I’m interested in this new group discussed in the story below. But note that it’s the group called the “Institute for Canadian Values” that I’m interested in. There’s two groups discussed.
It got me thinking about the other group discussed in the story: Who’s in charge of membership for the “Canada’s religious right” club? How do you join? Where in tarnation are they based? What are the dues? What’s their phone number? Or is this one of those things where the media and anti-religious liberals are the de facto “registrars” of the club, and they decide who’s a member, and once they decide, they slot you in there hoping it brings with it the appropriate ostracizing by the liberals of the country? Thought so!
Guess I should contact Allan Woods, the reporter who wrote the story, about membership fees for the “Canada’s religious right” club.
Liberals’ version of “tolerance” is fun!
(By the way, is there a “Canada’s Heathen left” club? I only ever hear about that “religious right” club in the media and from liberals. Is it just that I don’t know the secret handshake? Do you have to be a sheep to get into their club?)
But seriously, I have other pertinent questions about how this group can help us all—read the story first.
New think-tank to press religious issues
Allan Woods
CanWest News ServiceThursday, May 26, 2005
OTTAWA—Canada’s religious right is preparing to launch a social policy think-tank aimed at promoting “traditionalist” values that have been coaxed to the fore in the same-sex marriage fight—one of the most divisive political debates of the day.
The Institute for Canadian Values was to have begun next month to push for greater representation of religious and moral considerations in government policy, but it was delayed because several of its key players had planned to work on a Conservative election campaign that was nipped in the bud by last week’s historic confidence vote.
“We know this has been done on the left for many, many years,” said organizer Charles McVety, president of Canada Christian College in Toronto. “It’s never been done from a centrist perspective and certainly never from the right.”
Co-founder Joseph Ben-Ami, formerly of the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith, described the institute as akin to the fiscally conservative Fraser Institute, which counts among its members some of the founders of the current Conservative movement as well as core supporters of Tory leader Stephen Harper.
Buoyed by a recent $250,000 start-up contribution, it plans to launch an “annual bellwether” poll of social issues across the country “to see what the opinions of Canadians really are,” said McVety, a co-founder. “If you leave it up to the left, we know what positions they’re going to put forward.”
The institute hopes to gain influence on Parliament Hill by enlisting all-party support from the likes of former Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day, senior Conservative MP Jason Kenney, and Liberal backbencher Pat O’Brien, whom McVety said is one of 37 Grits opposed to same-sex marriage.
“The Liberal party of old has been a party that’s been concerned about these issues. This extremism of same-sex marriage and [decriminalizing] prostitution and marijuana is not the party that most Canadians know,” McVety said. “We hear [Prime Minister] Paul Martin speaking about Canadian values as if he knows what they really are. Last I saw, prostitution was not a Canadian value.”
Nelson Wiseman, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, said the Canadian social conservative movements emulate those established in the United States. But he said any popular religious-tinged political momentum that existed in Canada from the early part of the 20th century “has gone the way of the dodo.”
“In the U.S. social conservatism has been a major boost in constituency for the Republican party. In Canada social conservatism is a drag on the Conservative Party of Canada,” Wiseman said.
Indeed, the Conservative party has gone to lengths to cast off its more fundamentalist roots by passing motions not to reverse laws on abortion and to grant civil unions to gay couples, while upholding the traditional definition of marriage.
But there is significant support among parliamentarians for a social conservative agenda, said O’Brien.
“I think we’re in for a few years of some heated debate on social issues in this country,” he said. “The left wing is highly organized and very vocal and seems to be well funded. People with traditional values, I think, should get better organized. I support it and I’d be happy to be a part of it in some way.”
The institute aims to recruit top-level academics and pollsters in anticipation it will be viewed as a radical fringe element.
? The Vancouver Sun 2005
My other points are these: If they think “people with traditional values…should get better organized”—and by the way I couldn’t agree more, then why haven’t they contacted me with this tidbit? Have any of you been contacted? I do realize this site isn’t exactly Google.com, but it would seem like it would be worth sending me a note or to at least put me on a mailing list.
This is exactly why “the right”, whether religious or heathen, is getting nowhere fast. Lack of cohesiveness, lack of support, lack of organization. Lack of communication. Lack of cash.
It’s literally one of the reasons this web site was started.
The other point was simply with regard to a post I made earlier, lamenting the fact that pollsters or the groups who hire them rarely do polls on the real issues, without skewing the poll leftward from the outset and making it more of a left-wing push-poll to advance a liberal position. This new group seems to have read my mind.
Now if only they’d contact me!—or maybe somebody has the email addy of the “religious right”?
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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