Doug Koop of Christian Week interviews President Michael Van Pelt on education and cultural change:HAMILTON, ON—Michael Van Pelt has yet to celebrate his 40th birthday, but he’s keen to involve younger people in meaningful work. As president of the Work Research Foundation (WRF), an economic think tank based in Hamilton, he issued a press release celebrating three of his junior staff members who recently graduated from nearby Redeemer University College.“I would love to identify more solid, bright young people who have completed university and give them opportunities to become active in the public square,” he says. “My generation is a facilitator generation; the next one will be a much stronger influencer. They are very capable of promoting Christian views in sophisticated and credible ways.”The Redeemer grads helped the WRF relate with donors, develop its website (www.wrf.ca) and promote its “To Change the World” project featuring University of Virginia professor James Davison Hunter. “We look forward to developing this kind of partnership with institutions of higher education across Canada,” says Van Pelt.Although he earned his degree (history) at McMaster University, Van Pelt attended Christian schools, including Redeemer (“which profoundly influenced my thinking”) and considers himself “a product of Christian education.”He believes that the best leaders will be those who are deeply familiar with the Bible and the way Christianity has developed its significant impact on human civilization, an education typically best delivered by institutions like Redeemer (“or Regent College or Trinity Western University or any of a number of others”).This kind of education is foundational, insists Van Pelt. “Someone who is solidly versed in the tenets of the Christian religion, and is well-read in the interaction of Christian religion throughout history, is able to grasp onto things quickly and not be easily swayed by fads and trends.”With these basics in place they can more easily pick up the specialized knowledge their particular jobs might demand and understand it in its context, he says. They are better equipped to understand consequences of ideas and to apply knowledge in practical ways.While Van Pelt admires and seeks to encourage “top-of-the-line academics,” he has gained much of his own education in the business world. He says he learned a tremendous amount while working as a district manager for the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses in the late 1980s and 1990s.“I interviewed CEOs and leaders of small businesses—thousands of them—and because of the credibility of the organization I worked with, I got to talk to incredible people who opened up to me. I could get in the door of a couple of CEOs a day and get their sense of policy and business.“At the time I didn’t realize the generalist education I was getting, but entrepreneurs are intrinsically interesting.”He later became general manager of the Sarnia Chamber of Commerce. This meant working with many big corporations, adding larger corporate considerations to the repertoire of small business concerns in which he was already well versed.Van Pelt sees in these kinds of business groups—as well as in institutions like family and church—the seedbed of sound social development, the environment where “civic social entrepreneurs” can prosper.“The Chamber of Commerce is one of the business institutions that with the benefit of a 100-year history has the ability to influence national, provincial and municipal policy. I’m not sure how many people realize that. It’s seen as a service and lobby organization, a networking facility, but it’s way bigger than that for influence and impact at all kinds of levels.”All of which is good training for Van Pelt’s current role at WRF, where he manages a Christian organization—an economic and public policy think tank—that strives to integrate constructive ideas from the academic worlds on the front lines of civic and social application.He is dedicated to equipping able practitioners with ideas developed through rigorous thinking in order to stimulate effective action that produces social good. The job, he explains, is to seek and discover “civic social entrepreneurs” who are soundly based—or, in other words, innovative and creative Christians with an ability to apply their faith to work and public life in wholesome, authentic and eminently practical ways.“I have to understand the public policy world and also how to communicate to the public square,” he explains. “I often need to ‘travel with’ brilliant academics to lend more weight to their ideas. A think tank represents intellectual capital, but I’m only a small part of that. I take a small part of an idea and try to increase its weight on the front line.“I see brilliant people with a lot to offer, and try to broaden the context of those brilliant people and their ideas,” says Van Pelt.He envisions an important ongoing role for the church in the renewal of society—as the seedbed of the kind of “creative class” required to reverse economic and social decay. “Many churches are dying, but where you see emerging, lively churches growing, you will also find the seeds of good development in urban planning,” he says.These kinds of ideas must be passed along in an endless variety of innovative and creative ways. Van Pelt says he would love to see more leaders in organizations intentionally taking time to mentor “bright young talent who are solid in their understanding of Christian things and thoroughly committed to it.”And he is quick to point out that even the savviest formal training available is useless if it isn’t tested and applied in everyday environments.“Real education happens among family and among peers as well,” he says. “If that informal side is missing, there’s a good chance those players will not be leading. They are not likely to find their place in future leadership if they’re not seriously testing their ideas with their peers and the culture around them.”

Over the past five years, the value of Canadian exports to the United States averaged $338.2-billion per year, while U.S. exports to Canada were $291.3-billion, making total export trade between the two countries roughly $1.7-billion per day. More than 26% of U.S. exports went to Canada, and more than 80% of Canadian exports went to the U.S. As the late Social Credit leader Robert Thompson famously put it, "The Americans are our best friends . . . whether we like it or not."Canada's challenge is to maintain and expand the infrastructure necessary to keeping itself accessible to the world and, especially, the U.S. In its 2004 Throne Speech, the Government of Canada noted that "Canada has always been a trading nation, but never more so than today. It is vital that we secure and enhance our access to markets, both in North America and the world."The Canada-U.S. trading relationship is by far the largest in the world. To understand its nature, it helps to understand "trade corridors." These are streams of products, services and information moving through communities in geographic patterns according to a "culture" of trade agreements and treaties, statutes and delegated legislation that guide trading relationships, institutions and structures.Trade-corridor language recognizes that Canada's trade with the U.S. is regionalized, whether it be auto manufacturing, wood products, energy or services. The auto industry is concentrated principally in the Great Lakes region. A dynamic trade corridor has been constructed over the past 100 years to move steel, auto parts, assemblage, and finished products back and forth across the Canada-U.S. border in that region. The physical infrastructure of highways, rail, and the seaway; the legal infrastructure; "just in time" supply agreements; telecommunications; banking services; union contracts; customs and duty and "Smart Border" arrangements; and a host of other particulars constitute what we could call the Great Lakes trade corridor that makes the North American auto industry “go."Competition for trade can be framed in terms of trade corridors. Europe is now pouring money into the construction project known as the Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia. With 100,000 kilometres of road, TRACECA hopes to boost volumes in this trans-Eurasian corridor from 1.9 million tonnes in 1997 to 34 million tonnes by 2010.Similarly, Asian nations are planning an Asian Highway network, AH 1, also known as "the New Silk Road. " This network will span some 140,000 kilometres of road stretching across Asia to Europe.Although Canada and the U. S. possess a trading relationship second to none in the world, we cannot take it for granted, at risk of being left behind.Here are the next steps that Canada and the U.S. should consider:- Recognize the integrated, Canada-U.S. trade economy is organized on trade corridors -- half a dozen, more or less -- that generally follow natural, regional geography. Infrastructure decisions must support this reality.- Map Canada-U. S. trade corridors. This requires an enormous interdisciplinary commitment to co-ordinate data, project trade flows, anticipate infrastructure demands, and interface regulatory and government jurisdictions.- Commit resources -- financial and otherwise -- to building public infrastructure needed to move trade through trade corridors. Simply put, get on with public-private partnerships that will supply the investment needed, enact statutory and regulatory regimes, and hammer out bilateral agreements.- Encourage the culture of trade. Anti-Americanism is at its least helpful when it proposes to bite the hand that helps feed millions of Canadians. The Americans are Canadians' most important trading partners, and vice versa. When we need to, we can surely disagree without being disagreeable.On April 25, House Leader Tony Valeri will chair a landmark roundtable meeting of government officials, industry and business leaders, and thinkers from Canada's leading "think-tanks" with a view to moving forward with trade corridors to further Canada-U.S. trade.At the beginning of the 19th century, the U.S. was little more than a trade backwater to trade and commerce that centred in Europe and connected with the Caribbean basin. At the beginning of the 20th century, Canada was likewise a backwater to the great transatlantic commerce between Europe and the U.S. eastern seaboard.Today, these two former backwaters are international trading powerhouses, sitting between the two great trading blocs of Europe and Asia. Whether Canada and the U.S. are more than a geographic centre of trade in the 21st century and beyond is up to us.Financial Post  Michael Van Pelt is president of the Work Research Foundation and chair of the Trade Corridors Partnership.

