new openness to public exchange which allows the sharing of our deepest held convictions. For myself, I know what will get me up tomorrow morning (God willing) and set me to work. My place is at Cardus, yours, somewhere else in Canada's beautiful social architecture. May we steward our time and place well.

Christian voters should not become a political interest group defined by particular key issues. We ought to be concerned and think Christianly about all issues. Our faith impacts aboriginal issues as well as abortion, security as well as social justice, fishery and family policy. Instead of a checklist of issue orthodoxy, I will follow the campaign paying particular attention to competence, character and conviction. Competence is important because I know that God is more glorified through a job well done than poorly done, and effective government is a blessing for a nation. Also, change that is lasting (which is quite different than headlinegrabbing) requires competence to implement. While I am not interested in the gossipy details of candidates? private lives, evaluating their character is crucial. Leadership requires courage and the fortitude to resist the particular temptations of public office. Closely tied to character is conviction, the core beliefs that animate us. All of us, including all political candidates, are believers of one sort or another. What we believe about the big questions of life shapes what we think is important and what will drive our passions, also our political passions. After 25 years of political engagement, I?ve grown more cynical about election platform promises. While the political junkie in me watches with fascination the campaign games of defining the ballot question and wedge issues, history shows that parties usually govern differently than they campaign. Elections are important because they decide winners and losers. The importance of who is in government pertains to much more than the legislation that may be passed. It includes appointments to key positions that the governing party gets to make, the ability to draft regulations that shape how legislation is implemented and the appointment of cabinet ministers who make day-to-day departmental decisions regarding spending and priorities that impact everyday life. In short, the impact of the government we elect on our lives will be more felt in areas that never make the news than in the issues drawing our attention during the five weeks of a campaign. This is just another reason why competence, character and conviction mean more than a checklist of positions and issues mainly designed to win my vote.

There has been a great deal written and even more spoken over the past months about why we don't vote, yet the answers are less likely to be found in current behaviours than they are in the subtleties of post-modern thinking. We live in a consumer society; one in which the dominant although not exclusive trend is to assess the value the products we purchase and the activities we engage in by the benefits they bring to us as individuals. This articulates itself in the reasons for low voter turnout that I hear in the course of my studies and travels across the country. The most frequent is that "I don't know if I'll vote because I don't agree with everything any of the candidates has to say" or, in other words, there is no single party or candidate that affirms us individually - at least not at the level required to inspire us to return the favour by going to the polls. When we don't see ourselves fully represented in the choices placed before us as consumers, we fail to see sufficient value in the exchange of goods or services and choose not to buy into or participate in the process. Further degrading the value of this exchange is that the nature of our parliamentary democracy dictates that most of us will be dissatisfied with the outcome of any given election. With four or more candidates in each of our ridings or wards, the majority of us will typically not vote for the person, or party, who wins. In fact, if current polls are any indication federally, at least 6 out of 10 Canadians will vote for a party or candidate other than the one that forms government Oct. 14. The vast majority of us are therefore asked to participate in a process in which we will - so long as we only value it in terms of the satisfaction we gain from it - feel as if we have "lost." Hence the popularity of reforms that would attribute seats in the House of Commons based on a percentage of popular vote, a process that would allow more of us to see "ourselves" reflected in the parliamentary pot pouris. To a great extent, there is nothing particularly new about this. Canadian society has, however, always defined itself in terms of the balance of the tension between collective and individual rights, - the right of the majority to define the sort of community we will share versus the rights of each us individually to determine the course of our own lives. There is little doubt that the baby boom's powerful cultural influence and desire to lead lives of self-affirmation has shifted the balance in favour of individualism. Rightly or wrongly, that was a driving force behind the installation and interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that has made many changes in our society. All of this has consequently combined to reinforce the tendency to assess political and other behaviours in terms of the satisfaction it offers to us as individuals. Not only do we have a right to vote, growing numbers of us are inclined to feel entitled to see our individualism affirmed by the process. This tendency to take a consumer approach to life is also reflected in other ways. The most common cause cited for irregular church attendance, for instance, is not lack of faith in God, it is the churches' inability to meet our individual needs. So, while we once went to church in order to serve and praise God, we are now more inclined to assess the value of church attendance based on the service it provides us. We shouldn't be surprised that we would take the same approach to politics. It's not as if we don't believe in it anymore, it's just that we are more interested in what it can do for us than what we can do for it. Having established a reputation for excellence in promoting the value of individual rights and freedoms, our leaders, media and educators may, if they value high levels of political engagement, consider also promoting the idea that with each right comes an obligation and with each freedom comes a responsibility. That won't solve the entire issue of low voter turnout, but it's as good a place as any to begin.

