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MP Rachael Harder

October 5, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Earlier this week, Liberal and NDP Members of Parliament forced an unwilling Conservative to take the chair of the Status of Women Committee after blocking Lethbridge MP Rachael Harder from the position because of her pro-life views. 

The Liberal Party apparently thought that this was a wise move, with Liberal Pam Damoff nearly quivering with righteous indignation and Justin Trudeau, the Feminist PM, being more than happy to affirm that he was a big fan of independent women unless they held different opinions than his own. 

The Liberals claimed that Conservative leader Andrew Scheer was attempting to make abortion an issue again with his nomination of Harder, but the reaction of the public and the commentators was almost universally opposed to the Liberal move.

The decision of the Liberals to target Rachael Harder is not an isolated political event. 

Right across the country, Canadian politicians seem to have made the calculated decision that targeting people with pro-life or social conservative views—specifically Christians, as they don’t appear to have realized yet that their prohibitions and denunciations of those with traditional views will also include practicing Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs—is a great way to virtue-signal their intolerance of intolerance to the progressive public and create a scapegoat to attack viciously whenever a distraction is needed.

In Ontario, for example, Premier Kathleen Wynne is currently attempting to deflect attention from her abysmal economic record and skyrocketing hydro prices by banning peaceful protests outside abortion clinics, insinuating that pro-lifers posed a physical threat to abortion clinic staff. Her attorney general solemnly announced that they’d abandoned other legislation to work on the ban to ensure people were protected from people quietly praying or offering alternatives at the clinics. It’s also no coincidence that Trudeau’s Liberals decided to make an issue of Rachael Harder’s personal convictions at precisely the moment that a national uproar over their “tax reform” plan that would have taxed everyone but the millionaires in their own caucus was going on. 

In Alberta, the wildly unpopular NDP Premier Rachel Notley and her insidious Education Minister David Eggen have decided to attack United Conservative Party leadership candidate Jason Kenney for suggesting that parents should know what their children are up to when away from home and in the care of government employees. Notley announced that this was “super-cruel,” indicating that she thinks Alberta parents literally pose a physical threat to their children’s safety if informed of their activities, and Eggen announced that he was going to work on legislation to ensure that nobody would even be allowed to tell parents what their children were doing or what clubs they were joining. The Alberta NDP are clear: They are going to protect children from their parents, and protect the province from the evil Christians.

Unfortunately, there are a number of political opportunists who have decided that these attacks on Canada’s social conservatives are too effective to rebut, and that it is better to instead join in condemning them and competing with left-wing politicians for so-called “progressive” voters. Ontario’s Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown is the obvious example—he wooed social conservatives in order to secure the leadership of the party, and has now flipped on virtually everything, attempting to prove to Wynne’s voters that he is easily as liberal as she is. United Conservative Party leadership candidate Brian Jean of Alberta is another example—he has condemned social conservatives and suggested that they have no place in any party he leads in the past, but is trying to minimize those statements in order to secure the party leadership. If he wins, we will most likely see him turn into the Patrick of the Prairies.

It is important that Christians recognize what is going on here, and realize that our communities are being scapegoated in order to allow failing politicians to demonize their opponents and distract from their incompetence. There are actually far more Canadians from a wide range of cultural and religious beliefs who oppose the abortion status quo, disagree with radical sex education, and find much of the sexual ideology being pushed by Wynne, Brown, and Notley distasteful—which is why the backlash against Ontario’s sex education curriculum changes was not led by Christians, but by those of other faith backgrounds. It will be essential in the coming years to partner with other communities who also seek to pass on their values to their children without government interference and recognize that life and family are precious and of primary importance. 

Only when progressive politicians realize that their attempts to demonize and disenfranchise Christians for their convictions will result in the silencing of millions of Canadians from other communities will they be forced to pause.

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Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.