The other evening in Montreal, my friend Russ (an American) and I watched the second of the US Presidential Debates. If there was any doubt about which was the candidate to avoid, this debate made the matter clear for me. I would no more vote for John Kerry than mate with a goat. Here is why. If there is one thing that the contemporary age has done that deserves our deepest contempt it is this—to try and accord "respect" to someone else's "feelings." Years ago on the trendy left coast Island my family and I then inhabited, my wife shocked an assembly of mothers by telling one of our small-fry, who had come to her crying about some playground unfairness and complaining about somebody "hurting my feelings", by saying "I don't care about your feelings alone . . . . . . what happened?" My wife, being well educated (in Scotland) was taught how to think about such things as "feelings" and they did not count beside such things as "facts." Unfortunately, in the contemporary argot, "feelings" are, all too often, a stand-in for thought and so we can distance ourselves from substantive propositions by raising the flag of feelings up our personal identity flag posts. My wife and I have refused to be co-opted into this horrific form of unreality speak. It is not so, unfortunately, in the culture—in our Western cultures as a whole. That is where Kerry comes in. Twice during the debate, Senator Kerry was asked questions that came from what could be called a "pro-life" perspective (those who fear such language might substitute the meaningless language of "choice" and say such people were "anti-choice" if it makes them feel better). On both occasions Kerry responded with what his "handlers" had well scripted him to do: he said "First, let me say how much I respect the FEELINGS of the questioner. . ." then he went on to offer some ridiculous non-answer to the point being made. My concern is not with the non-answer as such (though that is also a bad thing) but with the supposed "respect for feelings." How can someone respect the "feelings" of a person who believes that an unborn human being should be accorded the sanctity of life and then use law and politics to kill the innocent? What has such a disagreement to do with "feelings" at all? Kerry and those who discuss like this have not got past the playground "wah, wah, wah" of human disagreements. To focus on "feelings" and ignore the debate itself is what Kerry and his kind are doing. I'd rather they hurt my feelings on such matters but dealt with the arguments. Nowadays it is the failure to deal with the arguments that poses the greatest threat to the most important subjects of the day (whether it be abortion or the nature of marriage). Is someone who uses the "feelings" arguments to avoid the real arguments a person we should trust with the most powerful political office in the world? If you say you "respect my feelings" then murder my mother, I can call you a liar and a bad man. On this reading Kerry is a bad man. If you say you "respect my feelings" and then dash the heads of my children against rocks, you have both a strange conception of feelings and children. Kerry is such a person. In all his Frankensteinian (he can't blame his looks but, my goodness, the man only lacks neck bolts to make him the perfect nightmare) smoothness, Kerry is a chilling representative of the false logic of the day. None of this, it should be noted, means that I like the alternative either—I hold no brief for "W" but I must say, that on the questions he did not stoop to "respecting feelings" whilst trashing the logic of argument. It is a tough choice the Americans face but for my money I would never vote for a Feelingstein like Kerry. Now where is that goat?

“Africa makes a mockery of what we say, at least what I say, about equality and questions our pieties and our commitments because there’s no way to look at what’s happening over there and it’s effect on all of us and conclude that we actually consider Africans as our equals before God. There is no chance.”–Bono of U2, Commencement Address at the University of Pennsylvania, May 17, 2004. ARRIVED in Canada on January 1, 1998, having flown as far from Johannesburg in South Africa as it is possible to fly before turning back around the curve of the globe. I came to Canada because I was broken and needed a break, but the way in which I was broken were as nothing compared to those that I had spoken on behalf of others in the previous two years.I had worked for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by a saint with the foibles of a saint, Desmond Tutu. The Arch, as we all called him, would hug us as we came out of our booths at the end of the day, and once, in a red-dirt town where an angry mob danced their vengeful anguish, surging hurricane-like around the hall in which the hearings were being held, he prayed through the noon hour in my booth, seeking and finding guidance to bring peace – or at least calm – to the situation. My job was not a lofty one; I was not a commissioner or a lawyer or an investigator; I was a simultaneous interpreter.We interpreters were a small but dedicated crew. We bounced three or four languages among one another to enable an audience to hear the testimony of a survivor or a perpetrator of gross human rights violations – abduction, torture, murder – in their own language within two to four seconds after it was spoken in the language of the witness or applicant for amnesty. Many of us drank hard; some of us found harder ways of numbing the pain and horror we spoke every day. For me the worst was the phone calls late at night between me in my hotel room and my young wife at home, when, exhausted – she after a day in the valley of the shadow of the diapers and I after a day of a woman telling of relentless violation or a man telling of testicles and bare electric wire or a mother telling of the sweaters of her infants scarlet with gunshot or a father telling of finding only a scrap of skin after three days of looking in the place where a mine shredded his son – we would curse and slam down the phone, too tired to listen and too worn out to care.When I came to Canada I thought I would be going back. Soon. Maybe after four or five years, with another academic degree certifying me for the ministry of word and sacrament in my home church. Eighteen months later the strange configuration of calling and debt moved me into the work I do now with delight and an assurance that it is what I should be doing. Africa faded, slowly. Asked some months later if I would not help found a leadership school back in South Africa, I collapsed into a profound vocational crisis – perhaps the most profound yet. What are my duties to Africa? Should I abandon the work I do here in North America – holy work, as far as I can tell – and turn to the cries of the beloved country? Should I return with my wife and young daughters to a country that at the time had the highest incidence of rape as reported to the police of any Interpol member country?My Africa problem is not whether there is something wrong with Africa, or whether something should be done about it if there is. Both reliable research and my own direct experience assures me that something is indeed very wrong with Africa, and I have no doubt that something should be done about it. My problem has to do with what should be done, and by whom. More particularly, what is my own personal responsibility toward Africa, and how does that responsibility weigh up against my other responsibilities?I grew up in an all-white residential neighbourhood where I was told during my childhood that black people could only live in the outbuildings if they had an employment document as a house servant or a gardener, and that a sunset to sunrise curfew for black people kept our streets safe. I was told that people in my neighbourhood enjoyed a quality of life unequaled in the world, except perhaps in Sweden. Health care was excellent by the standards of the time. The streets were paved, and regular watering kept the parks green and filled with flowers, even though our city was on the edge of an arid semi-desert. Schools did a fairly good job, and music lessons – if you wanted them – were virtually free, because they were offered as a normal, albeit optional, part of the education system. (I learned to play the viola, poorly.)In my teens, after my cataclysmic conversion to biblical Christianity (as distinct from the racist pseudo-Christian heresy of my childhood and the Buddhism Lite of my early teens), I became involved with an avowedly apolitical youth evangelism group in my home town that for all its intended denial of politics nonetheless had an enormous political influence on me and my friends. This group was the only inter-racial Christian youth group we could find in the city, and its evangelistic outreaches and youth camps brought me face-to-face with people of my own age who lived in very different circumstances from my own.My black teen friends lived not ten minutes by car from where I lived. Their neighbourhood had no electricity and only cold running water made available at public water taps, each shared by four residential blocks. Their streets were not paved, and night waste was removed by a truck that came by every few days. The schools were poorly supplied with books and hardly supplied with anything else. As one of the architects of this racially based political system – Hendrik Verwoerd – had explained some years before I was born:“When I have control of Native education I will reform it so that Natives will be taught from childhood to realize that equality with Europeans is not for them … People who believe in equality are not desirable teachers for Natives. When my Department controls Native education it will know for what class of higher education a Native is fitted, and whether he will have a chance in life to use his knowledge.” Many of my black friends, but especially their parents, managed to strain considerable dignity and a simple beauty of life out of the sordid circumstances into which they had been pressed. But to my young eyes the inequality between them and us was obvious, and obviously a grave injustice.I remember discovering – with shock that turned into deep conviction – the prophecy of Isaiah 58.