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Saturday Selections – May 3, 2025

Be Present

Reformed rapper Propaganda with a message that'll hit everyone hard:

"I guess you could say I've been through a divorce now – me and my phone are no longer married."

p.s. "finna" means "going to"

An encouraging message for Canadian Christians after election night

The same God who promises to turn everything to our good (Romans 8:28) was sovereignly in control when Mark Carney got voted in. So we know this is right, and to our benefit, even if we don't understand... at least in full.

One possible benefit – an evident silver lining – is the 90 pro-life MPs that RightNow says were elected. Pro-life candidates are banned from the NDP and Liberals, so these must all be Conservative, and 90 out of the 144 elected Conservatives is quite the sizeable segment. And being in opposition can be freeing, as it may allow these MPs to speak against government abuses more openly than they'd ever be allowed if they were government. Maybe some will start talking about the unborn, not just to fellow pro-lifers, but to the muddled middle who might yet be convicted of the wickedness of this slaughter.

Encouraging coverage of ARPA Canada

This week ARPA Canada got to make a presentation in the BC legislature with around 20 MLAs present, and this mainstream media account covered it straight up.

Want to improve your life?

"Open the Bible at least four times a week."

Stop valorizing doubt! (10-minute read)

As Trevin Wax notes, "Honesty about our doubt is a virtue, but it’s the honesty that’s commendable, not the doubt itself."

Syncretism is a pressing temptation

As Pastor John Van Eek notes in the video below, syncretism is the mixing of any two (or more religions) to form a completely new religion. Or to put it another way, Christianity plus anything isn't Christianity anymore.

In the past God's people might have mixed their true religion with Baal worship, but today's syncretistic temptation involves a very different religion: secularism. In the public square, the demand is that Christians limit ourselves to sharing a logical, scientific, or maybe "common sense" perspective, but never an explicitly Christian one. Now, Christianity is logical, and lines up with science (when properly understood) so this might seem a demand we could accommodate.

But when we understand that the secularism making these demands holds that man's reasoning is the source of all knowledge, including what is good, right, and meaningful, then we can see how secularism is another religion. And then we can also start to see the syncretistic element here. If Christians agree to act and argue as secularists do – with no mention of the God we were created to glorify (WSC Q&A 1) – then even when we are pursuing good ends, like fighting a trans agenda or trying to stop abortion, we are doing so by mixing secularism with our Christianity.

And then is that Christianity still?

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Saturday Selections – April 26, 2025

Christianity & global warming (10 min) Some Christians think global warming is a scientific, and not a theological, question. To that, Jeff Durbi...

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Abortion deaths reach 10-year high

According to the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI), the number of abortions reported in Canada increased to a staggering 101,553 in 2023...

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Pierre Poilievre: sometimes access comes with too high a cost

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Becoming Chinada? – a look at our country, from the eyes of a recently arrived Chinese family

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Saturday Selections – April 19, 2025

