Canada is entering its sixth year of leadership under the minority governments of, consecutively, Paul Martin's Liberals and Stephen Harper's Conservatives. If the most recent polls and punditry is to be believed, even another election in the fall (the fourth in five and a half years) is unlikely to change that. The first reason for this is widely accepted: The reconciliation of Canadian conservatives following the fissure of the 1990s between the Reform Party and the Progressive Conservatives has created a powerful single force. While its permanence, given history, is not to be taken for granted, its bond appears firmly fixed. Despite governing in the midst of the nation's worst recession in more than a generation, the Conservative Party of Canada's standing in the polls remains little different if not better today than a year ago. Under the fresh leadership of Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal party has rediscovered its traditional base in Quebec and once again is a strong candidate for power in the fall. But neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals, who between them represent the inclinations of 70% or more of Canadians, are likely to achieve a majority. The largest single reason for this is the enormous campaign advantage the Bloc Quebecois and its leader, Gilles Duceppe, enjoy due to the party's narrow ambitions and the public funding of campaigns. The Liberals, Jack Layton's NDP, Elizabeth May's Green Party and the Tories must deploy campaign efforts strategically to spend the most amount of time in areas of the greatest opportunities and threats. The Conservatives, for instance, need not spend as much time in Alberta and Saskatchewan where their seats are relatively safe, but must keep a high presence in Vancouver, southern Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes where threats and opportunities abound. Layton also has seats in Atlantic Canada he has to defend and seek, as w ell as Montreal, Toronto, various areas of Ontario and all across the West. Ditto for Ignatieff. In fact, the Conservatives have seats in nine of the 10 provinces and one territory, as do the Liberals, while the NDP is close behind with MPs from eight provinces and one territory. All of Duceppe's eggs are in one convenient basket, making his task much simpler. The enormous northern ridings of Abitibi-Temiscamingue and Manicouagan are Bloc strongholds. Other ridings in eastern Quebec are also safe, which allows Duceppe to focus on contentious ridings. When the risks and opportunities are broken down, he only needs to focus on about 24 ridings and while other leaders are flying coast to coast, the Bloc leader sleeps at home. Then there's the media advantage. Duceppe's constituency is almost entirely francophone, which means he can target advertising primarily through Quebec francophone networks where advertising rates are less expensive than national buys. Because he is able to spend all his time in one province, the Bloc leader is guaranteed prominent if not dominant play on Quebec's election newscasts and front pages. His image and messages appear more frequently while, unburdened by a record of governance, he is free to attack and diminish others without having to worry about effective and repetitive counterpoints or defensive strategies. No such luxuries are afforded leaders of national parties whose supporters must simmer in the knowledge the Bloc finances campaigns entirely through the federal funding for political parties, leaving private sources to its ideological confreres in the Parti Quebecois. Absent an unlikely change in the funding structure, little will change until 2014 when, due to population shifts, B.C. will get seven more MPs, Alberta five and Ontario 20. Were those in play in the 2008 election, for instance, the Conservatives might have 18 more seats, the Liberals eight more and the NDP six more. The Conservatives might still have been shy of a majority in a 340-seat House of Commons but in the future a majority will be much more within reach as Quebec's electoral value declines in proportion to the rest of the country. Significantly, B.C., with 43, and Alberta, with 33, will have a combined total of 76 MPs, one more than Quebec's 75, which due to stagnant population levels will not increase. Then and in all likelihood only then will the Bloc Quebecois,s stranglehold on Canada,s politics be released.

Research Fellow Geoff Ryan is featured on Listen Up TV as a guest speaker on urban poverty. Watch his commentary here.

Theos publishes Senior Fellow Jonathan Chaplin on Talking God: The Legitimacy of Religious Public Reasoning launched June 23, 2009 in the British House of Commons. Download Report

Stanley Carlson-Thies, "Faith-Based Initiative 2.0: The Bush Faith-Based and Community Initiative," (download PDF) Harvard J. of Law and Public Policy (Summer 2009). Read more about Stanley's work with the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance.

