Dennis Gruending

Dennis Gruending is an Ottawa-based author and former Member of Parliament. He is also a former director of information for the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. His books include the biography, Emmett Hall: Establishment Radical and his latest book is Pulpit and Politics: Competing Religious Ideologies in Canadian Public Life, recently released by Kingsley Publishing Services of Calgary. His blog can be found linked below.

Website: http://www.dennisgruending.ca/pulpitandpolitics/

Catholic bishops vs Development and Peace

Nov 262012

Faith speaks

Lay revolt follows cancellation of fall education campaign.

by Dennis Gruending

The Catholic aid agency Development and Peace (D and P) is in turmoil after the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) pressured the organization in September to scuttle an educational post card campaign just as D and P was about to distribute the material. The postcards, which were to be sent to the Prime Minister, asked that he have a parliamentary committee undertake a national consultation on the future of Canadian development assistance.

CRA hassles Canadian Mennonite Magazine

Nov 112012

Features

Richard Benner, Editor, Canadian Mennonite

Editor warned charitable tax status could be jeopardized by "partisan" articles.

by Dennis Gruending

The editor of Canadian Mennonite magazine says that he was puzzled, saddened and disheartened to get a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency warning that his publication was being too political and could lose its charitable status as a result. “I took it personally,” writes editor Richard Benner in the magazine’s November 12 edition.

Towards a Department of Peace

Nov 042012

Features

We get what we prepare for.

by Dennis Gruending

I was one of the speakers at a public consultation held in Ottawa on November 3 by the Canadian Department of Peace Initiative (CDPI). The group has been advocating for federal government legislation to create a Canadian Department of Peace. The rationale is that the Department of National Defence is devoted to planning and prosecuting war but that we should also have a Department of Peace with a minister at the cabinet table. His or her department would be responsible for providing a peace lens in all federal government activities as well as promoting peace building activities in Canada and abroad.

Prison chaplains and dogwhistle code words

Oct 192012

Faith speaks

Christian-only counselling panders to Harperites' electoral base.

by Dennis Gruending

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews decided recently to cancel the contracts of all 49 part-time chaplains in Canada’s federal prisons. Eighteen of those chaplains are non-Christians. Another 80 full-time chaplains remain; 79 of them are Christians. That leaves only one non-Christian chaplain, an imam, in the entire federal prison system. The public reaction, at least as expressed in the media, has been almost entirely opposed. Even the Conservative-friendly Calgary Herald was mildly negative.

Toews may (or not) care about negative public comment — he has had plenty of that in the past few years. But he has also won five federal elections in a socially and religiously conservative area of Manitoba and he knows well how to play to his political base. He also speaks in a code that they understand and he is doing that in the narrative of dissed prison chaplains.

Carleton’s political management program questioned

Jul 242012

Features

Deal with main donor raises issues of academic freedom and accountability.

Carleton University in Ottawa has received a metaphorical black eye in its attempt to keep secret the details of an agreement that created its one-year Master's degree in Political Management. The program was brokered by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning and funded by Calgary oil magnate Clayton H Riddell. After a year of Carleton's stonewalling, the information and privacy commissioner of Ontario ordered the university to comply with a request by Canadian Press to make the agreement public.

It turns out that the program's five-person steering committee has what Canadian Press describes as "sweeping power" over the program's budget, academic hiring, its executive director and curriculum. Preston Manning acts as Chair, the Riddell Foundation gets to appoint two members and the university also appoints two. In publicity surrounding its launch in 2010, the program was described as "cross-partisan" in nature, but people with political connections to Manning are prominent on both the steering committee and the academic staff.

Warrior Nation

May 152012

Canadian politics

Harperites glorify the War of 1812 to promote militarism to a peaceful nation.

by Dennis Gruending

Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety is a new book by Kingston-based author Jamie Swift and Queen's University historian Ian McKay. It is the story of how the Canadian government and military, assisted by complicit historians, think tanks and some media, are trying to shift public opinion to support a new militarism. "[They] are attempting to establish war as the pith and essence of all Canadian history," Swift and McKay write. To do that, they have, in the words of the authors, to "conscript Canadian history" — that is, to glorify wars past and present.

Rebranding 1812
The big project this year is an attempt to rebrand the War of 1812 between Britain (along with its Canadian colony) and the United States. That part of the war fought on what is now Canadian soil was, in reality, a series of tawdry and incompetently planned skirmishes in which neither side really won. But the "new warriors", led by the Prime Minister Stephen Harper and assisted by a platoon of Defence department flacks and eager academics, are attempting to turn 1812 into an epic Canadian victory.

First potash, now wheat

Apr 042012

Features

Viterra kills Saskatchewan Wheat Pool legacy.

by Dennis Gruending

Farmers fought long and hard to create the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool in 1924. Eighty-eight years later the company, now known as Viterra, is being sold to a Swiss-based multinational called Glencore for $6.1 billion. This is a sad story, a kind of morality tale about the gradual destruction of self-help, local initiative, community control and co-operation. With a few exceptions, there has been virtually no critical media analysis of this event that looks at it from the bottom up.

So, as someone who grew up in a small prairie village where the Wheat Pool elevator and the local Pool committee were fixtures, let me offer some observations. I'll begin with an anecdote. I co-hosted CBC Radio's morning show in Saskatchewan in the 1980s. One day I did an interview with EK (Ted) Turner, a farmer who served for many years as the Pool's president. A disgruntled Pool member had provided me with information about an impending increase in Turner's salary to something like $120,000 per year. The farmer thought this was outrageously high. I asked Turner about it in the interview (I admit it was a bit of an ambush) and he was clearly taken aback. That salary today, if one accounts for inflation, would be about $250,000 per year.

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