Embrace reality - brought to you by the letter f This is both fantastic – encouraging a farm hand to embrace reality over his feelings – and falls short because Granny points to a changeable dictionary as the final arbitrator of reality, rather than to the author of reality Himself, our God, and His unchanging Word. So God's people need to point to our sure Foundation. Does the 2nd Commandment apply to the King of Kings? Does the 2nd Commandment apply to film portrayals of Christ? This is a pertinent question at a time when there are three bio-films about Christ scheduled for theaters, including the animated The King of Kings for kids, and also the popular streaming series The Chosen, now in its fourth season. Roman Catholics, Mormons, and many an evangelical don't believe the 2nd Commandment applies. But as this article highlights, some Reformers such as Herman Bavinck, Joel Beeke, and John Calvin thought this commandment forbids any representation of any member of the Trinity. Why? Part of it may be practical – how could we ever visually depict the immaterial God the Father, or the Holy Spirit? But Jesus was a man, so isn't that different? Well, another practical consideration is that in extending what was written down into a visual medium, additions will not only have to be made, but made up (because we don't know what they were wearing or looked like, etc.). And as happened with The Chosen, once producers and writers are making additions, they seem to feel free to change what was written down too. Albert Mohler on IVF Mohler notes that the New York Times is asking questions that the world really can't answer. Christians need to ask these same questions, and we do have answers. So, "what do we owe the embryo?" Mohler knows "Christians must now face the question of IVF and embryo ethics head on." Creationist lessons from Australia’s rabbit plague From 24 rabbits 166 years ago, Australia now has a rabbit population of approximately 2oo million! This article is about how creationists... "...are often asked: how could we get so many people in such a short time since the Ark landed (about 4,500 years)? Similarly, how could we have so many land vertebrates today if most came from a pair on the Ark (seven pairs for ‘clean’ animals)? The answer is exponential growth." Australia's News South Wales has passed its own "anti-conversion therapy" law A law that makes it illegal to help someone convert from homosexuality to heterosexuality is now in effect in NSW Australia. The wrongs it is supposed to right are forced conversions, but as Anglican Archbishop Kanishka Raffel has noted, "the initial consultation paper provided no direct evidence of conversion practices in New South Wales." So why this law? Well, if we lived in a rational world then laws would only be proposed when needed – again, as the Archbishop put it, "Good laws must target extraordinary harm not ordinary faith." But the law is here anyway... because the world hates God (John 15:18-19, 1 John 3:13, 2 Tim. 3:12). "...now it’s time for churches to call this out for the massive intrusion it is on liberty of conscience, and its naked attempt to force self-censorship on faith communities at the risk of prosecution. And now is the time for faith-based schools to remind their students and their key stakeholders – government and well-heeled parents – that the gospel is actually all about conversion. Always about conversion." What's not fair about free trade? The key point here would be "we shouldn't make things harder to obtain simply on the grounds that they originate somewhere else." This gentleman has an evolutionary slant – he thinks the reason people instinctively object to free trade is a remnant of our evolutionary programming – but what he attributes to evolution can be better explained by our sinful nature. We are envious and seek our own advantage even if it hurts others, so no wonder then that we'll, for example, push for tariffs that help our industry even if those tariffs make things more expensive for everyone else. ...

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Millions distributed to Canada’s legacy media during election campaign

While the media was covering the federal election, the newly formed Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC) started its first handouts of cash from the enormous pot of $100 million that it is now mandated to give to Canadian news outlets each year. The funding comes from money that Google was required to pay in order to comply with the Liberal government’s Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which passed through Parliament in 2023. As revenue has dwindled for the legacy media, the Liberal government has been very motivated to step in with their own funding, both directly and indirectly. In addition to its $1.4 billion in annual funding of the CBC, it provided about $885 million of other media handouts in the past five years. The Hub, a relatively new media organization which doesn’t support government funding, reached out to Canada’s largest legacy media companies to ask if they received any of this money, how much they got, and whether they would be willing to disclose this during the election campaign. None of the organizations would commit to this. Why does this matter? We can’t serve two masters – if the media is supposed to be the servant of the public, holding the government to account, it can’t also be in the employ of that government. Last year, Reformed Perspective turned down an opportunity to receive substantial funding from the “Special Measures for Journalism” component of the Canada Periodical Fund. By God’s grace, our readers not only covered all our bills, they provided the means for us to grow our circulation and expand our team. Thank you for being the means through which we can continue to celebrate God’s truth, without being beholden to the government....

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Saturday Selections – April 12, 2025