Canada's public life as reflected through its commonly held beliefs is, like that of most countries, rife with misconceptions. For instance, people frequently think that Alberta, the province that privatized liquor stores, is rife with private health clinics. Not so. Ontario is the province with the private hospitals - the Shouldice Hospital in Thornhill being the best known - while B.C. and Quebec are the provinces with the most active private clinics. Alberta actually has the nation's most restrictive legislation when it comes to private health facilities. Another view widely held is that religious adherence is in morbid decline. Canada, for many practical historical reasons going back to franco-catholicism and anglo-protestantism, certainly has a strong tradition of separating politics from religion. But that doesn't mean faith here has been abandoned. The facts, again, tell a different story. According to research outlined in Dr. Reginald Bibby's book The Boomer Factor, 29% of Canadians have full memberships in a religious group. It might not be what it was but that's more than sports groups (22%), hobby groups (16%) and service clubs (12%). It's also much more - four times - than political groups which have only 7% of the population engaged as members. Of the 10 membership group categories listed in the research, religion is number one. But religions, unlike sports stadia, recreation centres, libraries and arts centres, have never depended or asked for public money to build their structures and their profile tends to slip beneath most public life radar. They may be the largest institution in which people have memberships but they also - for many good reasons no doubt including their status as poor sources of tax revenue - remain the most independent. Some might argue that this has disconnected the role of faith in Canadian life and, for instance, the civic planning in our increasingly dominant cities. There is no question that faith groups continue to build significant structures, but the major faith buildings continue sprouting up deep in the suburbs. Calgary's recently completed and massive Ahmadiyya's Baitun Nur mosque, the largest in the country, is an eloquent structure but is placed far from what we know as an 'urban core' area. Metaphorically and practically, we have placed institutions that are actually at the core of people's lives on the physical fringes of society. This is the practical outcome of subscription to the notion that religious interest in Canada is dead or dying. No one has compiled more comprehensive data in this field than the University of Lethbridge's Bibby. His Project Canada research over 30 years clearly shows a decline in regular church attendance compared with 1975. But it also shows that decline levelled out in about 1990, dipped at the 2000 mark and since then has grown back to levels roughly equivalent to and in some instances better than the norm in 1985-1990. The facts are that religions constitute the largest single common activity shared by Canadians and their interest in this area is the same today as it was a generation ago. If Quebec, where the decline in religious attendance has continued unabated, is taken out of the picture, the numbers speak even more in favour of faith as a major and growing part of Canadian's lives. (It should be added, however, that most Quebeckers continue to identify as Catholic and Statistics Canada's religiosity index, which measure private religious practice and not just church attendance, indicates little overall difference between Quebeckers and Ontarians. This and other data leads to speculation that the issues in Quebec have more to do with the institution of the church than with God). As Bibby concludes: "Contrary to ideas propagated by many Boomer academics and journalists in particular, the inclination of Canadians to reach beyond themselves continues to extend to the gods . . . . The extent of participation in organized religion has been grossly underestimated and patterns of involvement badly misunderstood." The point here is not to promote the imposition of faith. It is, however, to raise the notion that we may have forgotten, or risk overlooking, the need to include institutions of the soul in our civic visions. Given their contribution as incubators of preferred social values - a topic for future commentary - leaving them out would be a terrible mistake.