“… day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them. … Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for a man to humble himself? … Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?”My friends and I poured ourselves into the resistance against the apartheid regime. Our involvement in that resistance was no great shakes – we were very young, we had no idea what we were doing, and our connections into the existing resistance movements were very weak – but it was enough to get us into tepid water. I was invited to go and discuss my activities with the security police a few times, where it became clear that they had reliable information from one of my good friends, and my parents were reminded by someone or other that my activities might have negative repercussions for their careers. But nothing like the hot water that the black teens in our circle endured: 90-day detentions without trial, beatings with sand-filled nylon-stoking tubes, disappearances, and as we discovered years later, worse.We thought we would spend our lives on resistance against a racist tyranny. We struggled terrifically to understand the connection between our deepest loves (for God, for one another) and our duties as citizens. We read – Ron Sider and John Howard Yoder, at first; later Francis Schaeffer and Bob Goudzwaard; eventually Herman Dooyeweerd, Abraham Kuyper, John Calvin, and Augustine of Hippo. We argued. We prayed. At first we became pacifists and therefore understood our political duties to demand non-violence. I served three and a half years of a six-year community service assignment as a religious objector against military conscription. Later, toward the end of the 1980s, some of us turned to Just War doctrine and tried to figure out an understanding of just resistance against a tyrant. We never got very far theoretically, but we persuaded ourselves that the ever more vigorous violent oppression practiced by the then Botha government demanded from us as Christians armed resistance.We never got around to doing something about that conviction, because just as we stopped being pacifists the new De Klerk government announced that it would release all political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, unban all banned political movements, and begin a process of negotiation towards a Democratic South Africa. That all happened what is now almost half my life ago, but it remains perhaps the most decisive historical event to have a direct impact on my life. Suddenly I had no idea what my life was supposed to be about. If I was not to expend my life in the struggle against apartheid, then into what would I invest myself?I floundered. I wrote an MA dissertation (on “Christian philosophy and the transformation of African culture”) and a PhD thesis (on “The Ethics of Public Welfare”) in an effort to try to figure out what I should do in the aftermath of apartheid. I joined political movements, and with a friend, Mark Manley, I tried to put together a network of evangelical Christians active in post-apartheid South Africa. I worked on language policy and the constitutional rights of language groups with another friend, Theo du Plessis. I worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and I went slightly crazy. But I still had no idea what to do with my life now that I had nothing big and evil and obvious to be against.The first democratic elections of 1994 were astonishing, with the nation teetering at the edge of the abyss of civil war (not white vs. black, but something complex that could be over-simplified into Zulu vs. Xhoza) and then pulling back – a peaceful result partly due to nation-wide prayer, it seemed to many of us. Standing for hours in the long line snaking into a school hall to cast our ballots next to people of all tongues and races was perhaps the highest point in my political life. South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup tournament provoked a surge of shared patriotism that drew the people of the country together into a moment of common celebration the likes of which were not seen before, or since.But post-apartheid South Africa was a disappointment. Along with my other work, I spent a few days every month interpreting for the provincial parliament of what was once known as the Orange Free State province. It was a dismal affair. The plenary sessions were displays of the small-minded mediocrity of the provincial politicians of all parties. The committee sessions were displays of venality and petty power games. A tinge of backlash racism marked the operations of the new provincial government. A friend of mine, the finest development economist in the province and a long-time opponent of apartheid, raised funding internationally for the research and design of an economic development approach in the province, but because he was white the provincial government mocked and ignored the potential of his contribution. Hints of corruption and self-enrichment were everywhere – the new provincial cabinet members drove shiny Mercedes Benzes or BMWs, while the common people sank into ever greater poverty. Many of my most idealistic friends sank, not into poverty, but into a sour and depressed cynicism and pessimism about the future of the beloved country.The political efforts in which I involved myself were bearing little or no fruit. Most Christians involved in politics did not want to think christianly about their political duties, prefering instead a simplistic para-marxism or a vulgar nationalism. Those Christians who were willing to think christianly about their politics tended to fall for a triumphalistic imported version of the politics of the American religious Right – but since their numbers were small, their efforts were ineffectual. Networking Christians who were biblically thoughtful about political life in South Africa in the mid-1990s foundered on the rocks of non-biblical ideology, simplistic biblicism, and a general lack of interest. Increasingly I became persuaded that South African Christians were not ready for political responsibility because we lacked a thoroughly Christian understanding, not just of politics, but of culture in general. The ground in which my friends and I were trying to sow the seeds of Christian political action lacked compost and had not been plowed over. For a Christian politics to flourish in South Africa, Christian political activists needed to take a step back. The soil needed to be tilled, and compost needed to be worked into the fields. The most important political work in South Africa, I came to believe, was that of proclaiming the gospel. The proclamation of the gospel of the creation and redemption of all things in Christ was needed before Christian political action could become viable.With that in mind I began to consider the ministry of Word and sacraments in my home denomination, then the Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa. If a Christian politics in South Africa was for the time being impossible – or at least limited to education – then perhaps my calling was to do the work of preparing Christians for a Christian politics in the generations to come? Perhaps I could preach the Word and serve the sacraments in ways that would help cultivate discernment and conviction with regard to the duties of citizenship, Biblically understood?Things did not turn out that way. I spent 18 months in Vancouver, British Columbia, thinking that I was preparing for the Presbyterian ministry in South Africa. Our family went through its own little post-traumatic stress episode, whacked on top of consumer culture shock of the first degree, ameliorated by living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world (ah, the float planes drifting in over the bay against a gilt and russet sunset) and being embraced by Regent College, which turned out to serve us more as a therapeutic community than as a place of professional advancement. And then I was offered work with the two organizations in which I still find myself following the call of God today. We left Vancouver for Toronto, and with that decided that if we were to return to live and work in Africa, it would be after our children went to college, if ever.But is this the right thing to do? What Would Bono Do? Consider Africa today. While South Africa has not collapsed into failed statehood, as many people feared, it is one of the most criminally violent places in the world. In contrast, the neighbouring Botswana has relatively little crime – but it suffers from one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world. Zimbabwe is governed by a caricature dictator whose comic ridiculousness is rivaled only by his malevolence. Further up, in the Sudan, another genocide looms, perhaps on the same scale as that achieved in Rwanda. Everywhere Africa is plagued by disease, poverty, crime, and political situations that seem to allow a choice only between tyranny and anarchy. And yet this is a continent where people continue to choose the Christian faith over their native paganisms, where churches thrive and grow, where despite an ecstatic strain of piety among the mass of people, church leaders seem to have a bent for sound doctrine. Ever so slowly – as at the outer fringes of the Roman Empire from the fifth century to the twelfth century – Christianity seems to be working itself into the soil of African culture. The Christian transformation of African culture seems likely to be a 500-year project. What can I do to help it along?Writing this meandering memoir has brought me no closer to a personal vocational answer than the nights of prayer and tears of a few years ago. The comfort of my present sense of calling has never been so cozy that it requires an exercise of this kind to be shaken. A few weeks ago I sat next to a philosopher and a new friend, who quietly but passionately asked me, “But how can you be here and not there?” For now my retort is, that is not only my problem. It is ours.

Joe Couto of Christian Week interviews Michael Van Pelt on the challenge of religion and secularism in Canadian public life.TORONTO, ON-Tim Hollaar’s high-powered job as a vice president for the Canadian subsidiary of Australian-owned mining giant WMC Resources Limited sees him engaged in the cutthroat international mining business, where huge profits are made and lost everyday.But as a Christian, Hollaar finds it difficult to act in a "life-changing way” as demanded by his faith.That’s why Hollaar took time out of his schedule, including catching an early flight from Calgary, to take in controversial American sociologist James Davison Hunter’s first ever address to a Canadian audience on June 17 in Toronto.Hollaar said he was attracted by the University of Virginia professor’s unique views on how North American Christians can change culture and hoped for "takeaways” he could use to integrate faith and business.Hollaar was among a diverse group of 100 business people, church leaders and social workers who gathered at the Ontario legislature to hear a view on cultural change that challenges traditional Christian evangelism and outreach methods.While Hunter, department chair and director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, took aim at the "commercial/entertainment” world’s "energetic but superficial” culture, he also confronted "creedal communities,” which he believes have become increasingly marginalized."U.S. evangelical influence on the culture is minimal,” said Hunter. "Many [churches and denominations] are self-aggrandizing institutions-visionless, unsophisticated, naïve and out-of-touch with the world around them.”Fundamental to the church’s failure in influencing our culture is the view about how culture is actually changed. Hunter argued the prevailing view-that by convincing individuals to adopt the "right values” culture will be influenced for the better-is simply wrong.The proof is in the fact that while faith communities have always and continue to dominate North American society numerically, business, law and government have moved steadily toward secularism, said Hunter.He also argued that numerical size is not necessarily a guarantee of influence. For example, America’s homosexual community-at best three per cent of the population-has made extraordinary gains in visibility, legitimacy and legal rights during the past several decades.Instead, Hunter told his audience, cultural change depends not just on changing hearts, but on developing networks that promote change. Furthermore, he argued that "elites” are the ones that drive culture."Such power arises from overlapping networks of leaders and overlapping resources, all operating in the centre of institutions,” he said. "Change happens when elites overlap.”The message seemed to resonate with people such as Paul Weigel, president of the Ontario-based Forerunner radio ministry. "I thought Hunter has a very perceptive and realistic view of the way culture is formed in western society even if it is radically different than most of our current perceptions,” said Weigel."It has been a paradigm shift that has left me trying to adapt all that he said into the many different areas in which we are involved.”Michael Van Pelt, president of the Work Research Foundation, believes Hunter’s challenge to the traditional view of cultural change is needed at a time when public debate about public life has never been greater."We wanted to bring Hunter here to challenge us about public life and the influencing of culture,” said Van Pelt, whose economic think-tank helped organize Hunter’s address.Van Pelt said that by bringing together "diverse leaders with diverse callings,” his organization hopes to inspire Christian leaders from a wide variety of fields to be "change agents challenged to think about influence in every aspect of their lives.”