The Gray Haven's High Enough (4 min) The first story, history, told with tempo, beauty too – something special that'll have even rap and poetry haters take notice. Have you lost your ability to think deeply? "In 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You, Tony Reinke writes, 'God has given us the power of concentration in order for us to see and avoid what is false, fake, and transient — so that we may gaze directly at what is true, stable, and eternal.' As our ability to concentrate is eroded by cheap entertainment, so too is our ability to discern truth and focus on what has eternal value. We’re wasting God’s precious gift." So what can be done? Apologetics without apologizing Christians sometimes fall for our own bad press - the world paints us as simpletons for believing God's Word, and then we encourage their insult by acting as if God's Word is something to be ashamed of, when we never reference it in the public square. But the fact is, "Christianity is the most accurate account of reality and therefore worthy of our saying so." Solar and wind power are expensive The push for renewable energy doubled the cost of electricity in Ontario from 2005 to 2020, though the government hid some of those cost increases by paying for them. But that just meant taxpayers were going to be on the hook for them another way. And Germany, a renewable energy leader, is paying twice that. On a sunny, windy day, their solar and wind provides almost 70% of what their country needs, but on a dark, windless day, less than 4%. This is an article by a gay atheist who believes global warming is happening and man has a role. And he's still questioning what we're doing in our push for expensive unreliable renewables. Families parenting together God blessed us with like-minded Christian neighbors who were a few years ahead of us in parenting and we've been able to learn from their example, and share our own practices with them as well. This author makes the case that this is a blessing worth seeking out! Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity The German theologian thought that it is more dangerous for a nation to be stupid than wicked. The application is as suitable to our day as it was in Nazi Germany. "In his famous letters from prison, Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice, because while 'one may protest against evil; it can be exposed and prevented by the use of force, against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here. Reasons fall on deaf ears.'” ...

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Saturday Selections – April 5, 2025

Click on the titles to go to the linked articles. Broken Window Fallacy explains what government gets wrong Politicians can always point to the results of their spending. But what we don't see is what would have happened with that same money if they hadn't taken it from businesses and families and individuals in the first place. The jobs we would have created are unseen, because those jobs didn't happen – the government didn't let them happen. So any time a government brags about creating jobs, it's akin to a company bragging about its revenue while refusing to account for its costs (Prov. 18:17). Beast Games: family fun or mammon worship? A bit of a late warning, but if you haven't already checked it out, here's why you shouldn't bother. How murderous are you when even the UN says, "Whoah now, that's enough"? Canada has murdered its millions – nearly 100,000 unborn babies a year for decades now – and that's nothing compared to what the United Nations (UN) is responsible for due to their own promotion of abortion worldwide. But when it comes to euthanasia, even the UN is shocked at what Canada has been up to, in looking to expand it to the mentally ill too. Trump goes 0 for 3 on trade knowledge The Fraser Institute with one way Trump's tariff rhetoric contradicts itself, and a couple ways that his tariffs will hurt not just Canada, but the US too. The government is handing out more money to the media ...but why aren't we hearing about it? Maybe it's because we know that typically he who pays the piper calls the tune – this is media being bought and paid for. That's why The Hub is donating the $22,000 they've received so far to charity. (And no, Reformed Perspective wasn't sent any of this cash.) Defending the unborn as Christians (10 min) What does it look like to defend the unborn as an unabashed, God-glorifying Christian? It means starting with God, and then stacking the science, the logic, the biological reality, all atop that firm foundation of our Lord. Jeff Durbin shows us how it is done. ...

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Saturday Selections – Mar. 29, 2025

Propaganda techniques (10 minutes) This 1948 or 1949 movie highlights seven different propaganda techniques, and to be forewarned about them is to be...

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Saturday Selections – Mar. 22, 2025

One question to confound the evolutionist Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's a famous enough conundrum but quite the dilemma for the evol...

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Saturday Selections – Mar. 15, 2025

House of David show is making things up Wretched TV's Todd Friel doesn't hold back on Amazon's new biblically-based series about King David. His argu...

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Saturday Selections – Mar. 8, 2025

5 signs you should consider seminary Is God calling you to be a minister? Here are 5 points worth considering. While this is Westminster making it...

