Toronto has been the central headquarters of the pro-abortion, dump-the-family, and step-on-traditional values cliques in Canada during the last 45 years. This once so staid Protestant city has seen its intellectual, political, business and social elites transformed into panting after “world-class” status at any cost. As they constantly confuse themselves with representing not just Toronto but all of Canada—at least all English Canada—they truly believe that what they believe, all of Canada believes.

            Its great Oracles are the Globe & Mail, Canada’s national newspaper which has the honour—at least in its own eyes—of having initiated the swaying of the masses towards the killing of the unborn 50 years ago; The Toronto Star—champion of feminism—it covers most of Ontario; the “national” TV stations CBC and CTV with similar views; and the largest provincial government “representing” one-third of Canada’s population, lately also under the sway of ideological Leftism under Liberal Party Premier Dalton McGuinty.

Editorial

            On May 16, the Sunday Star (readership 600,000 on Sundays) carried an editorial under a ¾ inch high headline: “PM re-ignites abortion fight.” It had been preceded by two days of covering the 13^th annual National March for Life on Parliament Hill with reports and large colour photos on Friday and Saturday, May 15-16, an event which the Star had never so much as mentioned in the previous twelve years. This time large headlines on Friday, May 16, read: “Pro-lifers to PM: Thank you;” “Reopen abortion debate: Cardinal” (Susan Delacourt); and “Planned Parenthood gets silent treatment,” and “Programs will be closed or curtailed” (Olivia Ward). Saturday’s May 17 headlines read: “Pro-life MPs flex muscles, dig in for long fight” and “What is PM’s stand, critics ask” (Linda Diebel).  

            On Sunday, the Sunday Star brought a head-on colour shot of the front marchers behind the almost street-wide banner National March for Life, with a multitude of placards one of which read May 14, 1969: Canada’s Day of Infamy. The article’s headline: “Abortion: Don’t ask, don’t tell” (Leslie Scrivener).

            Following are the editorial’s first three paragraphs. I have numbered the lines for your special consideration with the relevant text in italics:

1.       Abortion has been a settled issue in Canada for a quarter-century. That said, the current consensus is by no means unanimous and never will be. Many who oppose the status quo will continue to agitate for change, as they did in their annual demonstration on Parliament Hill last week.

2.       The pro-life camp has attracted scant attention until now. The difference this time is that they understandably believe they have an ally in Prime Minister Stephen Harper and he will heed their cries for help. This may be a vain hope, given the legal and political obstacles,

3.       but it is a hope based on Prime Minister’s own words and actions.

4.       Pro-lifers want to revert to the status quo ante, a time when police arrested doctors who carried out safe, therapeutic abortions and put them on trial—until they found that juries would not convict them.

5.       Then the Supreme Court struck down those anti-abortion laws….

Stop here. Now go back to Line 1: “Abortion has been a settled issue for a quarter century.” False. In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled the existing law, i.e., the 1969 Trudeau-Turner law which made abortion legal under certain conditions, was applied unequally and, therefore fell afoul of the new (1982) Charter of Rights. It declared that law unconstitutional and told Parliament to try again. As it is, there never was a settlement, only a vacuum.

Line 2: “The pro-life camp has attracted scant attention until now.” Well hello! This is true for The Star which has held its journalistic eyes firmly closed for years. It only noticed the 2010 March for Life because it had been frightened by other events. Until this month, it and most other newspapers in Canada had refused to publish a single word about the previous twelve annual Marches. We will come back to these “other events” shortly.

Line 3: [This new pro-life] “hope is based on the Prime Minister’s own words.”  What? The editorialist quotes these words himself in closing: “This government is not going to re-open or permit anyone to re-open the debate on abortion.” And the Star thinks we’ll be relying on Mr. Harper to put an end to the assaults on the unborn in coming years. Come now!

Line 4: “Pro-lifers want to revert to…a time when police arrested doctors who carried out safe therapeutic abortions.”  What time would that be? Oh, the Star is referring to Henry Morgentaler, the Jewish atheist Marxist who said “the law is an ass” at a time when the law forbade abortions, i.e., before the federal and, later, provincial laws were changed. This present multi-millionaire spent a few months in a nursing home for the elderly for his killing spree.

Please, note the word so favoured by the media: “safe, therapeutic abortions.” Science tells us that abortion always leads to the killing of a baby and are never “therapeutic” (healing) for the mother, physically or mentally. Falsehood four.

Finally, Line 5 “Then the Supreme struck down these anti-abortion laws.” Really! The law that was struck down was the 1969 law which for the first time in Canada’s history, permitted abortions, in fact, made them legal and as many thought, therefore moral. Falsehood five.

Who could have possibly written this editorial? Could it have been the wife of Stephen Lewis, feminist Michelle Landsberg, for 20 years the Toronto Star’s favourite columnist and attack-dog frequently let loose on the pro-lifers. She had a way with words but usually got her interpretations of the facts wrong.