Annual Hill Lecture Parliament Hill, Ottawa May 13, 2003 I would like to divide my remarks into three parts: First, I shall take a bit of stock of the state of religion and human rights around the globe today, and demonstrate why human rights norms need a human rights culture in order to be effective. Second, I shall argue that religion must be an essential part of any human rights culture, and that the modern human rights movement is harming itself by ignoring religion. Third, I shall argue, in turn, that human rights must be an essential teaching of modern religious traditions, and many modern religious traditions are harming themselves by ignoring human rights.I. Religion and Human Rights Today We turn first to the state of religion and human rights around the world today. Let's let Charles Dickens set the stage: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." Charles Dickens penned these famous words to describe the paradoxes of the eighteenth century French Revolution fought for the rights of man and citizen. These same words aptly describe the paradoxes of the twentieth century world revolution fought in the name of human rights and democratization for all. The world has entered something of a Dickensian era in the past three decades (an Irwin Cotler apt phrase). We have seen the best of human rights protections inscribed on the books, but some of the worst of human rights violations inflicted on the ground. We have celebrated the creation of more than thirty new constitutional democracies since 1973, but lamented the eruption of more than thirty new civil wars. We have witnessed the wisest of democratic statecraft and the most foolish of autocratic belligerence. For every South African spring of hope, there has been a Yugoslavian winter of despair. For every season of peace, another season of war. These Dickensian paradoxes of the modern human rights revolution are particularly striking when viewed in their religious dimensions. On the one hand, the modern human rights revolution has helped to catalyze a great awakening of religion around the globe. In regions newly committed to democracy and human rights, ancient faiths once driven underground by autocratic oppressors, have sprung forth with new vigor. In the former Soviet bloc, for example, numerous Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths have been awakened, alongside a host of exotic goddess, naturalist, and personality cults. In post-colonial and post-revolutionary Africa, these same mainline religious groups have come to flourish in numerous conventional and inculturated forms, alongside a bewildering array of exotic traditional and new groups. One cause and consequence of this great awakening of religion around the globe is that the ambit of religious rights has been substantially expanded. In the past three decades, more than 200 major new international instruments and national constitutional provisions on religious rights have been promulgated—guaranteeing liberty of conscience, religious pluralism and equality, free exercise of religion, non-discrimination on religious grounds, autonomy for religious groups, among other norms. On the other hand, this very same human rights revolution of the world has helped to catalyze new forms of religious and ethnic conflict, oppression, and belligerence, of tragic proportions. In some communities, such as the former Yugoslavia and Chechnya, local religious and ethnic rivals, previously kept at bay by a common oppressor, have converted their new liberties into licenses to renew ancient hostilities, with catastrophic results. In other communities, such as Sudan, Rwanda, and Zaire, ethnic nationalism and religious extremism have conspired to bring violent dislocation and death to hundreds of rival religious believers each year, and to persecution, false imprisonment, forced starvation, and savage abuses of thousands of others. In still other communities, in North America and Western Europe, political secularism and liberal nationalism have combined to threaten a sort of civil denial and deprivation to a number of religious believers, particularly "sects" and "cults" of high religious temperature or of low cultural conformity. In Russia, and parts of Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America, this human rights revolution has brought on something of a new war for souls between indigenous and foreign religious groups. This is the most recent, and the most ironic, chapter in the Dickensian drama. With the political transformations of these regions in the past two decades, foreign religious groups were granted rights to enter these regions for the first time in decades. In the 1990s, they came in increasing numbers to preach their gospels, to offer their services, to convert new souls. Initially, local religious groups welcomed these foreigners. Today, they have come to resent these foreign religions, particularly those from North America and Western Europe who assume a democratic human rights ethic. Local religious groups resent the participation in the marketplace of religious ideas that democracy assumes. They resent the toxic waves of materialism and individualism that democracy inflicts. They resent the massive expansion of religious pluralism that democracy encourages. They resent the extravagant forms of religious speech, press, and assembly that democracy protects. A new war for souls has thus broken out in these regions—a war to reclaim the traditional cultural and moral souls of these new societies and a war to retain adherence and adherents to the indigenous faiths. In part, this is a theological war—as rival religious communities have begun actively to demonize and defame each other and to gather themselves into ever more dogmatic and fundamentalist stands. The ecumenical spirit of the previous decades is giving way to vicious new forms of religious balkanization. In part, this is a legal war—as local religious groups have conspired with their political leaders to adopt statutes and regulations restricting the constitutional rights of their foreign religious rivals. Beneath a shiny constitutional veneer of religious rights and freedom for all, a number of countries have come to develop a legal culture of overt favoritism of some faiths and overt oppression of others. Indeed, much of Eurasia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America seem to be at the dawn of a new era of religious establishments. Exactly the same pattern now threatens to repeat itself anew in Afghanistan and Iraq: American missionaries stand poised to pounce on the new souls suddenly laid open to them. Local Islamic leaders talk boldly of mounting a counter crusade. In these and other current religious and cultural conflicts, human rights are as much the problem, as they are the solution. In the current war for souls in Russia, for example, two absolute principles of human rights have come into direct conflict: the foreign religion's free exercise right to share and expand its faith versus the indigenous religion's liberty of conscience right to be left alone on its own territory. Or, put in Christian theological terms, it is one group's rights to abide by the Great Commission: "Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all nations" versus another group's right to insist on the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have done unto you." Further rights talk alone cannot resolve this dispute. Likewise, many of the nations given to the most belligerent forms of religious nationalism have ratified more of the international human rights instruments than the United States has, and have crafted more elaborate bills of rights than what appears in the Canadian Charter. Here, too, further rights talk alone is insufficient. These paradoxes of the modern human rights revolution underscore an elementary, but essential, point—that human rights norms need a human rights culture to be effective. Declarations are not deeds. A form of words by itself secures nothing. Words pregnant with meaning in one culture may be entirely barren in another. Human rights are not artifacts to be imported wholly formed from abroad; they must be sown and grown in local cultural and constitutional soils and souls. Human rights have little salience in societies that lack constitutional processes that will give them meaning and measure. They have little value for parties who lack basic rights to security, succor, and sanctuary, or who are deprived of basic freedoms of speech, press, or association. They have little pertinence for victims who lack standing in courts and other basic procedural rights to pursue apt remedies. They have little cogency in communities that lack the ethos and ethic to render human rights violations a source of shame and regret, restraint and respect, confession and responsibility, reconciliation and restitution. As we have moved from the first generation of human rights declaration following World War II to the current generation of human rights implementation, this need for a human rights culture has become all the more pressing.II. Religion and Human Rights Not only do human rights norms need a human rights culture to be effective. A human rights culture needs religion to be enduring. And here, we come to the second part of my argument: that religion, in all of its denominational multiplicity, must be given a much active role to place in the modern human rights revolution. Many will consider this thesis to be fundamentally misguided. For even the great Religions of the Book do not speak unequivocally about human rights, and none has amassed an exemplary human rights record over the centuries. Their sacred texts and canons say much more about commandments and obligations than about liberties and rights. Their theologians and jurists have resisted the importation of human rights as much as they have helped in their cultivation. Their internal policies and external advocacy have helped to perpetuate bigotry, chauvinism, and violence as much as they have served to propagate equality, liberty, and fraternity. The blood of thousands is at the doors of our churches, temples, and mosques. The bludgeons of pogroms, crusades, jihads, inquisitions, and ostracisms have been used to devastating effect within and among these faiths. Moreover, the modern cultivation of human rights in the West began in the 1940s when both Christianity and the Enlightenment seemed incapable of delivering on their promises. In the middle of this century, there was no second coming of Christ promised by Christians, no heavenly city of reason promised by enlightened libertarians, no withering away of the state promised by enlightened socialists. Instead, there was world war, gulags, and the Holocaust—a vile and evil fascism and irrationalism to which Christianity and the Enlightenment seemed to have no cogent response or effective deterrent. The modern human rights movement was thus born out of desperation in the aftermath of World War II. It was an attempt to find a world faith to fill a spiritual void. It was an attempt to harvest from the traditions of Christianity and the Enlightenment the rudimentary elements of a new faith and a new law that would unite a badly broken world order. The proud claims of Article I of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—"That all men are born free and equal in rights and dignity [and] are endowed with reason and conscience"—expounded the primitive truths of Christianity and the Enlightenment with little basis in post-War world reality. Freedom and equality were hard to find anywhere. Reason and conscience had just blatantly betrayed themselves in the gulags, battle fields, and death camps. Though desperate in origin, the human rights movement grew precociously in the decades following World War II. Indeed, after the 1950s a veritable "human rights revolution" erupted. In America and Europe, this rights revolution yielded a powerful grassroots civil rights movement and a welter of landmark cases and statutes. In Africa and Latin America, it produced agitation, and eventually revolt, against colonial and autocratic rule. At the international level, the Universal Declaration of 1948 inspired new declarations, covenants, and conventions on more discrete rights, most notably the great 1966 Covenants. Academies throughout the world produced a prodigious new literature urging constant reform and expansion of the human rights regime. Christian, Jewish, and other religious communities participated actively as midwives in the birth of this modern rights revolution, and special religious rights protections were at first actively pursued. Individual religious groups issued bold confessional statements and manifestoes on human rights shortly after World War II. Several denominations and budding ecumenical bodies joined Jewish NGOs in the cultivation of human rights at the international level. The Free Church tradition played a critical role in the civil rights movement in America and beyond, as did the social gospel and Christian democratic movements in Europe and Latin America. After expressing some initial interest, however, leaders of the rights revolution consigned religious groups and their particular religious rights to a low priority. Freedom of speech and press, parity of race and gender, provision of work and welfare captured most of the energy and emoluments of the rights revolution. After the 1960s, academic inquiries and activist interventions into religious rights and their abuses became increasingly intermittent and isolated. New constitutional laws in the United States and Western Europe began to demand that laws and legal arguments be grounded in secular purposes and serve secular ends in order to pass constitutional muster. The rights revolution—both in international law and in domestic law—seemed to be passing religion by. This deprecation of the