Michael Swan

The evidence piling up before a special joint committee on Medical Assistance in Dying includes a disability rights advocate calling Canadian senators and MPs racist and ableist to their faces.

Above and beyond. Having promised to contribute a substantial chunk of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ national commitment to donate $30 million over the next five years to the Indigenous Reconciliation Fund, the Diocese of Hamilton is now planning to raise even more money with annual envelope collections.

I’ve spoken to Cardinal Joseph Zen a couple of times. He’s a difficult interview — hard headed, spoiling for a fight and rather in love with his own opinions.

For six days in July the most important thing happening in this country will be an old man confronting our history.

Before rising before the gathered at St. Michael’s Cathedral-Basilica as priests, each of four men accepted a chalice from Cardinal Thomas Collins. The chalice was a gift to Toronto Bishop Armand-François-Marie de Charbonnel from Pope Pius IX in the 1850s.

This will be a better summer for migrant workers on Canadian farms, but only because local health authorities have become better at identifying and controlling COVID-19 outbreaks and not because Canada has addressed fundamental issues that made COVID into a rolling disaster across farm country the last two summers, says Connie Sorio.

Pope Francis will visit a residential school and will very likely be seen on the shores of Lac Ste. Anne during the annual pilgrimage to Manitou Sakahigan – Cree for “Lake of the Spirit.”

Francis will visit Quebec City, Iqaluit and Edmonton between July 24 and 29, adding the weight of his office to Canadian Catholic efforts to reconcile with Indigenous Canadians and to repair the damage done by Catholic-run residential schools.

Retired Major Bob Near doesn’t dispute that Canada’s military has a problem. But he has a problem with at least one of the solutions the Minister of Defence’s Advisory Panel on Systemic Racism and Discrimination has proposed.

Daria Prodan has been in Canada a month since she fled Odessa, Ukraine, for Bucharest, Romania, and then made her way to a new normal in Owen Sound, Ont., but her English is great. In an interview the confident 23-year-old chooses her words carefully, but rarely hesitates — until she’s asked about the Russkiy Mir (Greater Russia) concept driving Russia’s vast army over the border and into her country.