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New Quebec bill would prohibit teachers, school staff from wearing a crucifix

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

‘In Quebec, we made the decision that the state and the religions are separate and today we say the schools, the public schools are separate from religion’

The Canadian province of Quebec is moving ahead to expand its so-called religious symbols ban to now include all school staff, meaning no one who works at a school would be allowed to wear crucifixes or crosses of any kind. 

On March 20, the Quebec provincial government of Premier François Legault tabled a bill which, if passed, would expand the province’s current religious symbols ban to stop “any religious indoctrination.”

“In Quebec, we made the decision that the state and the religions are separate and today we say the schools, the public schools are separate from religion,” said Minister of Education Bernard Drainville to reporters Thursday.  

The new bill would update Quebec’s Education Act and would mandate that all students and staff at schools have their faces uncovered. It would also mandate teachers submit all of their educational plans to school principals so that they could be evaluated each year. 

According to Drainville, the “idea” of the new bill is “to protect students from any religious indoctrination.”  

He said, “If we are going to be coherent with this idea that a figure of authority should not wear a religious symbol, well, any adult can be a figure of authority and therefore no adults who are working within the school system should be allowed to wear a religious symbol.” 

The Chair of the English Montreal School Board, Joe Ortona, blasted the bill as “a smokescreen for this government who’s sinking in the polls to try to show that they’re doing something.” 

“And again, they’re not. They’re just coming up with phony solutions that really play to their base, which seems to be intolerant of any mention or of any public display of any religion whatsoever,” he added.  

The announcement of the new proposed law comes after Premier François Legault in December of 2024 tasked his top cabinet officials with putting in place a law that would ban all praying in public in Canada’s only historically and culturally Catholic province. 

In 2019, Quebec passed its so-called secularism law, or Bill 21, that bans all public servants, public school teachers, police officers, government lawyers, and wildlife officials from wearing any religious symbols while at work, including crosses or crucifixes. 

The province’s highest court upheld the law earlier this year after an appeal to overturn it failed. 

Canada’s notwithstanding clause, which is in section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, allows provinces to temporarily override sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect new laws from being scrapped by the courts. 

Canada’s leading constitutional freedom group, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), late last year sent a “demand letter” to Legault regarding his plan to ban public prayer. 

“Such a ban is a totalitarian suppression of the freedoms of expression and of conscience and religion,” the JCCF said regarding its notice of sending the demand letter. 

Quebec has been historically a Catholic province, however, since Vatican II, Mass attendance has plummeted and the provinces birth rate has nosedived to all-time lows. The province also has high abortion and euthanasia numbers, indicating a serious departure from the practice of the Catholic faith.

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Health

Canadians left with no choice but euthanasia when care is denied

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From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

Once again, a government report affirmed what every Canadian should know by now: People are being killed by euthanasia because they cannot access the care they actually need and in some cases are denied that care.

The “choice” that is left to them is a lethal injection. Ontario’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) Death Review Committee’s (MDRC) latest report, “Evaluating Incurability, Irreversible Decline, and Reasonably Foreseeable Natural Death,” highlights this fact once again.

As Dr. Ramona Coelho, an advocate for people with disabilities and one of the most eloquent opponents of Canada’s MAiD regime highlighted in her analysis of the report, Health Canada dictates that a “person can only be considered incurable if there are no reasonable and effective treatments available (and) explicitly state that individuals cannot refuse all treatments to render themselves incurable, and thereby qualify for MAiD.”

However, the MDRC’s report cites cases that do not appear to qualify:

Consider Mrs. A: isolated, severely obese, depressed, and disconnected from care; she refused treatment and social support but requested MAiD. Instead of re-engaging her with care, MAiD clinicians deemed her incurable because she refused all investigations, and her life was ended.

Or Mr. B: a man with cerebral palsy in long-term care, he voluntarily stopped eating and drinking, leading to renal failure and dehydration. He was deemed eligible under Track 1 because his death was consequently considered “reasonably foreseeable.” No psychiatric expertise was consulted despite signs of psychosocial distress.

Or Mr. C: a man in his 70s with essential tremor, whose MAiD provider documented that his request was mainly driven by emotional suffering and bereavement.

In short, Coelho concludes, “Canada’s legal safeguards are failing. Federal guidelines are being ignored. The public deserves to know: Is Canada building a system that truly protects all Canadians – or one that expedites death for the vulnerable?” It has been clear what kind of system we have created for some time, which is why Canada is considered a cautionary tale even in the UK, where assisted suicide advocates violently and indignantly object to any comparisons of their proposed legislation and the Canadian regime.