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Saturday Selections – Mar. 1, 2025

Why we can't focus (12 min) This fellow is worried that moving from a text-based culture to a video-based one is leaving us all stupider – "we are amusing ourselves to death." He's not trying to make a Christian point, but as "people of the Word," we know there is a pressing need for us to not only be able to read, but be able to concentrate on a passage long enough to understand it. Tariffs – an entrepreneur’s perspective What should you do when your neighbor gives you lemons? Christian businessman (and CHPer) Dave Bylsma encourages us to start thinking lemonade – explore the opportunities, rather than fixate on a problem that we really can't do anything about. The biblical basis for such an opportunity-mindset is the assurance "that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28). We didn't seek this hardship, but God is acting on us, and could be acting through us if we rise to this challenge. "The harm is staggering..." Jonathan Haidt on how smartphones and social media are fuelling the youth mental health crisis. He shares their four harms. Could this be the year’s most ridiculous idea about how life originated? Life may have started in space? They found some amino acids on the Bennu asteroid (at a cost of nearly $1 billion) so, the speculation has begun. Count the could haves and other fudge words in the paragraph below and ask yourself, if the prospect is so unlikely, why is this even getting covered? Well, because this level of rampant speculation is among the best prospects they have... "If a vast swarm of briny little worlds produced biological precursors, it could have mixed them together as they crashed into one another. The heat of the impacts could have fueled more chemistry, giving rise to even more complex molecules in their interiors, and perhaps even living cells. 'Could life have started there?' Dr. Rennó asked. 'I’m open to it. I like crazy ideas.'” Resisting gender ideology indoctrination in Canada’s public schools "Imagine that a religious cult had mysteriously swayed Canada’s schools to teach children that they are spirit-beings trapped in their physical bodies as some kind of curse. Imagine further that special staff were dedicated to ensuring schools were 'safe spaces' for kids to discover their true spirit-selves. Imagine special 'student clubs' to guide students in this self-discovery, with help from zealous adult believers from outside the school. Imagine students adopting new cultic names for themselves at school, which everyone else was required to use. And imagine at last schools keeping their kids’ new cultic identities secret from parents because 'children don’t need parents’ permission to be who they are,' to paraphrase Justin Trudeau. "I think Canadians would be appalled at this. And many would intuit that there was something legally suspect about it. But swap in 'gender identity' and this is what’s happening in Canada. A quasi-religious gender ideology is permeating our public schools, and most Canadian families have no opt-out..." Voddie Baucham's thoughts on voting as a Christian He's speaking in the context of the US, but there is crossover... ...

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Tariffs as a dressing down: if it is about drugs we should listen

With a lot of bluster and bravado, President Trump has made good on campaign promises to impose trade tariffs limiting other countries’ access to the prized American market, especially if these trading partners are reluctant to go along with concessions and demands from the new U.S. administration. Canada has experienced the uncertainty of these tariff threats, causing unsettlement for businesses on both sides of the border, and raising ill feelings among Canadians towards their southern neighbor. Economists almost unanimously agree that tariffs are ultimately harmful for the overall market: certain domestic industries can benefit from these financial penalties on their international competition, but the resulting prices will hurt domestic companies that use these imports to make their goods. And eventually the consumers who pay for finished goods will see these new increased costs included in the price they pay. Christian economist David Bahnsen recently wrote that Trump’s key economic officials agree that tariffs are harmful: “I believe Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is essentially a free trader who knows in his heart and mind that tariffs are a cost on the U.S. economy paid by U.S. importers, and ultimately, consumers. I believe NEC chair Kevin Hassett knows this. I believe CEA chair Stephen Miran knows this.” If tariffs cause economic harm all around, why is the U.S. President insisting that he will impose them? It all seems to be based on extracting action, not promises, from trading partners that the U.S. has deemed to not be living up to their commitments. U.S. officials allege that Canada is too lax on border security, allowing aliens to enter the U.S. from Canada: “ is not confined to the southern border – encounters at the northern border with Canada are rising as well.” Trump’s team has stated that Canada is not doing enough to capture smugglers bringing fentanyl into the U.S. “There is… a growing presence of Mexican cartels operating fentanyl and nitazene synthesis labs in Canada,” stated a White House fact sheet. I spoke recently off the record with several U.S. border patrol employees in Washington State who indicated that fentanyl coming into the U.S. from Canada is indeed becoming a bigger problem. The Trudeau government responded to the tariff threats by promising to beef up border security and appointing a fentanyl czar, resulting in a delay, but not cancellation of the tariffs. At the time of this writing, the tariffs are still scheduled to come into effect in the beginning of March. Canadians as a whole have been offended by this aggressive talk from our normally friendly neighbor to the south: the U.S. anthem was booed at sporting events, and some consumers have threatened boycotts of American-made products. How should Christians view these developments? It is good to recognize that every government has the duty to protect its citizens and defend its borders: while Canadians may not agree with President Trump’s assessment of dangers coming from “up north,” we should recognize that as chief executive of his country, he has the right to ask for increased cooperation in fulfilling this essential task of protecting his country’s citizens. In Luke 14, the Lord Jesus illustrates negotiation between sovereigns in this way: “…What king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not first sit down and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand. And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.” While citizens might not appreciate the heavy-handedness of demands brought by a nation we consider our friend and ally, our government should respond positively to reasonable requests, especially if they are intended to increase law and order, and stop criminal behavior that is harmful on both sides of the 49th parallel....

