News/Canada

TORONTO - The United States human rights record and its war on terror are on trial in a Federal Court in Toronto. The Canadian Council of Churches, Amnesty International, the Canadian Council for Refugees and an anonymous Colombian in a Nebraska jail are trying to persuade a judge to suspend Canadian co-operation with the United States on handling of refugees.

TORONTO - How a community teaches a man to fish is the question Michael Polanyi wants churchgoers and low-income people to start discussing.

OTTAWA - A prominent Canadian public intellectual has set off alarm bells for suggesting the Catholic Church and other religions that don’t comply with so-called Canadian values should lose their charitable tax status.

The financial challenge in front of Canada's Catholic development agency runs deeper than money. The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace is asking whether Catholics really believe in what the 40-year-old agency does.

OTTAWA - The new Liberal leader Stéphane Dion gets mixed reviews from Catholic observers who like his stress on a sustainable environment and social justice but raise concerns about his highly individualistic notion of rights. That approach could mean clashes down the road with group rights, especially those of families, religions and nationalities, they say.

TORONTO - Almost $3 million worth of fake receipts for fictional donations to 39 Toronto-area Catholic parishes has landed a Markham, Ont., woman in court.

The federal government can't say when Canadians will get to know whether the prison uniforms it buys are sewn by prison labourers in Myanmar, or whether Canadian army boots are manufactured using child labour.

TORONTO - Canadians are the third most generous people in the industrialized world, but only half as generous as Americans.

A spate of recent statistical reports on Canadian philanthropy draws a picture of a nation that opens its wallet, but not too wide.

OTTAWA - The Ontario Court of Appeal has recognized three parents in the case of a child being raised by a lesbian couple and has accorded equal rights and obligations to the lesbian partner in addition to the child's biological mother and father.

OTTAWA - The president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops has written Prime Minister Stephen Harper, raising a number of concerns in the wake of a failed motion to restore the traditional definition of marriage.