special role and rights of religions from the mid-1960s onwards has introduced several distortions into the theory and law of human rights. First, without religion, many rights are cut from their roots. The right to religion, Georg Jellinek wrote a century ago, is "the mother of many other rights." For the religious individual, the right to believe leads ineluctably to the rights to assemble, speak, worship, proselytize, educate, parent, travel, or to abstain from the same on the basis of one's beliefs. For the religious association, the right to exist invariably involves rights to corporate property, collective worship, organized charity, parochial education, freedom of press, and autonomy of governance. To ignore religious rights is to overlook the conceptual, if not historical, source of many other individual and associational rights. Second, without religion, the regime of human rights becomes infinitely expandable. The classic faiths of the Book adopt and advocate human rights in order to protect religious duties. A religious individual or association has rights to exist and act not in the abstract but in order to discharge discrete religious duties. Rights and duties properly belong together in most religious traditions. To speak of one without the other is ultimately destructive. Rights without duties to guide them quickly become claims of self-indulgence. Duties without rights to exercise them quickly become sources of deep guilt. Religious traditions, and their particular religious rights claims, provide the best examples of the organic linkage between rights and duties. Without them, rights become abstract, with no obvious limit on their exercise or their expansion. Third, without religion, human rights becomes too captive to Western libertarian ideals. Many religious traditions—whether of Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Reformed, Taoist, or Traditional stock—cannot conceive of, nor accept, a system of rights that excludes religion. Religion is for these traditions inextricably integrated into every facet of life. Religious rights are, for them, an inherent part of rights of speech, press, assembly, and other individual rights as well as ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and similar associational rights. No system of rights that ignores or deprecates this cardinal place of religion can be respected or adopted. Fourth, without religion, the state is given an exaggerated role to play as the guarantor of human rights. The simple state vs. individual dialectic of many modern human rights theories leaves it to the state to protect and provide rights of all sorts. In reality, the state is not, and cannot be, so omnicompetent. Numerous "mediating structures" stand between the state and the individual, religious institutions prominently among them. Religious institutions, among others, play a vital role in the cultivation and realization of rights. They can create the conditions (sometimes the prototypes) for the realization of first generation civil and political rights. They can provide a critical (sometimes the principal) means to meet second generation rights of education, health care, child care, labor organizations, employment, artistic opportunities, among others. They can offer some of the deepest insights into norms of creation, stewardship, and servanthood that lie at the heart of third generation rights. Fifth, without religion, human rights norms have no enduring narratives to ground them. There is, of course, some value in simply declaring human rights norms of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" or "life, liberty, and property"—if for no other reason than to pose an ideal against which a person or community might measure itself, to preserve a normative totem for later generations to make real. But ultimately these abstract human rights ideals of the good life and the good society depend upon the visions and values of human communities and institutions to give them content and coherence, to provide what Jacques Maritain called "the scale of values governing the[ir] exercise and concrete manifestation." It is here that religion must play a vital role. Religion is an ineradicable condition of human lives and human communities. Religions invariably provide many of the sources and "scales of values" by which many persons and communities govern themselves. Religions inevitably help to define the meanings and measures of shame and regret, restraint and respect, responsibility and restitution that a human rights regime presupposes. Religions must thus be seen as indispensable allies in the modern struggle for human rights. To exclude them from the struggle is impossible, indeed catastrophic. To include them—to enlist their unique resources and to protect their unique rights—is vital to enhancing the regime of human rights and to easing some of the worst paradoxes that currently beset it. The challenge of this new century is to transform religious communities from midwives to mothers of human rights—from agents that assist in the birth of rights norms conceived elsewhere to associations that give birth and nurture to their own unique contributions to human rights norms and practices. The ancient teachings and practices of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have much to commend themselves to the human rights regime. Each of these traditions is a religion of revelation, founded on the eternal command to love one God, oneself, and all neighbors. Each tradition recognizes a canonical text as its highest authority—the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur'an. Each tradition designates a class of officials to preserve and propagate its faith, and embraces an expanding body of authoritative interpretations and applications of its canon. Each tradition has a refined legal structure—the Halacha, the canon law, and the Shari'a—that has translated its enduring principles of faith into evolving precepts of works. Each tradition has sought to imbue its religious, ethical, and legal norms into the daily lives of individuals and communities. Each tradition has produced a number of the basic building blocks of a comprehensive theory and law of religious human rights—conscience, dignity, reason, liberty, equality, tolerance, love, openness, responsibility, justice, mercy, righteousness, accountability, covenant, community, among other cardinal concepts. Each tradition has developed its own internal system of legal procedures and structures for the protection of rights, which historically have and still can serve as both prototypes and complements to secular legal systems. Each tradition has its own advocates and prophets, ancient and modern, who have worked to achieve a closer approximation of human rights ideals.III. Human Rights in Religion It is essential, however, that religious communities live up to these ideals. And with this we come to my third argument, that human rights must be given a more prominent place in the theological and ethical discourse and ministry of modern religions. Many would consider this thesis to be as misguided as the thesis I just argued about the necessary role of religion in human rights. It is one thing for religious bodies to accept the freedom and autonomy that a human rights regime allows. This at least gives them unencumbered space to pursue their divine callings. It is quite another thing for religious bodies to import human rights within their own polities and theologies. This exposes them to all manner of unseemly challenges. Human rights norms, religious skeptics argue, unduly challenge the structure of religious bodies. While human rights norms teach liberty and equality, many religious bodies teach authority and hierarchy. While human rights norms encourage pluralism and diversity, many religious bodies require orthodoxy and uniformity. While human rights norms teach freedoms of speech and petition, several religions teach duties of silence and submission. To draw human rights norms into the structures of religion would only seem to embolden members to demand greater access to religious governance, greater freedom from religious discipline, greater latitude in the definition of religious doctrine and liturgy. So why import them? Moreover, human rights norms challenge the spirit of religious bodies. Human rights norms, religious skeptics argue, are the creed of a secular faith born of Enlightenment liberalism, humanism, and rationalism. Human rights advocates regularly describe these norms as our new "civic faith," "our new world religion," "our new global moral language." The French jurist, Karel Vasak, has pressed these sentiments into a full and famous confession of the secular spirit of the modern human rights movement: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights [of 1948]," Vasak wrote, "like the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, has had an immense impact throughout the world. It has been called a modern edition of the New Testament, and the Magna Carta of humanity, and has become a constant source of inspiration for governments, for judges, and for national and international legislators.... By recognizing the Universal Declaration as a living document ... one can proclaim one's faith in the future of mankind.In demonstration of this new faith, Vasak converted the "old trinity" of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" taught by the French Revolution into a "new trinity" of "three generations of rights" for all humanity. The first generation of civil and political rights elaborates the meaning of liberty. The second generation of social, cultural, and economic rights elaborates the meaning of equality. The third generation of solidarity rights to development, peace, health, the environment, and open communication elaborates the meaning of fraternity. Such language has become not only the lingua franca but also something of the lingua sacra of the modern human rights movement. In the face of such an overt confession of secular liberalism, religious skeptics conclude, a religious body would do well to resist the ideas and institutions of human rights. Both these skeptical arguments, however, presuppose that human rights norms constitute a static belief system born of Enlightenment liberalism. But the human rights regime is not static. It is fluid, elastic, open to challenge and change. The human rights regime is not a fundamental belief system. It is a relative system of ideas and ideals that presupposes the existence of fundamental beliefs and values that will constantly shape and reshape it. The human rights regime is not the child of Enlightenment liberalism, nor a ward under its exclusive guardianship. It is the ius gentium of our times, the common law of nations, which a variety of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Christian, and Enlightenment movements have historically nurtured in the West and which today still needs the constant nurture of multiple communities. I use the antique term ius gentium advisedly—to signal the distinctive place of human rights as "middle axioms" in our moral and political discourse. Historically, Western writers spoke of an hierarchy of laws—from natural law (ius naturale), to common law (ius gentium), to positive law (ius civile). The natural law was the set of immutable principles of reason and conscience, which are supreme in authority and divinity and must always prevail in instances of dispute. The positive law was the set of enacted laws and procedures of local political communities, reflecting their immediate policies and procedures. Between these two sets of norms was the ius gentium, the set of principles and customs common to several communities and often the basis for treaties and other diplomatic conventions. The contents of the ius gentium did gradually change over time and across cultures—as new interpretations of the natural law were offered, and as new formulations of the positive law became increasingly conventional. But the ius gentium was a relatively consistent body of principles by which a person and a people could govern themselves. This antique typology helps us to understand the intermediate place of human rights in our hierarchy of legal norms today. Human rights are the ius gentium of our time, the middle axioms of our discourse. They are derived from and dependent upon the transcendent principles that religious traditions (more than any other groups) continue to cultivate. And they inform, and are informed by, shifts in the customs and conventions of sundry state law systems. These human rights norms do gradually change over time: just compare the international human rights instruments of 1948 with those of today. But human rights norms are a relatively stable set of ideals by which a person and community might be guided and judged. This antique typology also helps us to understand the place of human rights within religion. My argument that human rights must have a more prominent place within religions today is not an attempt to import libertarian ideals into their theologies and polities. It is not an attempt to herd Trojan horses into churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples in order to assail secretly their spirit and structure. My argument is, rather, that religious bodies must again assume their traditional patronage and protection of human rights, bringing to this regime their full doctrinal vigor, liturgical healing, and moral suasion. Using our antique typology, religious bodies must again nurture and challenge the middle axioms of the ius gentium with the transcendent principles of the ius naturale. This must not be an effort to monopolize the discourse, nor to establish by positive law a particular religious construction of human rights. Such an effort must be part of a collective discourse of competing understandings of the ius