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Saturday Selections – Feb. 22, 2025

My pretty pink tractor Tim Hawkins on a problem that I'm sure has happened to many a farmer. Mark Carney - the man who would be prime minister REAL Women of Canada have put together this thorough backgrounder on the candidate who seems most likely to win the Liberal Party leadership race. While this lobby group isn't offering an explicitly Christian perspective, that's their general, implicit worldview. You are more than your brain Materialists – those who say all we are is what we are made of – would say who you are is housed in your brain. All you are, is found somewhere in there. Except it isn't. Neurosurgeon Wilder "Penfield could find no part of the brain that, when stimulated, caused patients to think abstractly — to reason, think logically, do mathematics or philosophy or exercise free will." This isn't an article about the soul, but it sort of is. 10 questions to ask when evaluating a Christian college While you could direct these at the admissions department, it'd be even better to ask them to a recent alumni. As the author notes, college publications really put a spin on things, such that you can almost read in the worldview you are looking for. But when they are having a speaker tackle the topic of gender, is it really clear from the materials what he'll be saying, or are you making some generous assumptions? You really may need to ask someone who was there. (Not all the questions are gold, but I found 8 out of 10 really useful.) Greenland used to be green land President Trump's aspirations for this frozen, mostly unpopulated island have kept it much in the news as of late. But its real news value comes from recently reported findings that could calm climate hysteria. Turns out that Greenland was once green, which means the Earth must have been a lot warmer in the past – 14 degrees warmer, according to these guys. That said, the dates for this latest discovery are way outside of the timescale the Bible reveals – this is supposed to be a look back at between 250,000 and a million years ago – so that's messed up. But for secularists who abide with millions of years, they have some explaining to do as to why 3 degrees warmer would end the Earth today, but 14 degrees warmer didn't do so back whenever. And for Christians, we can stand on God's promise in Gen. 8:22 that the end the climate cataclysmists are predicting simply will not come: "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” 70 million people have seen The Butterfly Circus In this short 20-minute film, a limbless man (played by Christian apologist Nick Vujicic) is forced to get by as a circus sideshow. But that changes when he is recognized as beautiful by a rival circus owner, and welcomed to stay with this "Butterfly Circus." This is a PG film, in part because the backstory of one character involves prostitution (nothing sexual is shown – we just see her pregnant and being shown the brothel door). The other reason parents are needed is because of how the film could be misinterpreted by children. Young viewers (and old ones too) need to remember that the Butterfly Circus owner recognized the limbless man as beautiful at the start of the film. To say it another way, it wasn't anything the limbless man did, or potentially could do, that made him beautiful. We are all called to develop whatever talents God has given us, but it's not our abilities that give us value or make us beautiful. Our beauty and our worth come from God's valuation of us – what He esteems is valuable indeed! ...

