2011‑2022, and is preserved here for archival purposes.
Convivium publisher, Ray Pennings, writes the last Convivium column as a tribute to this unique platform, expressing the gratitude we feel for all of you who have breathed life into it for over a decade.
Whenever we need to make statements of conclusion, we’re tempted to say, “mission accomplished.” We’ve done what we have set out to do, so the job is finished.
As publisher of Convivium, I need to let you know that this will be the last ...
Convivium's co-founder says goodbye to become publisher of the Catholic Register but Ray Pennings, Cardus Executive Vice-President, welcomes Peter Stockland home as a Senior Fellow.
It is said of Cardus that once you’ve worked here for a certain length of time, you never actually leave; you’re just not there at the moment.
So it is that while, officially and formally, I’ll be stepping down as editor of Convivium.ca effective Dec...
Don Hutchinson writes that whether we have unwittingly become card-carrying members of monsters at work or mobs inc. is best revealed by a look in the bathroom mirror.
When I encounter Frankenstein, the word that most readily comes to mind is ‘monster.’
I chuckled at the meme, “Albert Einstein was a genius. But his brother Frank was a monster.” The word association instantly conveys a humorous image, even ...
In this first of a two-part essay, Travis Smith teases out the new ersatz religiosity of our political, clinical and social pandemic responses.
Part Two: Follow The Political Science
The ongoing campaign against COVID-19 has several religious attributes and analo...
Peter Stockland notes theopoetics of Christian leaders and 277 Canadian delegates at the recent Glasgow climate conference equal bupkas unless we tackle climate change profitably.
Prior to the so-called COP26 conference, Pope Francis, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians, Bartholemew I of Constantinople, urged the world to “listen to the cry of the earth” regarding climate change...
Ottawa writer Ruth Dick argues it’s time to restore political health by purging our viral responses of the urge to condemn and dominate.
Basta! Enough!
With that exhortation out of my system, let me add a suggestion that’ll go over like a lead balloon: Within the sphere of public discourse, leave those who are actively vaccination resistant alone:
Avoid sharp-p...
Peter Menzies argues the salvation of Canadian democracy lies in our two youngest political jurisdictions where consensus government, not leadership whip cracking, prevails.
Six years and three elections ago, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau was about to become Prime Minister. Deficits were to be modest and temporary, Canada was going to “be back” as a global player, ways were to be sunny, transparency would blossom like flowers i...
Don Hutchinson says the recent court order compelling a Calgary street preacher to reference science in his sermons about COVID is offensive and has to be appealed.
Politically determined public health guidelines during the covid-19 pandemic have come with a cost.
Governments have defined essential and non-essential services, ostensibly to ensure Canadians have access to food. Not all can afford essential servi...
A palliative care group in suburban Vancouver has one week to rally members across North America to protect its vision of MAiD-free end-of-life care.
Although it’s only autumn, Angelina Ireland hopes and prays October 22 will be a very good Friday for the Delta Hospice Society.
The date is the cut-off for new members to join the Society and help turn the tid...
Evan Menzies watches the season two finale of the Apple TV+ surprise hit and sees the shadows of Cain and Abel falling across the characters.
“Nate Shelley is never seeing Heaven.”
That was one of many Twitter hot takes on the betrayal of Ted Lasso at the end of season two by his assistant coach and socially awkward apprentice Nate Shelley.
I was a bit surprised to see the outpourin...
Even as Canadians auto-correct for political falsehoods by expecting and accepting them, the Prime Minister’s fib on Truth and Reconciliation Day reveals a worrying pattern, Peter Stockland writes.
George Orwell would likely have caught his breath at news of a prime minister caught in a flagrant fib on a day dedicated to capital T Truth.
Orwell, of course, spent his journalistic career ferreting out and castigating the incessant political lying...
The shared-bathwater insularity of Parliament Hill’s media elite has made the 2021 campaign an adventure in safe and narrow thinking, Peter Menzies argues.
The words of Jody Wilson-Raybould are as good a place as any to begin an assessment of media coverage of Canada’s 44th federal election.
“In Ottawa, the political culture, which includes the media, lives in a world of its own construction, quite divo...