naturale—of competing theological views of the divine and the human, of sin and salvation, of individuality and community—that will serve constantly to inform and reform, to develop and deepen, the human rights ideals now in place. A number of religious traditions, of late, have begun this process of reengaging the regime of human rights, of returning to their traditional roots and routes of nurturing and challenging the human rights regime. This process has been incremental, clumsy, controversial, at times even fatal for its proponents. But the process of religious engagement of human rights is now under way—in Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Traditional communities alike. Something of a new "human rights hermeneutic" is slowly beginning to emerge among modern religions. This is, in part, a "hermeneutic of confession." Given their checkered human rights records over the centuries, religious bodies have begun to acknowledge their departures from the cardinal teachings of peace and love that are the heart of their sacred texts and traditions. Christian churches have taken the lead in this process—from the Second Vatican Council's confession of prior complicity in authoritarianism to the contemporary church's repeated confessions of prior support for apartheid, communism, racism, sexism, fascism, and anti-Semitism. Other communities have also begun this process. This is, in part, a "hermeneutic of suspicion" (in Paul Ricoeur's phrase). Given the pronounced libertarian tone of many recent human rights formulations, a number of religious writers urge that we not idolize or idealize these formulations. We must not be bound by current taxonomies of "three generations of rights" rooted in liberty, equality, and fraternity, several writers argue. Common law formulations of "life, liberty or property," canon law formulations of "natural, ecclesiastical and civil rights," or Protestant formulations of "civil, theological, and pedagogical uses of rights" might well be more apt classification schemes. We must not accept the seemingly infinite expansion of human rights discourse and demands. Rights bounded by moral duties, by natural capacities, or by covenantal relationships might well provide better boundaries to the legitimate expression and extension of rights. This is, in part, a "hermeneutic of history." While acknowledging the fundamental contributions of Enlightenment liberalism to the modern rights regime, a number of religious writers have also pressed us to see the deeper genesis and genius of many modern rights norms in religious texts and traditions that antedate the Enlightenment by centuries, sometimes millennia. They have urged a return to these religious sources. In part, this a return to ancient sacred texts freed from the casuistic accretions of generations of jurists and freed from the cultural trappings of the communities in which these traditions were born. In part, this is a return to slender streams of theological jurisprudence that have not been part of the mainstream of the religious traditions, or have become diluted by too great a commingling with it. In part, this is a return to prophetic voices of dissent, long purged from traditional religious canons, but, in retrospect, prescient of some of the rights roles that the tradition might play today.IV. Final Reflections A number of distinguished commentators have recently encouraged the abandonment of the human rights paradigm altogether—as a tried and tired experiment that is no longer effective, even a fictional faith whose folly has now been fully exposed. Others have bolstered this claim with cultural critiques—that human rights are instruments of neo-colonization which the West uses to impose its values on the rest, even toxic compounds that are exported abroad to breed cultural conflict, social instability, religious warfare and thus dependence on the West. Others have added philosophical critiques—that rights talk is the wrong talk for meaningful debate about deep questions of justice, peace, and the common good. Still others have added theological critiques—that the secular beliefs in individualism, rationalism, and contractarianism inherent to the human rights paradigm cannot be squared with cardinal biblical beliefs in creation, redemption, and covenant. Such criticisms properly soften the overly-bright optimism of some human rights advocates. They properly curb the modern appetite for the limitless expansion and even monopolization of human rights in the quest for toleration, peace, and security. And they properly criticize the libertarian accents that still too often dominate our rights talk today. But such criticisms do not support the conclusion that we must abandon the human rights paradigm altogether—particularly when no viable alternative global forum and no viable alternative universal faith is yet at hand. Instead, these criticisms support the proposition that the religious sources and dimensions of human rights need to be more robustly engaged and extended. Human rights norms are not a transient libertarian invention or an ornamental diplomatic convention. Human rights norms have grown out of millennium-long religious and cultural traditions. They have traditionally provided a forum and focus for subtle and sophisticated philosophical, theological, and political reflections on the common good and our common lives. And they have emerged today as part of the common law of the emerging world order. We should abandon these ancient principles and practices only with trepidation, only with explanation, only with articulation of viable alternatives. To deconstruct human rights, without posing real global alternatives, is to insult the genius and the sacrifice of their many creators. For now, the human rights paradigm must stand—if nothing else as the "null hypothesis." It must be constantly challenged to improve. But it should discarded only on cogent proof of a better global norm and practice. A number of other distinguished commentators have argued that religion can have no place in a modern regime of human rights. Religions might well have been the mothers of human rights in earlier eras, perhaps even the midwives of the modern human rights revolution. But religion has now outlived its utility. Indeed, the continued insistence of special roles and rights for religion is precisely what has introduced the Dickensian paradoxes which now befuddle us. Religion is, by its nature, too expansionistic and monopolistic, too patriarchal and hierarchical, too antithetical to the very ideals of pluralism, toleration, and equality inherent in a human rights regime. Purge religion entirely, this argument concludes, and the human rights paradigm will thrive. This argument proves too much to be practicable. In the course of this century, religion has defied the wistful assumptions of the Western academy that the spread of Enlightenment reason and science would slowly eclipse the sense of the sacred and the sensibility of the superstitious. Religion has also defied the evil assumptions of Nazis, Fascists, and Communists alike that gulags and death camps, iconoclasm and book burnings, propaganda and mind controls would inevitably drive religion into extinction. Yet another great awakening of religion is upon us—now global in its sweep. It is undeniable that religion has been, and still is, a formidable force for both political good and political evil, that it has fostered both benevolence and belligerence, peace and pathos of untold dimensions. But the proper response to religious belligerence and pathos cannot be to deny that religion exists or to dismiss it to the private sphere and sanctuary. The proper response is to castigate the vices and to cultivate the virtues of religion, to confirm those religious teachings and practices that are most conducive to human rights, democracy, and rule of law. T.S. Elliot once wrote that: "Religions run wild must be tamed, for they cannot be long caged." Religion is an ineradicable condition of human lives and communities. Religion will invariably figure in the legal and political life of a community—however forcefully that community seeks to repress or deny its value or validity, however cogently jurists or judges might logically bracket it from their political and legal calculus.In the summer of 1994, Czech President Vaclav Havel was awarded the prestigious Liberty Medal in Philadelphia. After graciously receiving the medal with many kind words, he then offered a stern warning: :Cultural conflicts are increasing and are more dangerous today than at any other time in history. The end of the era of rationalism has been catastrophic, [for now] the members of various tribal cults are at war with one another. . . . The abyss between the rational and the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique constantly grows deeper." There followed a long list of illustrations which left even the most buoyant observer looking nervously over his shoulder.But then, as a good dramatic poet will always do, Havel delivered himself of these words, with which I shall conclude as well: "[T]he only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the Earth and, at the same time, the cosmos. This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits in the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it, and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well."

Conservative Chaos The conservative family in Canada and North America has always been a coalition of many different interests, issues, and ideologies. Conservative leaders dance the fine line brokering these interests while at same time “sticking to the truth” of the conservative tradition. In a sense, the conservative family is always on the verge of chaos. The idea of staying true to your principles has always had a tougher time with compromise and consensus.The political events of the conservative family in Canada are sure to convince us of conservative chaos with a disquiet sense this may not only be chaos but a normal state of affairs to last for some time.Much of the discussion about Canada’s conservative chaos and its possible solutions remains at the political and electoral level—it is about strategy, leadership, first-past-the-post elections, money, media, etc. I don’t discount these discussions. Leadership and strategy can sometimes overpower the deeper and more foundational troubles at the root of this chaos.This evening, I wish to argue that the forces that divide the conservative coalition run far deeper than our present public discussion has posited. Furthermore, I will argue there is a divergence rather than a convergence in the conservative family—chaos is a state of the future, not just the past.My motive for making this argument is to sharpen the debate among fellow conservatives, to give an honest look in the mirror, to challenge us to a different language, and to keep us drinking beer in harmony as we resolve our differences. Finally, I wish to suggest an approach that I believe will hint toward how a diverse conservative community can live together and have an impact on our social and economic order in Canada. It is an idea called sphere sovereignly developed and articulated by Dr. Abraham Kuyper, prime minister of the Netherlands (1901–1905), founder of the Free University, journalist, theologian—a brilliant man of wisdom and political genius. For the purposes of this lecture, I will divide the conservative coalition into three separate groups: the social conservative, the pragmatic conservative, and the libertarian (often referred to as the fiscal conservative). My rationale for this distinction is this: the social conservative and libertarian operate out of defined historic and known worldviews. The pragmatic conservative—of whom there are many—will most often jump onto the latest conservative fad acting from tradition; peer influence; wrong newspaper, personal, and business interests; and sometimes from an intuitive sense that it just makes the most sense to be conservative.Let me broadly introduce the social conservative.John and Alex are good friends in Edmonton. John, his wife, and three children worship at a local evangelical bible church down the road. Alex is a younger Catholic—part of the charismatic renewal in the Catholic church. Twenty years ago during high school, John and Alex hardly new each other—evangelical kids and Catholics didn’t play together much—but now their paths are crossing more and more.The local pro-life or anti-abortion rally is where they first met, discovering the fact that they live only one block over from each other. Over a coffee at Tim’s—although Alex was hoping to have a good dark beer at the local pub—their conversation would hit on at least the following topics: 1. family breakdown in Canada; 2. millions of abortions in Canada; 3. the homosexual agenda; 4. taxes so high mom and dad are both working—government is too big;5. public morality of the younger generation; and 6. church stuff.Both Alex and John are major Focus on the Family fans, and John listens to CCM—Alex has a thing for classical music. The social conservative entry into public life in Canada is only a recent development of the last 25–35 years. Mark Noll, well-known historian at Wheaton College, a prestigious liberal arts university in Wheaton, Illinois, succinctly places this development in historical context. In an effort to chart the development of churches in Canada he writes:By the 1940s, Canada’s “other churches” were beginning to show considerable strength. These included immigrant bodies like the Mennonites, the Dutch Reformed, the Lutheran, the various Orthodox churches, and the Greek Catholics. They included also a host of conservative evangelical groups like the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Plymouth Brethren, the Salvation Army, several Pentecostal bodies, and still others who