The question: Can religion save the world? The debate about whether "religion" or "secularism" stands the best chance of alleviating 21st-century political conflicts will continue to be mired in debilitating confusion unless we are clear what people mean when they speak of a "secular state" (or a "secular international order"). First, a state may be called secular if it is officially committed to a secularist faith such as atheism or materialism or secular humanism and to propagating it through state action. This is "militant secularism", the kind witnessed under Communism. Second, a state may be deemed secular if, while upholding private religious liberty, it strives to keep the influence of religious faith out of public debate and public institutions. This is "exclusive secularism", the variety defended by the National Secular Society. Third, a state may be termed secular if it refrains from officially endorsing any one religious creed, adopting a stance of impartiality towards all. This is "impartial secularism"; it flows out of the logic of religious toleration. Fourth, a state may be thought of as secular if it refrains from officially offering religious justifications for its laws or policies, presenting to the public only "public good arguments". This is "justificatory secularism". While impartial secularism is a matter of what the state does (or refrains from doing) towards religious citizens, justificatory secularism is a matter of how it speaks about what it does. My central proposition is that religion stands the best chance of mitigating political conflict if it embraces the latter two meanings of a secular state and a secular international political order. Above all, religion should support impartial secularism, urging the state to grant effective equal legal standing to all (law-abiding) religions within its realm. The suppression of religious freedom will continue to be a chief cause of violent political conflict in the century ahead, and those states that engage in it, notably officially Islamic states, must face ceaseless pressure from defenders of impartial secularism everywhere. Impartial secularism can exist without justificatory secularism, and departures from the latter are less inherently politically divisive than breaches of the former. But where states officially invoke religious justifications for their actions they risk alienating those of their citizens who cannot endorse such justifications. Justificatory secularism on the part of the state can engender a sense of equal respect among all citizens and so help pre-empt or ease religiously-based political divisions. But it is essential to insist that justificatory secularism does not imply exclusive secularism. For states and state officials to refrain from officially invoking religious arguments in support of state actions is entirely compatible with protecting an extensive and intensive contribution from religious faith to public debate both outside and inside parliaments, right up to the point of the official announcement of a policy decision. While we should call upon states to respect justificatory secularism, we cannot impose a similar restraint on the justifying reasons advanced by citizens or their elected representatives. That would have silenced Desmond Tutu in his campaign against apartheid. Allowing freer reign for religious expression may make democratic debate more turbulent. It may make secularist and religious believers uncomfortable. It will certainly require everyone to bone up on the religious (or secularist) beliefs of those they find themselves debating with. Tony Blair's attempt to create greater religious awareness among school children thus seems eminently sensible and NSS's opposition to it leaves me scratching my head since I thought it favoured banishing ignorance. It is a chief error of many secularist believers to suppose that impartial secularism implies exclusive secularism, that the state cannot treat religions equally unless public policy debates are secularised. This is both a prejudicial and a dangerous error. Its consequence is the marginalisation of those citizens for whom religious faith is both the deepest and the most comprehensive source of normative guidance. Exclusive secularism is therefore both illiberal and anti-democratic and is guaranteed to fuel existing religious tensions or evoke latent ones. The track record of conflict-resolution through imposed public secularism is, to say the least, unimpressive, as the case of Turkey makes clear. Religion will neither be the dominant source of 21st-century political conflicts nor the unique solution to them. But religions, and political orders, which embrace impartial and justificatory secularism while rejecting militant and exclusive secularism may be well placed to help mitigate them.