Former CRTC Vice-Chair Peter Menzies warns the federal government’s so-called online harms bill, Bill C-36, leaves the Charter rights and liberties of Canadians out in the cold.
Canada did not build protection of certain rights and freedoms into its Constitution because, as some might think, they are saucy symbols of pop virtues. They are there because serious people understood that without the Charter of Rights and Freedoms the na...
Despite laudable adaptation to extraordinary technological change, too many journalists remain stuck with a story-telling idée fixe that blocks the light of facts, Peter Stockland argues.
An editor-in-chief infamous for, shall we say, whimsy once decreed no opening sentence of any news story could exceed 21 words.
The impromptu commandment unleashed a newsroom tizzy equivalent to what might have erupted if an exotic dancer had walked ...
Peter Stockland argues that despite the legitimate criticism journalism gets for all its institutional failings, abundant first-rate reporters and writers serve Canadian democracy well.
Honesty demands acknowledgement.
In recent weeks I’ve written, and other Convivium.ca writers have contributed, sharp criticism of journalistic performance on a variety of issues.
It’s true that at the institutional level, corporate providers ...
In her review of a 2021 book by British journalist Laura Dodsworth, Anna Farrow highlights disturbing evidence of governments using our primal panic response to push pandemic policies.
Long before David Attenborough brought his soothing voice to the explication of animal behaviour for the BBC Life series, the North American television public had been introduced to the majesty and oddities of the natural world through Mutual of Om...
Don Hutchinson asks who has fuelled church burnings across Canada, and notes Indigenous leaders from coast to coast have been most stalwart in condemning the two dozen arson attacks.
Mainstream media lit a fuse, and churches are burning. Nearly two dozen to date and a greater number have been vandalized with graffiti, paint-dipped handprints, and splatter.
Some congregations have accepted acts of vandalism as a visual lesson on t...
Peter Stockland flags an institutional shift in journalism that seems to be causing media outlets to follow the State line rather than inquire and clarify in the public interest.
Warning lights should always flash before our eyes whenever journalists mix raw numbers and percolating percentages in the same paragraph.
Numbers clearly state actuality. Percentages are the ups and downs of context. Regardless of the axiom attribut...
Deliberately ambiguous bills such as Ottawa’s C-10 and C-6 are the political deceiver’s plaything, Daniel Dorman argues.
John Milton’s Paradise Regained (the poem which followed his great English epic, Paradise Lost) expands and interprets the gospel narrative of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness (Matt. 4). In one particularly potent scene Jesus accosts ...
Convivium contributor, journalist, and former CRTC commissioner Peter Menzies has been centre stage fighting off the federal Internet control bill. Fortunately, he says, fame is fleeting.
Not long after I ended my decade at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) I began writing about communications issues.
Pretty geeky stuff, I guess, but now my views are apparently so in demand that Convivium.ca wants ...
The very wording of the federal government’s updated Broadcasting Act means language itself is being subordinated to the State’s political purposes, Peter Stockland argues in the second of two parts examining Bill C-10.
Read part one of Peter Stockland's two-part series on Bill C-10.
Debate over the federal government’s updating of the Broadcasting Act has l...
The continuing battle over Bill C-10, which revises the federal Broadcasting Act, is a fundamental dispute over who decides how Canadians connect, Peter Stockland reports in the first of two parts.
Read part two of Peter Stockland's two-part series on Bill C-10.
Two bright spots amid the thunderbolts and lightening of the Liberal government’...
Experts pushed back this week on government efforts to legislate control of Canadians’ Internet use. Peter Stockland reports on what’s at stake.
Despite the almost spiritual significance Internet cat videos apparently have for Canadians, fears that legislation known as Bill C-10 might snuff out Fluffy’s chance for viral stardom seem seriously misdirected.
As Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeaul...
Eerie silence has met Ottawa’s plan to regulate the Internet and outlaw hurtful – not just hateful – expression, Peter Menzies reports.
Canada’s long march towards violating Charter rights to free expression continues without any sign of political or media opposition.
Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s campaign to suppress the Internet has now opened up on three fronts. It is no l...