The National Post also noted examples found in the MRDC’s report, noting that: “A severely obese woman in her 60s who sought euthanasia due to her ‘no longer having a will to live’ and a widower whose request to have his life ended was mainly driven by emotional distress and grief over his dead spouse are the latest cases to draw concerns that some doctors are taking an overly broad interpretation of the law.”

None of this seems to concern the federal government, much less law enforcement. Horror stories are simply not addressed, as if ignoring them means that they did not happen. Constant revelations of lawbreaking are met with silence. “A quarter of all Ontario MAiD providers may have violated the Criminal Code,” journalist Alexander Raikin warned last year in The Hub. “Does anyone care?” In fact, Ontario’s euthanasia regulators had tracked 428 cases of possible criminal violations – without a single criminal charge being laid.

“Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAiD from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding,” Elaina Plott Calabro wrote in The Atlantic recently. “This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic.”

There is an opportunity to stop the spread of Canada’s MAiD regime. MPs Tamara Jansen and Andrew Lawton are championing the “Right to Recover” Act, which would make it illegal to euthanize someone whose sole qualifying condition is mental illness. I urge each and every reader to get involved today.

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Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National PostNational ReviewFirst Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton SpectatorReformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.

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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Every Child Matters, Except When It Comes To Proof In Kamloops

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By James C. McCrae

If murdered women justify landfill digs in Winnipeg, why hasn’t Kamloops lifted a shovel for its alleged 215 child graves—despite $12 million and four years of national mourning?

Winnipeg searched a landfill to honour Indigenous women, but Kamloops has yet to dig a few feet for its missing children

If Canadians are serious that every child matters, we should at least know the names of the “missing” Indian Residential Schools children about whom we hear almost daily in mainstream media reports.

There are frequent reports of news conferences staged by Indigenous band leaders proclaiming new ground-penetrating radar (GPR) “discoveries” of unmarked graves at former residential schools. GPR detects soil disturbances, but it cannot confirm whether they are human remains or even graves. The reality is that the small number of excavations which have occurred have yielded no human remains, despite stories of clandestine burials told by Indigenous knowledge keepers.

By contrast, in Winnipeg, excavations have been happening at landfills to search for the bodies of Indigenous women murdered by a serial killer. Yet after more than four years of gut-wrenching stories about the apple orchard at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, not a single excavation has been carried out to confirm the alleged burial of more than 200 children.

On May 27, 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that radar had revealed anomalies consistent with possible graves near the former school. Following that announcement, many First Nations made similar claims based on GPR. Yet no band, including Kamloops, has identified a single missing child by name. Kamloops alone has received $12 million in federal funding for excavation work, but no digging has taken place, and no explanation has been given for the delay.

Are we serious? If murdered Indigenous women in Winnipeg matter enough to prompt landfill searches, why don’t the children allegedly buried at Kamloops matter enough for an excavation?

Sometimes it seems Canadians are far too willing to look away, even at the risk of being disingenuous. The Heather Stefanson government in Manitoba was defeated in the 2023 election, famously because it refused to search landfills for murdered Indigenous women. Yet the Kamloops allegation—one of the gravest ever levelled in Canadian history, involving the alleged murder and burial of more than 200 children—remains untested.

In the meantime, copycat “discoveries” have spread across the country, the media has fanned a moral panic at home and abroad, orange T-shirts have become a fixture, and schoolchildren are taught that allegations of murder, rape, mayhem and mass graves are fact. Orange Shirt Day and the phrase “Every Child Matters” became national symbols of reconciliation after the Kamloops announcement, further entrenching the narrative.

In Manitoba, Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, two Indigenous women murdered in Winnipeg, mattered. Their families and communities mattered. If First Nations in B.C. and elsewhere—and indeed all Canadians—truly believe every child matters, and if many still believe there are children buried at Kamloops, why are Canadians kept in the dark? Indigenous families in particular are being told, and teaching their children, that genocide explains the inequality—social, economic and otherwise—they endure today.

It’s tempting to blame governments for fuelling the panic or the mainstream media for refusing to ask basic questions. Yes, they bear responsibility. But the spark came from Kamloops, and only Kamloops can settle this. Its own GPR specialist recommended excavation. That would prove whether bodies exist, identify who the children were, and reconnect them to their families and communities.

Instead, Canadians are asked to accept the story on faith. After four years with no excavation and no names, credibility is stretched to the breaking point.

Consider the contrast: Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew says $18 million was spent to dig through thousands of tonnes of hazardous landfill to recover the remains of Morgan and Marcedes. Kamloops, with $12 million to dig just a few feet, has yet to act.

Something is wrong with this picture. Either compassion for Indigenous children is missing, or the “missing” children aren’t missing at all.

Where is that compassion Canadians love to think they possess?

Or is it simply not true that every child matters?

James C. McCrae is a former attorney general of Manitoba and Canadian citizenship judge.

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