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Saturday Selections – Feb. 15, 2025

Charles Darwin's birthday was Feb. 12, so for this edition we are marking that event by featuring a collection of very different rebuttals. Click on the titles for the linked articles. Your cells are constantly being recycled and repaired... even as they keep running Every day your DNA experiences 10,000 lost letters of code in every single cell of your body. Your body is like a library of information... that's constantly on fire. As fast as the environment burns down your DNA, a host of DNA "librarians" in your cells builds back what was being burnt down. That means that, right from the beginning, our DNA needed these repair mechanisms. But these mechanisms need all sorts of DNA to be formed. It's a chicken and egg dilemma – which came first? Both need to have been in place from the beginning, and couldn't have evolved one at a time. Better science without Darwin When you presume that all the life around us came about by random mutation, acting without design or purpose, then you're not liable to look to Nature for brilliant design. And devotion to Darwin might have you falling for all sorts of mistakes, like believing that much of our DNA is just junk left over from our previous evolutionary incarnations. Or you'd be liable to look for and try to point out flaws in our design. But you'd be wrong. What if, instead of looking to Nature for bad design, scientists starting looking to it for Inspired design? That's what the field of biometrics is all about – looking to Nature for inspiration, because of the brilliant engineering on display. Evolution can't explain why we blush Does blushing make you fitter? Nope. In fact, an argument could be made that this honest unconscious reaction might put someone at a disadvantage. That's why Darwin was perturbed by it, because even blushing exposes the insufficiency of his evolutionary theory. The astonishing self-organizing human embryo You start as a single cell that then subdivides into all sorts of other different types of cells. But how does the one decide to become all the others? "...how exactly does an organism without any central control self-organize?" The more we learn, the more apparent it is, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. The Darwin devotion detector Some years back author and scientist William A. Dembski crafted a test that paired statements – one devoted to Darwin, the other not – that could be used by a person to gauge how devoted or not they might be to Darwin. I think this 40-question test could be used by Christians in university to confront classmates willing to listen (interested opposition, not fingers-in-their-ears fools) to expose to them their blind devotion to Darwin, and how it isn't anything to do with science. Here's one pairing, as an example, with the first showing Darwin devotion, and the second lining up better with reality. Darwin’s theory of evolution is as well supported scientifically as Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Putting Darwin’s theory of evolution in the same league as Einstein’s theory of general relativity is an affront to the exact sciences. The age of the arches As the article above notes, Arches National Park has about 2,000 natural rock arches, with roughly one collapsing each year and none forming. So, unless there were millions of arches to start, that makes it seem that these are not the millions of years old they are purported to be. And the article below highlights how they were not formed as they were purported to be either. ...

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US Bible sales booming

Although most people are aware that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time, data from printed book sales in the USA in 2023 reveals an upward ...

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Young Canadian defends Scripture to the world

Things can change quickly when you have the courage to seize an opportunity, and are blessed by God. 33-year-old Wesley Huff is serving as the Cent...

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Taxpayer-funded drug trafficking exposed in BC

BC’s NDP government and provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry have long denied or downplayed the concern that the free drugs they are giving to...

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Spiritual warfare becoming more visible at Canadian universities

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Saturday Selections – Feb. 8, 2025

