By Dennis Gruending

The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan is poised for sale to the highest bidder, and shareholders, not to mention company executives, stand to stuff their pockets from a deal when and if it occurs. The company has spurned as inadequate an offer of $38.6-billion (U.S.) from an Australian-based giant called BHP Billiton and has also been in talks with other companies, including two from China. The great and tragic irony for the people of Saskatchewan is that in 1989 a provincial government sold Crown-owned PCS for $630 million, a minute fraction of what it may sell for now. It’s like selling your house and having the new owner flip it for 60 times the price. What has this to do with a blog called Pulpit and Politics? Let’s start with the morality of greed, market fundamentalism, and the common good.

I was a young journalist with a ringside seat in Saskatchewan in 1975 when a government led by Premier Allan Blakeney took over half of the potash industry. I later wrote a biography of Blakeney called Promises to Keep and the potash story is told in that book. Potash (potassium chloride) is used as a component in farm fertilizers, which are in growing demand, notably in China and India, countries that have enormous populations to feed. Saskatchewan has the largest potash deposits in the world. (Read on …)

By Dennis Gruending

(The following post was published in the 20th anniversary edition of The Hill Times newspaper on October 5, 2009):

 The Hill Times is a niche publication in the best sense of the word. It is preoccupied with everything that happens on (and around) Parliament Hill and that cuts a broad swath. I know, based upon my eight years as a staff worker and a Member of Parliament that the newspaper is read avidly by pretty well everyone in the precinct. The Hill Times is also characterized by a civility that provides at least some sense of community in a place where that is not easy to achieve. I have come to occupy a niche of my own since I left the Hill in 2004, returning to consulting, to writing books and now a blog called Pulpit and Politics. I am interested in the growing influence that religion is having upon politics and society in Canada and elsewhere. I am pleased that the Hill Times has published some of my articles on this topic.

God is back

In one of my first blog pieces in November 2007, I reported on a lengthy article carried in The Economist. The magazine’s editor John Micklethwait said, “In the 20th century people, particularly among the elites, tended to think that religion was disappearing. That obviously hasn’t happened.” This year Mickhlethwait has published a 400-page book called God is Back, in which he makes his point in even greater detail. Rather than fading away religion has come to play an increasingly prominent public role in contemporary societies. One has only to think about the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions; the impact of liberation theology in places such as Brazil; the role of the church in Poland; the rise of the religious right in the United States, Canada and elsewhere; the rise of militant Sikhism and Islamic extremism. If ever religion was a marginalized force, it has rebounded markedly and not always for the better. All too often, from Northern Ireland through Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel, religious intrusions have been violent and bloody. Canada, so far at least, is the peaceable kingdom but the culture wars so common south of the border have their echoes in this country as well.

Canada does not exist in a vacuum. An IPSOS-Reid poll reported, for example, that the vote of evangelical Christians and Catholics who attend church weekly was a deciding factor in the election of a Conservative minority government in January 2006. The question is whether that was a blip or an emerging reality in Canadian political life. The religious right is growing in its political influence. Mainline Protestantism has been in decline although it is showing some signs of revival. Conservative Catholics and evangelicals, who once disliked and mistrusted one another, are now engaged in a growing collaboration on issues such as same sex marriage. The Conservatives are assiduously courting those evangelicals, Catholics, and certain Jewish voters as well to join their political coalition. That has caught the attention of other parties. The NDP has responded by creating Faith and Social Justice Commission, which attempts to mobilize a religious constituency on their behalf. Michael Ignatieff has given Toronto-area Liberal MP John Mackay the task of reaching out on behalf of his party to evangelical Christians.

There is a good deal of research and reportage in the United States about the relationship between religion and politics. Journalists follow the power and the money and in the U.S. the religious right has been an important political player since the days of Ronald Reagan. Recently, for example, there has been coverage about what American religious groups are saying about President Obama’s proposed reforms to health care – the response from those organizations has, unfortunately, been mostly opposed to the reforms. Far less attention has been devoted to the relationship between pulpit and politics in Canada.

What the media misses

I have reported on my blog how several Catholic NDP MPs were denied full participation in their church because of their party’s support of same sex marriage legislation. This is an unfortunate regression on the church’s part to the 19th century when the bishops and clergy in Quebec tried to bring Wilfrid Laurier to heel. I have reported on the National Prayer Breakfast, which I believe should become an inter-religious rather than exclusively Christian event. Other of my blog stories have been about what churches had to say about issues in the 2008 election campaign; about how there has been a proliferation of socially and religiously conservative lobby groups in Ottawa in the past several years; about religion and multiculturalism; about how some MPs and senior bureaucrats see the connection between religious faith and their own public lives.

