Four of Canada’s fastest growing cities are in the West, where Calgary and Edmonton have posted the highest percentage increases in population among the country’s 33 metropolitan areas.

Calgary grew by 12.6% between 2006 and 2011, Edmonton by 12.1%, Saskatoonby 11.4% and Kelowna, B.C., by 10.8%.

Now, I’m not saying that has anything to do with Ruth Lobo Shaw reinstating the pro-life group at Carleton University in 2006, but it IS a coincidence.

Read a little bit more about him in this light piece at the Post.

Naomi Lakritz also weighs in on our 400-year-old approach to when life begins, here. (It’s past 5 am, and there’s no water in my trough!)

I’ll get the discussion started with a little debate statement.

BIRT it is okay to kill girls when a North American feminist advocates for this on the grounds of free choice but not okay when someone does so because of cultural dictates for son preference. Talk amongst yourselves.

A brilliant article and well worth the read especially in light of Stephen Woodworth’s continued efforts (and motion today in the House of Commons) to re-open the debate that is trying with all its might to remain closed.

And this enforcement of a new status quo succeeds so well due, surely, to benefits enjoyed as a result—benefits of an order that make acceptable even the killing of innocents, by their protectors, on a scale that freezes the imagination. How much then must depend on its remaining so, remaining beyond question? This is the nub of that ideological word choice. So much else can be chosen in a given life if the option to dispose of unwanted children is dependably available.”

Mr. Hope said he was worried the procedure, done with the patient in stirrups, might be a little “feminizing,” but said clinic staff acted sensitively to the situation.

You don’t say.

It won’t be until over a decade later, when I am well into the actual world of parenthood, frazzled and overwhelmed with love and impatience for the tiny creature I have created, that I will realize that if I had actually had a baby at age nineteen it might have been the very thing that would have kept me from the years and years of misery and destruction ahead of me. It won’t be until I am finally a mother myself, and not until my cheek rests against my child’s soft downy head, that I will realize the bleakness of what I did all those years before.

Even if some forms of partiality are inevitable, journalists betray their calling when they simply ignore self-evident truths about a story.

Three truths, in particular, should be obvious to everyone reporting on the Komen-Planned Parenthood controversy. First, that the fight against breast cancer is unifying and completely uncontroversial, while the provision of abortion may be the most polarizing issue in the United States today. Second, that it’s no more “political” to disassociate oneself from the nation’s largest abortion provider than it is to associate with it in the first place. Third, that for every American who greeted Komen’s shift with “anger and outrage” (as Andrea Mitchell put it), there was probably an American who was relieved and gratified.

In the wake of Komen’s decision, the Yale School of Public Health told the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff that its invitation to Nancy Brinker to be its commencement speaker was now “under careful review.” Because God forbid anybody doing a master’s program at an Ivy League institution should be exposed to anyone not in full 100 percent compliance with liberal orthodoxy. 

The Tories decided to just pre-empt it all by committing to not reopen the debate, period. It was broad, and it helped silence the critics — sort of — but also painted them into a corner. They can’t really do a single thing about abortion without being justifiably accused of reneging.

He goes on to say:

There’s an argument to be made that on an issue like this, there’s a moral imperative to do something regardless of past promises. But I’m not holding my breath.

And of course there is, but our Prime Minister knew that before he started in with this “we will not re-open the debate” zombie-like meme. He could have done just as well by declaring his bias to be “we will allow for freedom of speech” (who is against freedom of speech? But he chose not to do that.)

I’m quite OK with saying that the time is not now for the political debate. Furthermore, we still need to loosen the stranglehold of radical feminism on the media. So much of what pro-lifers say, think and believe is still twisted beyond recognition, the National Post being a fantastic exception for the freedom they allow. So there’s hope, but I’d wait it out for a bit of a fairer playing field.

The bulk of PP’s breast-health work is simply referring their clients to outside facilities. “Sorry, no help for you here.” In fact yesterday, Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure CEO Nancy Brinker and President Elizabeth Thompson revealed they halted funding to PP for this very reason. “We have decided not to fund, wherever possible, pass-through grants. We were giving them money, they were sending women out for mammograms. What we would like to have are clinics where we can directly fund mammograms.”

The spin continues.