OTTAWA – Ontario doctors who are suing the Ontario physicians’ college over conscience rights received good news Nov. 8 when the province of Ontario dropped its intervention on behalf of the college.

News that Ontario’s provincial government had disbanded its roundtable of experts on violence against women has Catholic Family Services woman abuse specialist Shereen McFarlane worried.

Do you have capacity?

Catholic schools in Vancouver have come to Toronto shopping for young, ambitious and faithful Catholic teachers who want to trade supply teaching assignments for a permanent contract and a classroom of their own. 

It isn’t just polls that show more than half of Ontarians wish there were no publicly funded Catholic schools. 

In 1989 Ontario’s Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter, “This Moment of Promise,” in the wake of legislation to fully fund the province’s Catholic school system. The document set the groundwork for Catholic education in a new era and was followed in 1993 by a pastoral letter titled “Fulfilling the Promise.” Now, 31 years after the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the constitutional legitimacy of full funding of Catholic education, the bishops have issued a third pastoral letter.

A petition demanding conscience rights for doctors who oppose assisted suicide is the first move in a multi-pronged strategy to persuade Ontario’s new government to enshrine such rights in law.

It’s probably a safe bet that Ontario’s new premier has never read Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Church’s teaching on marriage, parenthood, procreation and contraception. 

OTTAWA – The repeal of Ontario’s controversial sex education curriculum by the new government has elicited reactions ranging from jubilation to gloom among Catholic education stakeholders.

A sampling of recent media indicates voices are again ramping up their call for one school system in Ontario or, in short, for the abolishment of Catholic schools. 

Coming to a location near you: OCS, the Ontario government’s latest retail venture, set to open its doors later this year.

An Ontario campaign to pressure politicians over the protection of health care conscience rights is “democracy in action,” said an organizer.

OTTAWA – Two student pro-life clubs and a men’s issues association are considering whether to appeal a Feb. 26 court decision that upheld the right of student unions to deny organizations official club status on campus.



Mary Isabel Dool was never going to concede that only her brothers could have a vocation.

When 500 counter-protesters shouted down between 30 and 40 anti-Islam activists in front of City Hall in London, Ont., on Aug. 26, Fr. Michael Bechard proudly stood with the majority wearing a dark suit with a Roman collar.