A story that the mainstream media both covered and missed was the Prime Minister’s promotion of two individuals to senior positions in the PMO in March 2009. Darrel Reid became chief of staff and Paul Wilson replaced him as PMO policy director. Reid and Wilson have deep roots in both religious and political organizations. Reid was chief of staff to Reform Party leader Preston Manning while he was leader of the opposition. Later he became the president of Focus on the Family Canada, a conservative Christian lobby group that has worked against public childcare, same-sex marriage, and against adding sexual orientation to a list of minorities protected from hate crimes.

Wilson has worked for Trinity Western University, which is based in Langley, B.C. and is one of the largest evangelical educational institutions in Canada. Trinity established an Ottawa “campus” in 2001 in an old mansion near Parliament Hill. It houses the Laurentian Leadership Centre, which places students as interns with Ottawa-based organizations, predominantly with MPs. Wilson co-ordinated that internship program but when the Conservatives won election in 2006, he left Trinity Western to become a senior policy advisor to Vic Toews, then the justice minister. Wilson later served in a similar policy role for Diane Finley, the minister of human resources.

There is nothing wrong with these individuals occupying senior positions but their combined political and religious connections are worthy of note and journalists reporting the promotions missed the religious side.

Potential stories

There are other potential stories that I have not had the time or resources to follow. For example, the government is rolling out grants under its infrastructure program and a number of them are going to religious institutions. These include grants to the above-mentioned Laurentian Leadership Centre, and larger one to its parent Trinity Western University. Other grants have gone to Atlantic Baptist University in New Brunswick, Redeemer University College in Ontario and the Briercrest Bible School in Saskatchewan. There is a long tradition in Canada of religious schools and hospitals receiving public support, but it would be interesting to see the full list of religious institutions receiving money under the economic stimulus package and a description of the projects involved.

Ultimately, I am interested in how religious faith informs our political decisions – the division of wealth in our society, education and race relations, the environment and foreign policy, to name just a few. People of religious faith should, like anyone else, be welcomed to participate in political debates and movements for the benefit of the common good. But that participation is worthy of journalistic scrutiny undertaken with a sense of detachment and at least some degree of skepticism.

By Dennis Gruending

The federal New Democratic Party wants to reach out to faith-based groups and religiously motivated individuals through its recently created Faith and Social Justice Commission. Joe Comartin, NDP MP for Windsor-Tecumseh, is chair of the Commission’s provisional steering committee. “We are going back to our roots,” Comartin says. “The CCF-NDP was created in large measure by people who were trying to put their religious faith into action, and for many of us faith remains the main motivator for how we practice politics and make policy.”

Comartin says the FSJC was approved in principle at the party’s 2006 convention and officially recognized by the federal council late in 2008. The Commission will present its bylaws and elect officers at the party’s federal convention in Halifax August 14-16, 2009. Comartin says that the Commission has been somewhat slow to get going because there was a federal election in 2008 and a decision not to hold a convention in that year. But he says the Commission has proven worthwhile. “The Commission has already accomplished one major goal and that is to raise the profile of individuals within our party who come to their politics from the perspective of a religious faith.”

The FSJC arose partly from the realization that most often people and groups claiming a religious motivation for their politics in recent years were supporting right wing parties, particularly Reform, the Canadian Alliance, and now the Conservatives. The Harper Conservatives court the religious right and hope to incorporate them into a governing coalition that will wean Canadians from their essentially social democratic tendencies. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has also appointed an Ontario caucus member to lead in outreach to faith-based groups. Ignatieff recently participated in what was billed as a session of dialogue and debate organized by the Canadian Council of Churches.

Pierre Ducasse is a former contender for the NDP leadership and now a staffer who also acts as secretary to the FSJC. He says, “Some people believe that if you come from a faith perspective, you are inherently a conservative, but as social democrats we believe that the central religious message is one of justice and being our brother’s and our sister’s keeper.” Ducasse agrees that the Commission’s activities have so far been sporadic, but he adds, “The very fact that we exist is important. When our MPs meet with people who come from a faith perspective, we tell them about the Commission. For example, when MP Tony Martin meets with groups about poverty issues they are often people of religious faith and they are pleased to hear that we have this Commission.”

Comartin says that he has seen a change occurring among faith-based groups in the past four or five years. “We are witnessing a shift from the primary focus of these groups being right wing and based upon what they call family values back to a more left of centre position. These people are increasingly concerned about peace, poverty and the environment and they are coming at it from a more progressive perspective.”

Ducasse and Comartin agree that Barrack Obama’s effective outreach to faith-based groups during his presidential campaign in 2008 was an important development. Comartin says, “Faith groups in the U.S. became active on behalf of the Democrats in the way that they had been for the Republicans in earlier times. This arose from pastors and others seeing the problems that people in their congregations and their communities were facing, and they became involved in politics because of their faith and their desire to create change. Political leaders are recognizing this.”

