TORONTO - More than 20,000 pamphlets were dropped in mailboxes at homes across Ontario as part of the “De-Fund Abortion Pamphleting Blitz” on Jan. 14.

The aim was to raise awareness among taxpayers that their tax dollars are providing abortion services in the province.

“It works at the grassroots level to spread awareness about… abortion funding to motivate and activate the everyday person to contact their MPP,” said Alissa Golob, youth co-ordinator at Campaign Life Coalition, who ran the event.

Edmonton - Alberta’s newest member of the Canadian Senate is a board member of the Western Catholic Reporter and a long-time leader in St. Joseph’s Basilica parish.

Betty Unger, named to the Senate Jan. 6 by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has served as chair of the WCR board and is currently in her seventh year as a board member. Unger has also been the chair of the parish pastoral council at the basilica parish and currently serves on its finance and administration, and human resources committees. She is also a member of the parish Catholic Women’s League and a Sunday lector.

Edmonton - In the eyes of Fr. Jack Gallagher, sociologists have proven Catholic teaching on sexuality and marriage right.

“Study after study” shows that the ideal place for children to be raised is with their two birth parents, said Gallagher.

“It’s astounding to me that the empirical evidence is so clear,” he said. “I thought there would be general evidence in favour of the Catholic teaching. On point after point, the sociologists have simply proven it true.”

CALGARY - Young pro-lifers from Calgary are petitioning the Alberta government to bring a halt to provincial funding for abortions.

The campaign to Defund Abortion in Alberta is a grassroots initiative started by university and college students, mostly from Calgary, seeking to eliminate public funding for abortion and to support conscience rights for taxpayers.

“A defunding campaign will also focus on uniting Albertans who often disagree about tactics in the abortion debate, but who would generally agree that tax dollars should not fund abortions,” said Amanda Achtman, a University of Calgary student active in the group.

While official, political debate over plans to put an outdoor recycling yard across from Canada’s national shrine has been delayed until Feb. 1, ongoing discussions among lawyers may lead to a new home for the industrial facility before the end of this month.

Midland, Ont., Mayor Gord McKay told The Catholic Register he believed lawyers for the Jesuits, Recycling Specialties Inc. and the Town of Midland may be able to find an agreement on how to get out of plans to recycle metal, wood, cardboard, plastics and other materials on the banks of the Wye River within sight and earshot of pilgrims to Martyrs’ Shrine.

“All three parties are talking to one another through their lawyers. There’s something happening there,” said McKay. “It’s one of those things where if we’re not coming to meetings I think good things are happening.”

OTTAWA - Dan McTeague, one of about a dozen staunchly pro-life Liberals who lost their seats in the May 2011 federal election, looks forward to the revitalization of the once powerful Liberal Party.

As one of more than 3,100 delegates at the Liberal Biennial Convention here Jan. 13-15, McTeague said he hoped the party will be able to reach out to all Canadians, including the Catholic and ethnic voters who were the former pillars of party support.

Political scientists have credited the Liberal defeats in 2006 and 2008 to a growing collapse of Catholic and ethnic voter support. Last May, the Liberals were demoted to third party status behind the NDP and the governing Conservatives. The Liberals elected only 34 MPs, though their numbers have grown by one with the recent defection of a Quebec NDP MP to the Liberal ranks.

Canadian religious leaders and interfaith coalitions banded together before the Nov. 28 to Dec. 9 United Nations climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, to urge Ottawa to take substantial steps toward a new international agreement to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocols. Almost alone among Canada’s major church and faith bodies, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops refused to sign the “Canadian Interfaith Call for Leadership and Action on Climate Change.”

The Congregation of St. Joseph signed, along with many other Catholic religious orders and a broad swath of Canada’s Christian bodies. Major Muslim, Hindu and interfaith coalitions also signed onto the two-page statement.

EDMONTON - Catholics from Edmonton are elated to learn their former archbishop has been elevated to the College of Cardinals.

The announcement that Archbishop Thomas Collins, now archbishop of Toronto, will be a cardinal was made at the Vatican Jan. 6.

After serving as archbishop in St. Paul, Alta., Collins was the archbishop in Edmonton from June 1999 to January 2007.

OTTAWA - Though the Prime Minister has repeatedly said his government will not allow the abortion debate to reopen, an Ontario Conservative MP said he is not worried about the risk as he contemplates bringing forth a private members’ bill on the matter.

“I’m pretty comfortable as a Member of Parliament raising this issue, because it is an issue with such human rights implications,” said Stephen Woodworth of Kitchener, Ont. “It should be everyone’s priorities to ensure that any law that involves fundamental human rights is informed by modern, medically accurate evidence, not some 400-year-old arbitrary legal argument.”

KITCHENER, ONT. - The new year meant a new beginning for a group of Anglicans from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.

On Jan. 1, 12 individuals from that area were received as a community into full communion in the Roman Catholic Church during an Anglican Use-rite Mass at the Cathedral of Christ the King in Hamilton. The liturgy was presided over by Bishop Douglas Crosby and celebrated by their former priest-mentor, now chaplain, Fr. William Foote. The group made a profession of faith and received the sacraments of Confirmation and the Eucharist.

Now known as the Sodality of St. Edmund, King and Martyr, under the oversight of the diocese of Hamilton initially, they become the second community of Canadian Anglicans to be so received, following St. John the Evangelist in Calgary, which entered the Church on Dec. 18.