Juno News - November 10, 2019


Pro-life movement optimistic despite Trudeau win


Episode Stats

Length

7 minutes

Words per Minute

188.71127

Word Count

1,334

Sentence Count

63

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary

Pro-life Canada's Pro-Life Conference highlights the progress that has been made in the pro-life movement since the election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But there is much more work still to be done, and a lot of optimism still needs to be made in order for pro-lifers to have a voice in the political system.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I'm here in Calgary at Life Canada's Pro-Life Conference, an organization that represents
00:00:11.160 numerous pro-life groups across the country. The theme for this year's conference, just a few
00:00:16.520 weeks after the federal election, is changes in the air. Now for a lot of pro-life Canadians who
00:00:22.760 have been very frustrated with the re-election of Justin Trudeau, who was not just pro-choice
00:00:27.800 himself but actively works against pro-life sentiment in the country and in his own party,
00:00:33.880 the message here has been fairly optimistic in fact. People suggesting that there is a lot to
00:00:39.420 be hopeful for and a lot to be proud of in the pro-life movement standing in Canada. One example
00:00:45.780 of this comes from Alyssa Golob, one of the co-founders of RightNow, a pro-life group that aims to
00:00:51.640 nominate and then elect pro-life candidates across the country. This is what Alyssa had to say.
00:00:57.380 Canada is now a more pro-life country today than it was before the election. Out of the 53
00:01:02.080 conservative pro-life MPs who are running for re-election, 52 of them got elected. And out
00:01:07.500 of the 22 additional conservative MPs, 15 of them are pro-life. So we now have more pro-life MPs sitting
00:01:12.600 in the House of Commons now than we did before the election. In Ontario, there are now more pro-life
00:01:17.860 MPPs than there are MPPs in the entire Liberal caucus. And in Alberta, when I moved here last year
00:01:23.200 to help in the provincial election, we helped over 52 pro-life candidates in the nomination process,
00:01:27.900 and the majority of them got elected, which resulted in Motion 506, an NDP motion to expand
00:01:34.240 abortion access being defeated a couple of weeks ago. That's very much the message that yes, there are
00:01:38.860 more pro-life members of Parliament in Canada now than there were before the election. They don't
00:01:44.040 comprise a majority, but it shows progress in her view. And also right now has been looking at success
00:01:49.600 in elections in Ontario and Alberta, where they've also managed to identify and elect pro-lifers
00:01:54.800 to be candidates first off, and then eventually to run and win in elections. What was interesting,
00:02:01.480 however, is really looking at some of the broader cultural issues here. And one of the things this
00:02:06.360 conference has done is focus on the various stages of the pro-life movement, from education
00:02:11.520 to nominating and electing candidates, to working within the political system and trying to advocate
00:02:17.940 and basically lobby politicians on pro-life legislation. How do you do that, however, when you're talking
00:02:24.400 about a government and a governing party that are hostile to pro-life values? I spoke about that with
00:02:31.560 Tabitha Ewart, who is a legal counsel and advisor for We Need a Law, a group that, as the name suggests,
00:02:37.840 focuses on pushing for a law in Canada on abortion. The only democracy in the world that doesn't have
00:02:44.340 any regulation on abortion is Canada. We need a law works to change that. Although she says there
00:02:49.940 are different pieces of legislation apart from prohibitions or limitations on abortion that are
00:02:55.860 on the table that are relevant to pro-lifers. This is what she said she's working on. One of the things
00:03:01.240 we just want to avoid doing is just yelling at our politicians that abortion is wrong without coming
00:03:05.920 up with any reasonable solutions. So that's one of the things why as an organization, we are always
00:03:10.160 advocating for our international standards law, right? Something that would have a 13-week gestational
00:03:13.960 limit and a waiting period and counseling for women going through an abortion. And it's working
00:03:18.340 alongside politicians, talking about strategy of how to introduce it, how to bring it up in
00:03:22.660 conversation with the media and with the general public. So there's lots that still needs to be