There was some criticism from within the NDP in 2006 about creating a party commission that was faith-based, but Comartin says the response has mainly positive. “Our MPs are reporting back from their ridings that a lot of people think this is something that needed to be done for a long time given the importance that religious faith and the social gospel played in the founding of our party.” Comartin says caucus members have been supportive as well and that nine or 10 NDP MPs (out of 37) regularly attend meetings of a faith and social justice caucus.

Comartin says that Rev. Eric Irvin, a Baptist pastor from Kentucky who was deeply involved with the Obama campaign, will speak to a luncheon sponsored by the FSJC at the Halifax convention in August.

By Dennis Gruending

You cannot be a person of faith without being political, says Paul Dewar, the New Democratic Party MP for Ottawa Centre. Dewar spoke to the Faith and Public Life class at the Ottawa Lay School of Theology on February 9th.  “Faith and politics are congruent and we have no option but to be political if we are going to live the gospel. We have to constantly question what the Christian message is, and we can never stop trying to change the way things are in society.” Dewar says that for him the word “political” includes electoral politics but also transcends it. “Our response to faith must be lived out in community,” he says. “Faith is something that we must do and not only think about.”

Dewar talked about how he grew up in a Catholic household in Ottawa in the post-Vatican II era in the 1960s. “My parents were both deeply involved in their church and they extended that into the community. Their faith, their community and their attempt to live the gospel were all of one woven cloth.” Dewar says that their parish priest, a member of the Basilian order, was also a valuable member of the community. “He was quiet and intelligent and able to work with others.” Through him, Dewar became involved in Alleluia House, a project inspired by Jean Vanier (who later created L’Arche) to have a community for people who were developmentally delayed. “These people were not unusual to me, they were my neighbours,” adds Dewar.

Dewar says that his parents’ participation in the Catholic Family Movement in the 1960s “levered their social action.” Initially it was Dewar’s father Ken who was the more political member of the family, but it was his mother Marion, a public health nurse, who eventually ran for public office. “She was involved in the church and extended that into the community and she got into public life in that way.” Marion Dewar became the mayor of Ottawa in 1978 and later served as an NDP Member of Parliament. “I was raised in the Catholic church but in the social democratic faith as well,” Dewar says, “but I would say that it was a 75-25 per cent quotient of faith over politics that influenced who I am.”

He says that it was not easy for Catholics of his parent’s generation to be social democrats (members of the CCF and later the New Democratic Party) because of opposition from many Catholic bishops. Dewar referred a book called Catholics and Canadian Socialism, written by former priest and academic Gregory Baum. In it Baum documents how bishops in Quebec and Saskatchewan in the 1930s and 40s forbade Catholics to support the CCF. The bishops’ in their criticism failed to draw a distinction between communism and the democratic socialism of people like J.S. Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas, who ironically were also religious ministers.

The bishops’ campaign was not entirely successful, Dewar says. “There were agrarian radicals like Joe Burton in Humboldt, Saskatchewan who challenged the church by running for the CCF. We also had Catholic labour people and activists in places such as Antigonish, Nova Scotia doing the same thing. The bishops neither welcomed nor expected debate on these matters but some people began to challenge the church and the Vatican.”

Dewar says that as he grew older and attended university he took a break from the church. “But it never left me. I kept reading and thinking and questioning.” At one point his mother introduced him to the mayor of Managua and following completion of his first university degree Dewar spent six months working in Nicaragua. “I was influenced by what I saw happening in the Christian community there. I saw how poor people who had been in a paternalistic relationship with the church used liberation theology to understand what the gospel was all about. They discovered that social justice and the sharing of resources was what Christ was talking about. I had never seen this manifested to such a degree. It was when I came back from Nicaragua that I came back to the church.”

Dewar became a teacher and later became involved in his union. He was vice-president of the Ottawa Carleton Elementary School Teachers’ Federation and helped establish the teachers’ Humanity Fund, providing donations to projects in developing countries. He was elected to the House of Commons in 2006 and again in 2008. He was asked following his presentation at the Lay School if he talks publicly about his religion in political settings. “Not often,” he replied. “I am prepared to talk openly about faith in settings such as this class, but when speaking in a political capacity I am reluctant to do so because I fear I could be misunderstood, and I do not want to use religion to score political points.”

Dewar says his mother was an example to him in this way as well. “Many people who attended my mother’s funeral and an associated event at Ottawa city hall were surprised to hear about the depth of her faith. She was profoundly spiritual but she was also aware of where faith belonged. She did not place her Catholic faith in the forefront in her public life, and she was also very open to all faiths and religions.”