Now let us ask: What events frightened the Toronto Star into taking note of the 2010 March for Life on Parliament Hill and giving it grandiose coverage, followed by an editorial in which it claims the Prime Minister is re-igniting the abortion issue?

First, note that the Toronto Star’s panic is self-induced, brought about by the shenanigans of its own partisans and their insufferable pride.

Recall that the controversy began with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s common sense announcement on January 27, 2010 that his government would try to get his fellow G-8 members to help poor families overseas with concrete maternal health measures: water, food, medicine. Simple and straightforward. However, this was followed by an outcry from the Liberals and their media allies, demanding that Harper promote abortion. Harper said no, he would not do so.

Thereafter the partisans were “shocked” when the Prime Minister did not even seem interested in family planning, i.e., meeting medical needs and slaking hunger and thirst with contraception and condoms. By mid- March, The Star and Globe, CBC and CTV, were hysterical with anger (See C.I., April 2010, p. 25). (Canada did however send 100,000 condoms to Haiti to “help” the earthquake survivors!)

Next came the Ignatieff Liberal Party debacle, with second-in-command Toronto MP Bob Rae engineering a votable pro-abortion motion for foreign policy in the House of Commons. By a vote of 144 to 138 on March 23, Parliament rejected abortion in foreign aid.

The March 31, 2010, visit of Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State, gave the Star new hope, but it did not help. Canadians resented her scolding their Prime Minister for not including abortion in his G-8 maternity health plan. Follow-up visits by G-8 ministers in Halifax in April and of the United Nations’ General-secretary in Ottawa showed no interest in the issue, all facing political and economic woes of their own.

Cutting 40 years of Liberal Party subsidies

            The partisan media then concentrated on raising the ire of Canadians against the Harper government for quietly cutting off the subsidies for foreign aid to abortion, contraception, and condoms bestowed on Canada’s anti-life NGO’s (non-government organizations) by the previous Liberal governments of Trudeau, Chrétien and Martin. These subsidies were massive, involving dozens of groups financed via CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) or directly, such as IPPF (Canadian International Planned Parenthood Federation) and Marie Stopes International, the world’s two leading abortion providers. This year alone, IPPF of London, England, had expected $18 million from Canada. In previous years they had received larger grants.

            Several doctoral theses could be written examining the financial largesse from the taxpayers’ purse handed out by the Liberals year after year to both Canadian home-based feminists and so-called foreign “aid” groups, practically all of them contemptuous of traditional values and Conservatism.

More bad news

            It must have seemed to the Toronto Star that everything was going wrong. Francine Lalonde’s pro-euthanasia bill, supported by her party’s leader, atheist and Marxist Gilles Duceppe and his Bloc Quebecois with 52 seats in the House, was crushed with a four to one vote on April 21. (Will medical doctors already intent on practising euthanasia stop doing them or, like Morgentaler, consider the law “an ass”?)

            Then came news about “Gay Pride” Parade of Toronto, the Toronto Star’s own annual entertainment event of the year for which it prepares announcements months ahead. Again, the Harper government acted “rudely,” flatly rejecting the request for $600,000 and, most likely doing the same elsewhere. Platinum sponsors like the University of Toronto with its “academic diversity” courses on the homosexual lifestyle would have to hand over bigger grants. But, no doubt, Ontario’s Liberal regime will make up the difference to the event; it loves the vulgar, the obscene, the ugly.

            Finally, journalist Marci McDonald’s new book The Armageddon Factor: The rise of Christian Nationalism threw more fuel on the fire set by the partisans, attempting to convince them that the evil American “Christian” right was about to close in on Canada. It hit the streets the week of the March for Life, just in time to crank up the panic on the Left.

            Anyone, however, who had seen the laughter, happiness, and gaiety of the March for Life folks would have realized the folly of associating them with the Canadian Left’s picture of “sour faced,” “gun totting,” “bullying,” “fundamentalist” ogres so popular in Canada’s media. Many newspapers carried reviews as if it were the reality in Canada.

Who is right?

            The Toronto Star did not even let up after the March on Parliament Hill. On Monday, May 17, it brought two more articles by its team of pro-abortion female journalists: Chantal Hebert’s “PM navigating abortion minefield” and Rosie Di Manno’s “The A-word roars in PM’s ears.” Di Manno’s piece was full of nonsense, such as “distinguishing” between a three-month fetus (kill it) and seven-month-old fetus (let it live). Hebert’s article, however, did what Catholic Insight is doing in this article. She asked: who actually started this sudden reversal of solemn media silence to full publicity? Hebert was not certain.

            We think it was the pro-abortionists who started it. After killing four million Canadian babies through surgical abortions, their bad conscience does not give them rest: they want more and more of the same.

            The real reckoning is still a few years off, when Canada’s economy collapses with a declining population. But the pro-abortionists won’t be around. Rejecting both families and children they will have phased themselves out of existence.