00:03:27.520 done, especially if there's any individual Canadians, just going to their politician and encouraging
00:03:31.580 them to be bold on this issue. And in terms of like with pro-abortion politicians, there's still a
00:03:36.780 lot of things that we have common ground with. I mean, 90-something percent of Canadians are against
00:03:41.700 sex selection abortion. That's something that everyone should be able to get on board with.
00:03:45.500 Things like being against the Canada summer jobs attestation. We saw party members of all parties
00:03:50.840 being uncomfortable with requiring people to attest that they support abortion. So there's lots of
00:03:56.340 things that can be done regardless of where someone's stance is on the issue. So these are some of the
00:04:00.220 themes, some of the reasons that people are optimistic, even with pro-lifers comprising a minority of the
00:04:07.040 representatives of the Parliament of Canada. Now let's talk about some of the cultural forces here.
00:04:12.780 I spoke to Jonathan Van Meren, author of a book about the culture war, about the cultural battles
00:04:18.360 that we see, and also himself a pro-life advocate working with the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform.
00:04:24.900 And he says that a lot of these big issues we see around the world are in fact showing that opinion
00:04:30.560 is shifting, that the pro-life message is being spread. The problem in North America,
00:04:36.160 the problem in Canada is that the media is out of alignment with the people. Here's what he had
00:04:42.040 to say about that. Look, I mean, Justin Trudeau won again. The media tried to make this about social
00:04:47.520 issues and really spin that as a negative conservative. Where do you think the culture
00:04:51.780 is on these things? Before the politics, the culture on these social issues now compared to
00:04:57.420 prior to the election? Well, interestingly, I think the best way to explain that is to contrast
00:05:02.760 what we see on the ground versus the political conversation. So with the organization I work for,
00:05:07.560 the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, we're going door to door every day. We're talking to people
00:05:11.740 and the vast majority of Canadians are very uncomfortable with the status quo, which is
00:05:16.200 abortion legal until birth. But 80% of Canadians don't know that fact. So for me, what strikes
00:05:21.620 me, especially during an election period, is this huge divide between what the politicians are saying
00:05:26.960 and what the people on the ground are saying. And the only reason it's so difficult for pro-life
00:05:31.100 issues to get traction in federal politics is due to the fact that so many Canadians are unaware
00:05:36.060 of the status quo that Trudeau himself is defending. So the message that the pro-life movement needs to
00:05:40.320 take away from an election like this is that we need to seize the offensive on this issue.
00:05:44.280 We need to highlight where Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party, the NDP actually stand. And we
00:05:48.880 need to highlight the fact that we are the only nation, we are the only Western democracy with no
00:05:53.240 laws on abortion whatsoever. Because what we find from a lot of liberal voters door to door is that
00:05:58.320 they're appalled when they find this out, but almost none of them know this. This has been just a sampling
00:06:03.400 of some of the messaging we've heard at this conference by Life Canada. Again, pro-lifers who
00:06:08.860 you may think have lost the election are seeing gains being made. The media doesn't like it. This is
00:06:15.380 why the media has been relentlessly pursuing its anti-social conservative and quite frankly,
00:06:20.360 anti-religious messaging with Andrew Scheer. They seem to be threatened and working against this idea
00:06:27.820 that, hey, people think it's okay to talk about values. Canadians think it's okay to be pro-life.
00:06:33.200 Canadians think it's okay to elect politicians who are pro-life. The media is the one that is imposing
00:06:39.300 its vision on Canadians and it seems to be backfiring. We are covering this, talking about
00:06:45.980 the issues that the mainstream media isn't, covering perspectives the mainstream media isn't.
00:06:50.360 We can't do this alone. If you can head on over to tnc.news slash donate and tip it a few dollars to
00:06:56.940 keep the lights on and let us keep doing this work and speaking the truth, please do.
00:07:01.900 For True North from Calgary, I'm Andrew Lawton.