May 14, 2009, has come and gone. I know many of you will wonder why I mention this, as you did not read anything particular about this date in your newspapers or saw any particular coverage on TV. The media silence has been deafening.
May 14th was the fortieth anniversary of Pierre Trudeau’s legislation making abortion (and homosexual acts in private) legal in Canada. For the 12th year in a row pro-lifers in Ontario and Quebec participated in the March for Life on Parliament Hill, while in other provinces fellow workers have started to do the same in their provincial capitals. In Ottawa, despite the rain and gusts of wind which turned umbrellas inside out and almost blew away the young people holding street-wide banners, the spirit was great. The 2008 record of 8,000 marchers was replaced by 12,300 people this year, the large majority of them (75 to 80%) under 25 years of age. Those above that age included twelve Catholic bishops, including Cardinal Ouellet of Quebec City and the Archbishops of Ottawa, Kingston and Toronto, together with another eight bishops, including the retired bishop of Amos, Quebec.
In Winnipeg, Man., 140 people showed up including retired Archbishop Peter Sutton; in Regina, Saskatchewan, 700 people came, including Archbishop Daniel Bohan and bishops Legatt and Bayda of Sasktoon; in Edmonton, Alberta, 400 people joined with the four bishops of Alberta; in Victoria, British Columbia, 2,000 pro-lifers with Archbishop Miller and the bishops of Victoria, Kamloops and Westminster.
In the East, in New Brunswick the 400 witnesses to life from conception to natural death included 18 Members of the provincial Legislative Assembly (MLAs) as well as the Bishop of St. John, Robert Harris. Newfoundland had 40 people and Nova Scotia 350, for a grand-total well over 16,000.
In Ottawa the day opened with church services, for Catholics at Notre Dame Cathedral with 900 faithful, with an overflow crowd of 300 in the basement, and another 800 people at St. Patrick’s Basilica. The day concluded with the customary Rose dinner for 1000 in the main dining hall and another 250 in another room. There, the large majority again were young pro-lifers. Salt and Light TV recorded the day for a DVD presentation to be shown sometime in July.
The media, as mentioned, were silent despite efforts to bring them on stream. Campaign Life Toronto called several contacts at the CBC. By accident a CBC interior memo reached these contacts which instructed employees not to answer return calls “as the event is of no consequence.” So much for the atheist view.
In Ontario, there was indeed no coverage of the March at all. There was one small photo in Toronto’s free paper Metro, and a very tiny piece with an equally tiny insignificant photo of three people shouting, in the Ottawa Citizen. That was it!
There were two articles, one in the National Post by Michael Coren and one by Gloria Galloway in the Globe and Mail on the same date as the March itself, May 14.
Coren recalled some basic facts about the pre-born child and the mother (the two have different DNAs) and noted that in eleven years of the March for Life not a single act of violence had taken place, with the crowds singing and praying.
The Globe headed its article “Forty years later, abortion debate rages on,” with the subtitle, “On anniversary of procedure’s legalization in Canada, thousands expected to protest on Parliament Hill.” It then accompanied the story with a 1984 photo of a smiling Henry Morgentaler and a dozen supporters shouting and waving their hands in the air (presumably after Morgentaler’s acquittal by a jury of illegally opening an abortuary in Toronto. It was, of course, illegal but the jury had been cleverly pre-selected by Morgentaler’s lawyer Morris Manning).
On the following day, May 15, the National Post printed a large photo of a section of the crowd in rain gear and umbrellas. One day after that, May 16, Rory Leishman, columnist of the London Free Press, was able to publish a well-written commentary on the 40th anniversary in that paper under the title “Social chaos awaits unless Parliament restores restraint.” He emphasized future disastrous social and economic consequences of divorce, abortion and contraceptives all enacted by the “great” Pierre Trudeau and his Liberal Cabinet.
Let me close on a Liberal note. On May 13, Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff issued the statement:
“It is the longstanding view of the Liberal Party of Canada that women must have the right to choose and this party will take no step that limits, or opens the door to limiting access to safe medical services for women across Canada.”
I will not now comment on “right to choose” and “safe medical services,” after three and a half million babies have been slaughtered and tens of thousands of women suffer from the after-effects. It seems to me that Ignatieff has just written the death notice of the Liberal Party.