Monarch butterflies are freaky cool (7 min) We know that caterpillars become butterflies – two creatures in one! – but did you know that Monarch butterflies themselves have two entirely different life spans? One generation lives just weeks, and the next will live months, long enough for them to make the journey from Canada to Mexico, a route they have never traveled before. That's three creatures in one! Who will you believe about spanking? Big-name psychological groups say spanking is harmful. But that says more about them than about spanking. Sooner or later, babies will be too precious to abort More people die from abortion than all other causes of death combined – abortion may have accounted for 52 percent of all deaths in 2021. Michael Cook thinks the consequences of this slaughter will be such that shrinking nations will have to turn their backs on abortion... or disappear. "Devil with a bluegrass, bluegrass, bluegrass, devil with a bluegrass thumb" Being able to laugh at yourself is grace indeed! Origin-of-life challenge: $10 million, just lying around (10-minute read) Since 2019, a $10 million prize has been available for anyone who can produce “a purely chemical process that will generate, transmit and receive a simple code.” This is a key tenet of evolution – that unguided processes can create and transmit information – and evolutionists have not been able to put up... so we should rightly regard them as having been shut up. Tariffs: why Canada shouldn't hit back Free trade – free of barriers and restrictions – has, traditionally, been pretty exclusive to the Right side of the political spectrum. But now, with President Trump threatening tariffs on Canada and Mexico, we're even hearing the Left talk about the harms that tariffs could cause. And not just to Canada and Mexico, but to American consumers too. As the far-left stalwart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC) noted on X, "Remember: *WE* pay the tariffs....Trump is all about making inflation WORSE for working class Americans, not better." But what is she talking about when she says Americans pay the tariffs it charges? Think of it this way. Imagine two towns located right next to each other – Town A and Town B – and each has a car mechanic. These mechanics are full-service: they go right to your house to do the repairs. The only difference between the two is that the car mechanic in Town A – let's call him Arnold – is way cheaper, so not only do all the folks in Town A use Arnold, so do most of the folks in Town B. That, understandably, makes the mechanic in town B – we'll him Bill – quite unhappy, as it really hurts his business. So Bill demands that his town put in a tariff of sorts. He wants a 25% surcharge on any "out of town" car mechanics. He argues that this surcharge will be incredibly beneficial – applying it to Arnold for the work he does in Town B will help fund Town B's government. It will also help protect Town B's homegrown car repair businesses - Bill's – by making his prices seem more competitive. And, Bill notes, if he gets more business, the government will benefit from the taxes he'll pay. Bill pitches his tariff/surcharge as a win/win all the way around. But Bill is forgetting someone – several someones, in fact. The surcharge will make Arnold's prices higher. Any Town B clients who do continue to use him will now be paying 25% more. And any clients he loses to Bill will be impacted too, having to pay Bill's higher prices for their car repairs, taking a bigger chunk out of their household budget than ever before. In other words, Bill is staying in business at the expense of the car repair consumers in his own town. That's not win/win at all – that's a win for Bill, at the cost of everyone else in town. This is what AOC meant when she said that Americans will pay the tariffs they charge. Canada rightly fears American tariffs on the energy and goods they produce. Those tariffs could hurt our producers badly. But hitting back at American tariffs with our own tariffs on US goods is only going to compound the pain. It might benefit some of our producers – whoever makes the goods that compete with imported American goods – but that benefit will come at the expense of Canadian consumers overall by making them pay more. Just like Town B's car repair "tariff" hurt Town B's citizens. Is there an explicitly biblical perspective to be brought here? Well, what about Leviticus 19:15? “Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly." God equates justice and impartiality, which prompts a question: should a government take actions that benefit some of its citizens – some producers – at the expense of other citizens, the consumers and producers who use those goods? Isn't that partiality? God also speaks to this in his Golden Rule (Matt. 7:12). "Do unto others as you would like done unto you," applied to the economic realm would mean that car mechanic Bill wouldn't argue for his surcharge because he wouldn't want that same surcharge applied to everything he buys. If Town A has cheap car parts, or groceries, or gasoline, he'd love to be able to benefit. That fact is, tariffs always hurt consumers, so no matter what the US does, let's not let tariffs beget more tariffs. Instead of putting up trade barriers, there are interprovincial barriers we could greatly benefit from taking down, as Pierre Poilievre explains below. ...

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Canadian economy stank it up under Trudeau