were able to establish flourishing works in particular locales. Although these groups were establishing a foothold, they were not affecting the broader society as Catholics and the older Protestants had done. For various reasons—ethnicity, language, a passivity-inducing Holiness theology, or a stultifying fixation on biblical prophecy—these “other” Christians have often been content to remain in self-contained social, intellectual, and cultural ghettoes.The dramatic developments and influence of the religious right in the United States has, in part, launched these social conservatives into the political and public arena. However, as my stereotype of John and Alex suggests, this entry into the public life had a narrow and specific focus. Social conservatives’ participation in the political arena has largely been focused on family-related moral issues of great importance. The criticism that social conservatives are single issue/interest groups in the political arena is often true—although sometimes harshly judged. There are two key reasons for this single mindedness.The first is a pragmatic reaction of no one fighting in public life for the protection of the traditional family being attacked by radical feminists and social liberals.William Gairdner notes in a recent essay that in their “effort to repulse the left’s persistent reaching for state power, conservatives have always sought to fortify the many alternative forms of social and moral authority that are natural to human communities.” The second is based on a theology of individual faith and concern with being saved as opposed to a Christian worldview for all spheres of life. This situation has not served publicly active social conservatives well in Canada. As a matter of fact, Dianne Francis, Canada’s conservative goddess, once remarked that social conservatives are not fit to govern and should be prevented from doing so. Others with social conservative tendencies content themselves with other aspects of public life and politics that don’t really have much to do with their personal faith and religion and everything will be okay.So much for the social conservative.Let me introduce the libertarian.The primary principle at work for the libertarian is the freedom of the individual. Period. It’s simple and easy to apply.Brian Lee Crowley, president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, reviews David Boaz’s Libertarianism: A Primer. In a succinct and lightly sarcastic essay, Crowley says: The disappearance of the all-embracing state as a credible alternative unleashed a flowering of thinking about what made the newly attractive liberal-individualism and market-oriented social order work, and how could they be expanded.One of the main currents of thought to emerge from this intellectual ferment is libertarianism, an ugly contrived new word for a powerful set of old ideas. These ideas—individual liberty and responsibility, the rule of law, limited government, robust property rights, and the power of competition to tame potentially dangerous social. . . .[Boaz’s] libertarianism flows from a kind of revealed truth: that each human being has natural rights, that these rights are self-evident, and that people create governments in order to protect their rights. The rights are essentially the right to self-ownership (I, including my body, belong to me and no one else), and the right to live your life as you please as long as you don’t infringe on the equal right of others to do the same.Professor Tom Flanagan, in a Fraser Institue occassional paper entitled “The Uneasy Case for Uniting the Right” (Public Policy Sources, Number 53), more simply defines libertarians as “those who want free markets and individual choice to be the main determinant of public policy” and conservatives as “those who like free markets but are also concerned about the maintenance of traditional morality.”Karen Selick, a lawyer and writer in Belleville, Ontario, and a self-described libertarian, says one of the most important tenets of libertarianism is that the state has no business telling consenting adults what they may or may not do, so long as they are not initiating force or fraud against others. Behaviour that is only self-destructive, but that does not involve the use of force against other people, would probably be considered immoral by many, perhaps even most, libertarians, but would never be made illegal in a libertarian society.So practically, libertarians get real concerned about regulating pornography and television programming, preventing responsible adults getting access to recreational drugs, setting community standards for acceptable art, requiring prayer in the classroom, or the community (family) first idea of some conservatives.They also get antsy about more leftist ideas like redistribution of income, protecting consumers and employees from shady and exploitative practices, and cleaning up the environment.ObservationsOn Leadership The libertarian movement has clearly led the right in Canada—both in the think-tank world and in the political arena.On Human NatureLibertarians are optimistic about the goodness of the individual; social conservatives are more cautious and realistic and sometimes pessimistic.On the Common Enemy The conditions of the last 50 years or so have given reason for the social conservatives and libertarians to join in a long and partly successful battle against the welfare state, state intrusion into all aspects of life, and the sense of a loss of freedom and responsibility.Furthermore, many social conservatives, when it comes to issues beyond family and morality, readily accept the libertarian line of thinking. Some do so for pragmatic purposes—it is the best available line of defense against a social liberal government. Others try to make ideological sense of this merger by calling themselves Christian libertarians.This rally cry against the welfare state is losing steam due to the foggy sense of governments becoming more fiscally responsible, the national debt less on the daily news, and talk of smaller governments.Conservative DivideThis leads me to my argument that the conservative divide will deepen. Libertarians and social conservatives will increasingly find themselves on different sides of issues that have great importance to them. Gairdner, in the following statement, introduces this divide and its possible future:And this is where the confusion begins, as so many who call themselves conservatives today do so simply because they happen to favour free markets. However, it doesn’t take long to see that this sort of conservative usually has very little interest in, and may even openly disdain the natural forms of civil authority. In this respect he is more like a modern liberal or a libertarian. To preserve this distinction, such people sometimes call themselves "fiscal" conservatives to indicate that they will fight for freedom in the economic arena, and they believe all moral and social matters "should be left up to the individual." In other words, along with their modern liberal counterparts they embrace all the ideals of the autonomous, freely-choosing individual, and only part company with liberalism when it favours the broad use of state powers to correct society or to make things artificially equal. Simply put, these conservatives want the state to stay out of all transactions of private life, especially economic ones, and they proudly imagine their "free-market individualism" to be the best argument and defence against state power.Alas, it has turned out to be the worst.So what are some of the frontline examples that evidence this divide?Demographic Libertarians of the younger generation are not shaped and or limited by the Judeo-Christian morality and culture that many of the older libertarians have work, lived, and thought under.Policy Traditional issues like abortion have always divided the conservative coalition; however, the issue was clearly articulated and the battle lines clearly drawn.This is not the case with some more recent policy issues such as biotechnology/genetic engineering. Michael Cromartie, in a conversation with Francis Fukuyama on his latest book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, talks about this issue.[Cromartie] But this is an area, isn't it—because the dangers of runaway biotechnology are so staggering—where there can be real coalitions crossing political lines? It seems that people on the Right and on the Left can agree that certain boundaries ought to be put on certain biotechnological advances.[Fukuyama] That's happening already. I think in the cloning bill you've already seen an alliance of social conservatives and religious conservatives with environmentalists and other kinds of progressivists and certain feminists. On the other hand, there is a fundamental split between libertarian conservatives and people who take religious seriously. Libertarians believe in the complete sovereignty of the individual and individual preferences. There's really no higher moral basis on which an individual's choices can be criticized. This fundamental difference in outlook has been papered over in the existing conservative coalition, but the biotechnology revolution will expose it.Compassionate conservatism and the faith-based initiatives in the United States are another example.Let me quote from the mission statement of the newly formed Center for Compassionate Conservatism.The compassionate conservative movement must be fully equipped to defend the compassion and morality of government policies that show due respect for the individual, civil society, and the marketplace. To that end, the Center for the Study of Compassionate Conservatism works to promote pro-active, people-centered approaches to public policy by providing a forum for compassionate conservative thinkers who recognize a real, but limited, role for government in furthering the common good.By rejecting the reactive anti-governmentalism that has too often characterized the conservative movement in the past, the Center offers a distinct brand of conservatism capable of realizing America's greatness through the goodness of her people. Our attention is focused largely upon developing a positive conservative agenda for issues that often receive insufficient attention within the conservative movement, such as poverty relief, educational reform, universal health care, environmental stewardship, and racial reconciliation.Stephen Goldsmith, a policy adviser to George W. Bush during the presidential campaign, in “What Compassionate Conservatism Is—and Is Not,” says “compassionate conservatism recognizes that we’re not going to become a virtuous and robust community of neighborhoods in this country just by relying on the forces of the marketplace. Instead, prosperity needs to have a purpose as well.”Compassionate conservatism clearly wishes to distinguish itself from the libertarian line of thinking in the conservative movement. Even the school voucher issue—the favoured child of the American right—is now becoming a democratic social justice issue. A growing partner in the school choice lobby are Democrats fighting for educational diversity in inner cities in the Unites States.ReligionThere are winds of change in the social conservative community. Many are frustrated with their lack of success in the political arena and the misunderstanding of their motivations and vision for the public square. Furthermore, many are looking for an intellectual tradition to develop a broader view of active public life that speaks to economic issues, community issues, poverty, water, environment, and technology. Charles Colson, one of the most respected conservative leaders in North America, in his book How Now Shall We Live?, argues for such a vision. He says:Our choices are shaped by what we believe is real and true, right and wrong, good and beautiful. Our choices are shaped by our worldview.The term worldview may sound abstract or philosophical . . . but actually a person’s worldview is intensely practical. It is simply the sum total of our beliefs about the world, the “big picture” that directs our daily decisions and actions. And understanding worldviews is extremely important. . . .Every worldview can be analyzed by the way it answers three basic questions: Where did we come from, and who are we (creation)? What has gone wrong with the world (fall)? And what can we do to fix it (redemption)?My point is that social conservatives over time will develop a more integrated worldview for all aspects of public life. This worldview will result in policy implications that will chart a different course than that of the libertarians. Interestingly, this worldview vision is being rediscovered in the Catholic and Reformed traditions. Evangelicals will increasingly turn to these traditions to find the intellectual tradition to give strength and foundation to a more integrated understanding of public life and of how to properly order society.Furthermore, the social conservative community is placing more emphasis on the practical aspects of building an intellectual tradition for active public life (post-secondary institutions, innovative leadership programs, think-tanks, etc.).Finally, in a global picture, we are increasingly seeing lines of conflict being drawn over differing worldview and religions. I think it would be rather naive to think these developments will not impact Canadian public debate.Strategy and WorldviewTom Flanagan, in “The Uneasy Case for Uniting the Right,” says “there is nothing intrinsically conservative or libertarian about the challenges facing the Canadian right today; they are issues of political party competition and institutional structure, not of ideology per se.” I respectfully suggest that the diverging views of the libertarians and social conservatives do constitute a challenge for the right in Canada, and it is time to have a frank