Ray Pennings quoted on, "For the love of God: Advance polls unite church and state at Easter" Read the article here.

Responsibility to protect, the key international doctrine at work in Libya, has a Good Samaritan sort of rub to it. Conceived out of the tragedy of Rwanda, it was a moral stake by the international community that never again would we walk along past unspeakable atrocities. It was a faith-full moment, a moment full of hope for a different way in global affairs that privileged innocence over power, justice over might and mercy over indifference. Yet until Libya, it was still just another paper idea on the books at the United Nations. Now, while the bombs are dropping in Libya and interventionists are getting fired up about responsibility to protect, or R2P, finally birthing a real humanitarian regime, it's worth putting some thought into how difficult and painful the birth of this Good Samaritan doctrine has proved to be. If R2P is our Good Samaritan moment, we've yet to reach down and bind any wounds, or open our homes. Dropping intervention from 40,000 feet (to paraphrase David Cameron) to score tactical hits on behalf of one side in a civil war is somewhat different than what the architects of R2P had in mind. Of course, we're sort of making this up as we go along. Clearly it was important to use the moral language of R2P and to have the French lead the way, lest the neo-conservative ghosts of the Bush doctrine come to haunt Obama. But this also means we have no real plan, which is neither consistent with R2P nor with Good Samaritan kind of foresight, to say nothing of the long Christian tradition of Just War. The strategy right now feels eerily like bombing Qaddafi into a stalemate and stalemates can't be broken from the air. Eventually someone has to go onto the ground and secure a peace. There was fragmented talk of arming the rebels to do it in our stead. But the ghosts of that past are worse still than the Bush doctrine. If this is R2P, it's R2P-lite, which still might be better than no R2P at all. But for Good Samaritan Christians, the justness of this conflict is evaporating by the day as U.N. powers dither ever longer on if and how this civil war can be transitioned from stalemate to peace. At some point you need to get off your donkey and kneel in the ditch. All of which begins to suggest why R2P hasn't made inroads into interventions in places like Ivory Coast, where bombs have also fallen and the prospect of a stable government remains tenuous. Disembodied air power won't tip the balance to just peace in the Ivory Coast or, for that matter, in Somalia or Haiti or, probably, Libya. R2P advocates who are anxiously waiting for an international coalition to act on these and other failed states will wait a long time. American power has developed an allergy to neo-con state building, albeit buttressed by a colossal deficit. But one thing the neo-cons had right is this: when you drop the bombs, you're in for the long haul. It's not enough to stalemate the bad guys and hope for the best. Good Samaritan politics don't abide a quick fix. There is no early in, early out in R2P.

Among President Barack Obama's first acts was concluding a military procurement debate by vowing to veto the purchase of even one more F-22 fighter jet. He was firmly supported by Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, a Republican hawk from the Bush era, who pointed out during an interview with Foreign Policy magazine that the U.S. already had 187 of the jets, and not one had ever been used to fight a war. Whatever the strategic merit of sacking the F-22, the episode exposed the utter folly of letting bureaucratic inertia propel purchasing decisions in the absence of a vigorous public policy debate about the actual purpose of buying military hardware. Sadly, Canadians are following the folly rather than learning the lesson. Our debate over buying 65 F-35 fighter jets has stalled at hardware, taking a quintessentially Canadian turn in the worst sense: narcissistic, navel-gazing, insecure and bureaucratic. The national debate, both on and off the Hill, has obsessed over technical minutiae. Is the F-35 too slow? Is stealth necessary? Is it expensive or unreliable technology? Should the process have been open to competitive tender? These are bureaucratic debates for a nation of soulless penny-pinchers, not a deep moral vision for Canada's role in the world. Debates over tools don't come before you set the project. Are we building a car or a barn? Then we'll know whether we need hammers. Rick Hillier, former chief of the defence staff, famously articulated the concept of three-block warfare (military action, peacekeeping and humanitarian aid) to respond to what he called the changing global security environment. This was a style of warfare that fit the reality of the day. The majority of conflict, most analysts agree, is not between states, but within states. All the F-35s in the world won't stabilize an Afghanistan or a Darfur. Canadian assets are in play in Libya, but, as British Prime Minister David Cameron has lamented, "you can't drop democracy from 40,000 feet." These seem to be the challenges with which our military will conceivably be tasked. Where do the F-35s fit in? Here's a basic pitch: The F-35s are a minimalist hat tip to Canada's taking its own sovereignty seriously. The Canadian air force isn't equipped or designed for long-term overseas three-block warfare. In other words, spending money on fighter jets means a more traditional security posture. It means money that's not going into foreign aid or development or even ground security. It means Canada is not just another NGO. We patrol airspace that we actually think is ours, and we have the ability to respond if folks aren't inclined to agree. Then why 65 jets? That's not nearly enough. It's a compromise number predicated on Canada's doing a little of everything. If we really need a serious interceptor squadron, where did this number come from? This will actually produce a smaller air force. If interceptors are part of Canadian sovereignty, this force won't be up to it. An election campaign is an opportunity to bring foreign policy into focus for Canadians. Our Afghan deadline is up, the bombs are falling in Libya, and eyes are turned to Ottawa for the next generation of foreign policy. The F-35 acquisition is a chance for the government to stake a bold claim on Canada's role in the world and, on the basis of that claim, to provide the ways and means to do it. Obsessive controversy over acquisition costs and technical capacities embarrasses our heritage, the proud service of Canada's military, and the moral imperative of our action in the world. If these are the tools we need, then let's not dither. But at least give us the dignity of debating the why of our role in the world. At least give us some soul in Canadian foreign policy.

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.