With the Justin Trudeau era (almost) over, it’s time to assess his record. In a January 9 article posted to The Hub, Lakehead University’s Professor of Economics Livio Di Matteo compared current Canadian economic conditions with 2015, when Trudeau was elected as Prime Minister with a majority government. Di Matteo’s conclusion? The Canadian economy is in much worse shape now than a decade ago, especially in six key areas: GDP, job growth, interest and inflation rates, and the federal deficit and debt. Canadian Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per person grew more slowly than other capitalist countries. For comparison purposes the figures that follow are in US dollars. In 2015, Canadians produced about $43,600 per person, compared to $57,000 for the Americans. We were producing approximately 76% of what they were producing, by this economic measure. As of 2023, the World Bank Group has Canada at just above $53,400, or almost $10,000 more than eight years ago. But over those same eight years the US per person GDP has grown to $82,800, an increase for them of about $25,000. So instead of producing 76% of what Americans do, we’re now at about 65% of our largest trading partner’s productivity. On the jobs front, an almost identical percentage of Canadians were unemployed in 2015 and as of November 2024 – just under 7%. However, this statistic conceals that a larger slice of the population is working in the public sector than ever before: 21.1% as of 2023, versus 19.7% in 2015. Interest rates in Canada have increased from very low in 2015, when the Bank of Canada rate hovered just below 1%, to around 3.5% at the end of 2024. Higher interest rates contribute to slow business growth, and an increased cost of living especially for people looking to buy a home. Inflation rates have recently eased from a high of nearly 7% in 2022, to just under 2% in 2024. However, Di Matteo points out that “from 2015 to 2024, the All-Items Consumer Price Index grew by 26 percent.” This Index is another inflation measure based on the rising cost month by month, year by year, of a basket of goods and services. That 26 percent is a far cry from the slow growth of the economy overall. According to the Trudeau government’s own account, they spent $63.1 billion more than they collected in revenue in the fiscal year ending March 31 of 2024. As Professor Di Matteo shares, “over the terms of the Trudeau government, the net federal debt has nearly doubled rising from $701 billion to $1.35 trillion.” Di Matteo reminds readers that when you borrow, you must also repay: the cost of servicing Canada’s national debt is increasing at an alarming rate. “Debt charges are expected to reach $53.7 billion in 2024-2025, or about 10 per cent of federal spending.” Solomon alerts us in Proverbs 14:23 that “in all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty.” We pray that future Canadian leaders will be better stewards of the great resources that God has given us. Picture credit: paparazzza / Shutterstock.com...

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Saturday Selections – Feb. 1, 2025

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Blind guides can’t suppress Dutch MP sharing truth about the unborn

Early this year, a Dutch politician managed to vividly illustrate the horrors of abortion, despite the efforts of the opposition to shut him down. Presenting at a January 15 meeting to fellow members of a committee on medical ethics, Member of Parliament Gideon van Meijeren brought along a model of a 22-week-old baby to show the reality of who a doctor is killing, and how children of that age can feel pain as they are brutally murdered. As Jonathon Van Maren reported in his piece on TheBridgehead.ca “Dutch MP silenced for exposing reality of abortion releases powerful pro-life video,” when Van Meijeren brought the model out to accompany his remarks, committee chair Mohammed Mohandis immediately objected. The chair would not allow the doll to be shown, even instructing that the live feed of the meeting be turned off. A neighboring committee member actually grabbed the plastic model in an attempt to put it out of sight as the meeting continued. Van Meijeren objected to the decision of the chairman, reminding his colleagues that illustrations and objects have often been used in Parliament, and that his freedom of expression was being curtailed, but Mohandis would not change his mind. Rather than continue without visual aids, Van Meijeren left the meeting. But that wasn’t the end of it. A little later, he released a powerful video, and in a wonderful twist it has been seen by almost 100,000 so far, which is many more than would have seen the committee meeting. There he further explained how terrible it is that the Netherlands allows abortions all the way up till 24 weeks gestation, well past the time frame that children are perfectly formed, and can feel pain. Speaking in Dutch, he said: “It is not new to me that other members of Parliament would like to close their eyes to reality, but that there is such a panicky reaction to the showing of an anatomical model of a 22-week-old fetus, yes, that is quite telling, because the model itself is, of course, not shocking at all. No, what is shocking is that these babies are killed on a daily basis in the Netherlands. That is why this may not be seen.” The young politician went on to describe the horrific manner in which older babies like these are killed through the indiscriminate ripping off of limbs and body parts inside the womb. By nature, we want to deny the realities of our sinfulness: Adam and Eve hid from the Lord in the Garden after their rebellion; David was blind to his own murder of Uriah until the prophet Nathan confronted him. When our political leaders deny citizens access to the truth by suppressing free speech and covering up atrocities, they have become like the “blind guides” that Jesus condemned in Matthew 15: “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone, they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit” (Matt. 15:13-14). Picture credit is a screenshot from the MP’s viral video. If you know Dutch, check out his video below. ...

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