discussion about what they may be and how we deal with them.Sphere Sovereignty   What this evidence boils down to is this. Libertarians in our postmodern world will develop public policy initiatives increasingly outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition heavily committed to the primacy of the individual, while social conservatives will develop a stronger and more integrated worldview more sharply contrasted to other religious and secular worldviews.Quite frankly, I consider this a disturbing picture. It means either the continued reign of a liberal mediocrity—slowly sapping public and private institutions of creativity, innovation, and vision—or a sharper, more hostile public marketplace of convicted and convinced adversaries. The political spectrum provides good context for introducing the idea of sphere sovereignty to this dilemma. The political spectrum has provided us with a useful (but soon to end) language to communicate ideas. Those on the left see the state or government as the overriding institution having authority over all aspects of the social and economic order. Those on the right see the individual as the primary institution in society and all other associations as contracts of individuals. The centre brokers between the government and the individual based on conditions, interests, and other reasons.Many have decried the simplistic measurement of the political/ideological spectrum. However, think about this. The political spectrum more accurately describes the public debate and social and political order better today than ever. The welfare state has led to an undifferentiated society where increasingly government plays its hand in affairs historically not its own. The voice of opposition from the right is increasingly one of individual freedom and liberty.So where does Abraham Kuyper’s view of sphere sovereignty fit in?The idea itself is simple: society is made up of many different spheres, each relatively independent of the others. It's almost a truism: a school is not a church is not a state is not a business is not a family, etc. Each of these institutions has a proper sphere with a relatively independent authority: school boards in the sphere of education; parents in the sphere of family life; business owners, managers, and union representatives in the sphere of economic life; government in the sphere of political life; and so forth.Similar to the idea of civil society, sphere sovereignty helps us to understand that society is not just a dog-eat-dog individualistic free-for-all, but neither is it a government-dominated collectivistic whole of which schools, families, businesses, labour unions, and so forth are merely subsidiary parts.Dr. Richard Mouw, one contemporary Kuyperian scholar, notes:Kuyper’s perspective on social issues has much in common with the views being put forth today by thinkers who are concerned with the proper shape of the “good society.” A number of North American social critics (Peter Berger, Robert Bellah, and Mary Ann Glendon among them) have emphasized in recent years the important role that “mediating structures” play in providing a buffer zone between the individual and the state. . . . Like these contemporary thinkers, Kuyper was eager to curb the power of the state. The various cultural spheres do not exist by governmental permission.In his Stone Lectures, delivered at Princeton in 1898, Kuyper points out thatthere exists, side by side with this personal sovereignty the sovereignty of the sphere. The University exercises scientific dominion; the Academy of fine arts is possessed of art power; the guild exercised a technical dominion; the trades-union rules over labor—and each of these spheres or corporations is conscious of the power of exclusive independent judgment and authoritative action, within its proper sphere of operation. Behind these organic spheres, with intellectual, aesthetical and technical sovereignty, the sphere of the family opens itself, with its right of marriage, domestic peace, education and possession.Within the sphere sovereignty framework, the sphere of government has a unique place.  Bound by its own mandate, therefore, the government may neither ignore nor modify nor disrupt the divine mandate, under which these social spheres stand. The sovereignty, by the grace of God, of the government is here set aside and limited, for God’s sake, by another sovereignty, which is equally divine in origin. Neither the life of science nor of art, nor of agriculture, nor of industry, nor of commerce, nor of navigation, nor of the family, nor of human relationship may be coerced to suit itself to the grace of the government. The State may never become an octopus, which stifles the whole of life. It must occupy its own place, on its own root, among all the other trees of the forest, and thus it has to honor and maintain every form of life which grows independently in its own sacred autonomy.Does this mean that the government has no right whatever of interference in these autonomous spheres of life? Not at all.It possesses the threefold right and duty: 1. Whenever different spheres clash, to compel mutual regard for the boundary-lines of each; 2. To defend individuals and the weak ones, in those spheres, against the abuse of power of the rest; and 3. To coerce all together to bear personal and financial burdens for the maintenance of the natural unity of the State. The decision cannot, however, in these cases, unilaterally rest with the magistrate. The Law here has to indicate the rights of each, and the rights of the citizens over their own purses must remain the invincible bulwark against the abuse of power on the part of the government.In sorting through these theoretical reflections, three insights emerge that are helpful in thinking about the social order. The first is that within the various spheres, there are different created norms or standards by which institutions are to be guided. The second is that sphere sovereignty challenges the dominance of any one sphere, including the economic sphere. The third is that government has a positive role in creating space for the different spheres to function according to their defining norms. (See Ray Pennings, “Kuyper’s Sphere Sovereignty and Modern Economic Institutions” in Comment, Winter 2003).My colleague Dr. Gideon Strauss, in a Comment editorial, gives practical meaning to sphere sovereignty:Here at Comment we believe in markets. We believe markets to be the best way—no, the only sane way—to structure interactions in economic life. We don’t only believe this because of the historical evidence from the complete failure and ghastly horror of socialism and fascism, but even more because we consider markets to be built into the very design of economic life. Markets as the proper setting for economic interaction, for buying and selling, are in our view a feature of the structure of reality. So we flagrantly support the idea and the reality of a market economy.But this does not mean we support the idea of a market society—what Warren Bennis calls “a bottom-line society.” Human life is not all about economics. Contrary to rational choice theory, we human beings do not make all of our decisions simply in terms of cost/benefit analyses.While economic life needs room to flourish and protection from the encroachment of excessive government intrusion, it also needs limits. The sphere of economic life not only provides businesses with space for the wealth-generating manufacture of products and provision of services—and labour unions with a space for negotiating fair participation in these activities—it also sets the outer limits for business and labour.There are many spheres of human life where economic considerations appropriately play a role but do not dictate decision-making. Families, schools, and hospitals all have to balance their books—but they don’t exist to balance their books. In each of their cases, love, learning, and care, respectively, trumps the bottom line.One of the great challenges facing us is cultivating a society in which economic markets can flourish without overwhelming other spheres of human life.With that in mind, it’s heartwarming to know that when Warren Bennis asks his undergraduate students to list their most admired leaders, the people they cite first are their family members and high school coaches!So what is the benefit of this line of thinking?It means that the spheres or institutions beyond the government and the individual must take leadership to exercise their own authority and properly assume their sphere in the social order.For example:Traditionally, labour and management have depended on the ideological leanings of the ruling government to use the hand of government to establish their relationship with one another. This encourages the already adversarial premise of labour relations policy in Canada. As my colleague Ray Pennings, chair of the Centre for Industrial Relations Innovation, suggests, intermediary institutions such as industry associations, collective bargaining institutions, and professional organizations may be more effective in developing cooperative employee/employer relationships.It also challenges the social conservatives’ overly optimistic view of governments’ ability to legislate morality and the libertarians’ view of the primacy of the individual and the free market over all of life.Sphere sovereignty distributes responsibility and leadership more effectively through the social order. It takes a positive view to the diversity of spheres and institutions, including the sphere of government. It refutes the claim of the left that when we limit the government’s responsibility to its proper sphere all social problems are left for the market and the individual to solve.Politically, the idea of sphere sovereignty is a useful model to mediate the diverse views of the conservative family. Furthermore, I believe it may be a more effective way to communicate the message of the conservative idea to a broader base of electors—without giving into the social liberal tendency to buy people with their own money.I recognize that the idea of sphere sovereignty is not an independent, unique concept. The Catholic idea of subsidiarity is a parallel concept with a longer tradition. The civil society movement in North America has a sphere sovereignty premise. The volunteer movement in Canada is a limited practical example of sphere sovereignty. And there are many others.Public Discourse and Political DebateSo what are the dynamics of this idea of sphere sovereignty on the public discourse and political debate in the conservative community?On language, let me compare the speeches of two Alliance candidates in the last federal election. One speech was filled with phrases such as “the less government the better,” and we have “too many politicians in Ottawa.” The speech communicated government as only a necessary evil. It communicated the idea of the...

Richard Mackie of the Globe and Mail covers WRF union survey:A major study of attitudes toward unions has good news for Canada's beleaguered labour movement: It says approval of unions has surged in the past couple of years.But it cautions that those who support them want unions to turn away from the confrontational approach to labour-management negotiations.The study, conducted for the Work Research Foundation, is to be released today. It says 64 per cent of Canadians interviewed approve of unions, the highest level of support in 40 years.That level is up from 54 per cent in 1970 and from 57 per cent in 1997. In 1961, 66 per cent said they approved of unions.Sixty-two per cent said that unions should be able to compete with each other to represent groups of workers, according to the study, a copy of which was obtained by The Globe and Mail. Competition was seen as a way to improve representation.Both union members and non-union-members rejected the inevitability of confrontation in labour-management relations.Over all, 7 per cent of those questioned said confrontation is necessary; 52 per cent said it is sometimes necessary; 25 per cent said it is rarely necessary, and 16 per cent said it is never necessary."The modest jump in the approval level of unions appears in part to reflect the aging of the population," the study said."Younger adults ... were more approving than older adults who they are beginning to replace."Although union members are much more likely than others to approve of unions, approval is hardly restricted to members," the study found.Ray Pennings, chairman of the Centre for Industrial Relations Innovation at the Work Research Foundation, said approval for the concept of unions contrasts with a decline in union membership.Across Canada, 30.4 per cent of workers belong to a union, down from 35.7 per cent in 1992.He said the study has a message for "right-wing political ideologues, that collective bargaining can be a positive and productive economic activity."At the same time, the study tells "left-wing ideologues that the adversarial, collectivistic, monopolistic unionism of the past isn't working.In fact, it is counterproductive and costing unions membership," Mr. Pennings said.This was the third study of attitudes toward unions conducted by the Work Research Foundation, an organization established to study issues surrounding the organization of work, the movement of trade, and leadership in the economic sphere.The polling was conducted by Environics Research Group Ltd., which questioned a representative sample of 2,030 Canadians from Dec. 17 to Jan. 6.A sample of this size has a 95-per-cent statistical probability of obtaining results, on any given question, like those that would be obtained if all adult Canadians were questioned, within a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points, upwards or downwards.The data were analyzed by Reginald Bibby, a sociologist at the University of Lethbridge.