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“Frankly, I’m very comfortable with the fact there’s been a falling out. I don’t lose any sleep over the fact that and Campaign Life are upset,” the PC leader said, adding he now regrets voting against same-sex marriage and abortion when he was a Conservative MP.
“If Charles McVety wants his ten bucks back for membership, he can have it. If he wants to vote for someone else, he can vote for someone else, so be it,” he said.
“Frankly, I think they take more credit for any part of my leadership campaign than is merited. I went out and signed up 45,000 members.”Back in December 2014, I sent an email to a couple of politicians expressing my concern over the Liberals sex-ed curriculum. Almost immediately after I sent the email, Patrick Brown emailed me back from his personal email address (like he did to CLC) asking me for my phone number. I gave it to him and he called me back. He told me in no uncertain terms that he was against the sex-ed curriculum. I asked him at the time if he was also concerned about the Liberals decision to hide abortion information. He told me he was for open access to information, although any further emails I sent him on this subject, remained unanswered (that should have been my first clue to PB's philosophy).
"Social conservatives, as I’ve written before, are not numerous enough to single-handedly put someone in office. However, we are numerous enough to ruin the career of someone like Patrick Brown, who has managed to lie to us, betray us, call us intolerant bigots, and then shruggingly suggest we vote for someone else in the confidence that we won’t. If we keep letting politicians like Patrick Brown treat us like that, we are simply ensuring that no politician will ever take us seriously, because they can have their cake and eat it too—they can get so-con votes while telling the Toronto downtown elites that they think we’re kind of repulsive. I think it’s time for social conservatives to show that we care more about putting someone Conservative in power. We have real concerns that need to be addressed, and if Patrick Brown is an impediment to that, then we should treat him as such."Good luck Patrick in trying to get anyone to believe you ever again. I think you're going to need it.
"Authorities should bar doctors from refusing services like abortion and assisted death on moral grounds, and screen out potential medical students who might impose their values on patients, leading Canadian and British bioethicists argue in a provocative new commentary.
The paper by professors at Queen’s and Oxford universities, who are also editors of two major bioethics journals, throws rocket fuel onto a debate already inflamed by the new law allowing assisted death.
They argue that physicians have no right to opt out of lawful medical services — from abortion to prescribing contraceptives — that are requested by a patient and in the person’s interest.
Those who let conscientious objection affect patient care are clearly unprofessional, say Udo Schuklenk and Julian Savulescu.
“Doctors must put patients’ interests ahead of their own integrity,” they write in the journal Bioethics.
“If this leads to feelings of guilty remorse or them dropping out of the profession, so be it,” says the bluntly worded piece.
“There is an oversupply of people wishing to be doctors. The place to debate issues of contraception, abortion and euthanasia is at the societal level, not the bedside...
...Schuklenk said it is debatable whether currently practising doctors should be barred from practising because they morally object to facilitating certain legal services.
But it would be reasonable to screen applicants to medical school and eliminate those unable to put aside their moral values, he said, comparing the idea to a medical faculty in South Africa rejecting racist students.
Such screening might exclude people of certain religious beliefs from becoming doctors, but there is little evidence that would be detrimental to patients, the commentary says."Is this what we call progress? Just because something is legal doesn't make it moral. This sounds like what Hitler demanded of his doctors in Nazi Germany. It may have been legal then to perform horrid medical experiments, etc. on people, but it certainly wasn't moral.
"In my view, to deny access to generalized, non-identifying statistics regarding an important public policy issue such as the provision of abortion services would have the effect of hindering citizens’ ability to participate meaningfully in the democratic process and undermine the government’s accountability to the public." Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, 2000
“Information sharing should not be impeded because of excessive classification rules …. we must work to extinguish the belief that those who collect information own it.” -- William P. Crowell, Markle Task Force on National Security in The Information Age, testifying before the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, 8 Nov. 2005
"After I had been confirmed as federal Information Commissioner, I met with the former Commissioner, John Grace, to get his advice. One thing he said struck me in particular; he said that in his seven years as Privacy Commissioner and eight years as Information Commissioner (a total of 15 years spent reviewing the records which government wanted to withhold from Canadians) he hadn't seen a really good secret. My experience is much the same over the first year of my term. For the most part, officials love secrecy because it is a tool of power and control, not because the information they hold is particularly sensitive by nature."
John Reid, 1999
"Government ought to be all outside and no inside. . . . Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety." Woodrow Wilson"
"The overarching purpose of access to information legislation … is to facilitate democracy. It does so in two related ways. It helps to ensure first, that citizens have the information required to participate meaningfully in the democratic process, and secondly, that politicians and bureaucrats remain accountable to the citizenry." - Gerard LaForest, former Supreme Court of Canada Justice, in Dagg vs. Canada (1997)
"Government ought to be all outside and no inside. . . . Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety." Woodrow Wilson
"I believe that a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society.... if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless." - Sissela Bok, Swedish philosopher, 1982
"A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both." - James Madison, 1832
"Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix." Pres. Harry Truman
"Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity" - Lord Acton