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.

"Power resides where men believe it resides," said the teaser for Season 2 of the HBO series A Game of Thrones, which began airing this last Sunday night. "It's a trick, a shadow on the wall": a fitting epigraph for a postmodern fairy tale. George R. R. Martin has written five books so far in the series on which the TV show is based, the most recent of which, A Dance with Dragons, appeared last summer and immediately topped the bestseller list. Martin's take-no-prisoners realism was evident early on: "When you play a game of thrones you win or you die. There is no middle ground." There is power and there is death, there is king and there is pawn. There is such a thing as honor and valor, but these are secondary, maybe tertiary, to surviving the day. As he writes of one of the heroes of old: "Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought bravely. And Rhaegar died." Martin has been compared to Tolkien. The depth and richness of his world make that claim plausible. In every narrative nook is another mystery, another layered plot for conspiracy enthusiasts to savor. That, at least, is part of the attraction of the series: its inscrutable narrative density. Yet in many respects, Martin's stories have more in common with Machiavelli's Prince than with Tolkien's tales of Middle Earth. Political realists have been quick to catch on to this affinity—Foreign Policy even ran a feature on Martin's realism and its insights for international politics. When asked if he thought his books were too cynical, Martin simply responded "they are realistic." Read the entire article at Books & Culture.

Much has been remarked about the new leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, Thomas Mulcair, and his desire to move his party to the centre, or the centre-left, or the left-of-centre, recasting them as moderate progressives, or progressive moderates. Whatever the position may be called, will there be room in it for the religious left? For those who are not paying attention, religion is thought to be the exclusive province of the political right. Yet the most religious caucus in Parliament today is that of the Green party, where 100% of its members (namely, Elizabeth May) are recent theology students aspiring to ordination. More broadly, clergy in Parliament are almost always on the left. A few months back, I launched a new magazine called Convivium: Faith in our Common Life. In our first issue, we had NDP stalwart Bill Blaikie, one of Canada’s longest-serving MPs and an ordained United Church minister, write about the social gospel roots of his party. At the same time I wrote that Jack Layton’s defeat of Blaikie in the 2003 NDP leadership convention marked the vanquishing of the social Gospel tradition by a new leftist politics — urban, socially libertine and aggressively secular. In our current issue, Blaikie vigorously objects to my “premature obituary” for the social gospel tradition. I sought out Bill Blaikie to write for us not only because he was a rare combination in Parliament — electorally successful, intellectually sophisticated, and thoroughly decent — but because he tells a story that is critical to understanding the role of religion in our political history, and the present possibilities of the same. His defence of the social gospel in our magazine is made at greater length in his recent very worthwhile book, The Blaikie Report: An Insider’s Look at Faith and Politics, which should be in Mulcair’s transition dossier. Thomas Mulcair does not come from Layton’s downtown Toronto, but his Montreal constituency is likewise a long way from the prairie social gospel championed by clergymen such as Tommy Douglas, J.S. Woodsworth, Stanley Knowles and Bill Blaikie. That tradition was economically interventionist, even statist, but had plenty of room for culturally conservative voices. When people speak about Mulcair’s moderation, it appears to mean becoming rather more centrist on economic issues. To the extent that progressive parties have done this — Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, Tony Blair’s Labour — the portside balance to this centrist shift has been to adopt ever more extreme social libertinism on cultural issues. It’s early days yet for Mulcair’s NDP, and he may well chart a different course. Yet with a caucus filled with MPs from secularist Quebec and almost no one from the Prairies, one expects that the religious left will be a muted presence. Consider Paul Dewar, recent candidate for the NDP leadership. Heir to a famous Ottawa political name — his mother was a formidable mayor — Dewar has told faith and politics author Dennis Gruending that about 75% of his public positions were shaped by his Catholic faith, and 25% by the social democratic tradition. But in his recent book Pulpit and Politics, Gruending relates that Dewar prefers to mute his own voice: “I am prepared to talk openly about faith in [academic] settings. But when speaking in a political capacity I am reluctant to do so because I fear I could be misunderstood and I do not want to use religion to score political points.” In general, politicians running for office are eager to score political points. Perhaps Dewar keeps quiet about faith because he thinks it would give him an unfair advantage. Or perhaps it is that his party and the general political environment make it a liability, rather than an advantage? The NDP is quite a different party than it was a year ago, let alone 10 years ago. Under a new leader in a largely new caucus, its immediate task will be to define where it fits on the political spectrum and what it has to offer to Canadians. That is a more important task than the daily tactics of partisan jousting. Drawing upon its now 50-year history, the New Democrats will have to decide whether the long social gospel tradition is a heritage to be embraced, or to be discarded. Religion is ever so much bigger than politics, and it does have a contribution to make to the political sphere — and not just on one side of the aisle.

Nicholas Gafuik covers the recent Manning Networking Conference, and highlights Cardus charitable research in his latest piece in the Calgary Herald: Sound public policy, even when well implemented, is not always enough to produce the desired outcome. Public policy is necessary, but not sufficient. Government alone is not enough. The annual Manning Networking Conference took place in Ottawa earlier this month. The theme was government as facilitator. The annual barometer released at the conference confirms again that Canadians are skeptical of big government and prefer government as a facilitator. Read the rest of his commentary here.

A new College of Trades has an ambitious mandate to regulate about half a million workers as the province takes a stab at reforming an apprenticeship program that originated decades ago. ... In April and September last year, CARDUS, a Hamilton-based think tank, released two reports critical of the college and its mandate. Brian Dijkema, one of the authors of the September CARDUS report, said the problem begins with the lack of research upon which the legislation was based. The report is also critical of the fee structure, which it suggests will require more compulsory trades and possibly, maintain the status quo on ratios. “In the absence of clear criteria and evidence by which the college shall determine compulsory versus voluntary certification, the possibility that trades will be made compulsory for the purpose of funding the college’s activities should give us pause,” the report concluded. CARDUS suggests membership fees will increase to as much as $100 – currently it costs only $40 to register as an apprentice. Read the entire article here.