Thirty years ago, buying advertising was easy. You purchased an ad in the local newspaper, maybe one in a magazine and on TV and, shazam!, people showed up at your store or auto dealership and bought your stuff. You made money, the media made money and people got the information and product information they needed. When it came to finding a car, a place to live or a job, there was really only one place to go, the classified advertising department of your local newspaper. In those days, people subscribed to newspapers the way they today subscribe to cable. Virtually everybody did it. Enormous, responsive audiences were guaranteed. It was not unusual for newspapers to have a 'read yesterday' rating of 70 per cent or better. The first big shift came when local TV newscasts became so powerful that hundreds of afternoon newspapers across North America moved to morning delivery or died. But the business was still good, so good, in fact, that everybody wanted a piece of it and, even before the Internet, media began to fragment. For many newspapers which over the course of a century or more had enjoyed virtual monopoly status this meant learning to compete and being more responsive to audiences and advertisers. Community relations departments became marketing departments, for instance, as operators learned they had to actually sell their products and value to the community. Some did it well, some did it poorly. But they all continued to do just fine until the green sprouts of the technology age matured almost overnight into the solid oak of the Internet and the single audience and advertising platform that print once represented was blown apart. Breaking news, formerly the sole preserve of print, could now be delivered on demand to people's desktops and Black- Berry smartphones. Heck, you can read it on screens in office tower elevators. Newspapers had two options. One was to adapt to their new role as carriers of commentary, context and analysis of news to distinguish themselves online and the other was to continue to do what they had always done in terms of product creation, assuming that they could just transfer it to the online world. Recognizing that what was most at risk was the lucrative gold mine of classified advertising, papers also launched their own online products to make sure they retrieved at least a portion of the lost, help wanted, rentals and auto advertising. Still, the toll was inescapable. What was once unimaginable is now taking place and, particularly in the U.S., newspapers are dying. For business people who have relied on print to deliver their product information, this is an enormously confusing dilemma. The once simple task of placing an ad and waiting for the phone to ring or the line to form is now a complex weave of picking and choosing between print, broadcast and online deliveries too numerous to mention. But should you abandon print as so many are saying? As a former newspaper executive my answer is: no, I don't think so. Diminished as they are, newspapers can still build audiences bigger than most as a single buy. Readership declines have more or less stabilized over the past eight years and while newsrooms are shadows of their former selves, they are still much larger than those elsewhere. Most of all, while new media has proven to be unstoppable in certain advertising categories, it has yet to prove its effectiveness when it comes to selling retail products. Yes, many newspapers will die. The herd will be culled. The ones that survive will not be those that deliver what is essentially a print version of their online news capacity to people's doorsteps. Quite the opposite: people don't just need news, which can now be delivered on hundreds of different platforms. They need context, meaning and explanation. Newspapers that recognize this evolutionary opportunity and invest in it may never be the bastions of profitability they once were. But under the appropriate structure they can retain and build the audiences they need to survive as solid businesses and serve their communities. It might be the end of the day, but it's way too early to pull the plug on print.

The City of Calgary's Centre City project is one of the most dynamic urban planning documents I've read in a long time. It defines the heart of one of North America's great cities; one of the world's cleanest cities and Canada's emerging centre of economic and cultural influence. It clearly outlines the future infrastructure of a downtown core that is, in its own words, "a livable, caring and thriving place within a first-class urban living environment and a national and global centre of business." Economic, social, cultural and environmental sustainability is a core objective for a plan that in the short run will see 25,000 additional people living in the newly defined city centre, while in the longer term as many as 70,000 people will settle in the area that for many years has been the hole in Calgary's residential doughnut. Last fall, having completed our Toronto the Good project, we at Cardus used the Centre City initiative as the foundation for the beginning of our examination of Calgary's social architecture and how it is expressed through the urban planning process. What we came across was what could be a rather unique omission. Within all of the plan's detailed and admirable initiatives, there is no mention of or accommodation for new institutions of faith. Yes, there are a great many existing faith institutions in the downtown area and some such as the old Wesley United Church have become secular institutions such as the Arata Opera Centre. So we know there is some existing capacity to serve the social and spiritual needs of the population influx the Centre City plan will inspire. But we also know intuitively that existing infrastructure represents a different Calgary than the one that exists today. There are no mosques or temples within the Centre City, which means that while there is some existing Christian and Jewish infrastructure downtown, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and other members of Calgary's multicultural mosaic must travel to the suburbs or fringes of the city to pray and engage with other members of their faith community. If existing capacity is not sufficient to meet their needs, the same will be the case for Christians and Jews. Institutions of faith belong at the centre of cities and not physically and metaphorically on their fringes. These are places of community care and emotional healing. They can and are used for girl guide and boy scout meetings, day cares, seniors centres, AA meetings, choirs, concerts and more. One in three Calgarians attends worship at least once a month and each imam, rabbi, priest and pastor has at his or her fingertips the names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of hundreds if not thousands of good-hearted citizens ready to step up and volunteer in the event of disaster. When all the hotels were full and all those people were stranded at Calgary airport on 9/11, it was the airport chaplain's office that triggered the calls that opened up homes and found people in distress a safe place to stay. Last month, Cardus outlined its plan for a next step in addressing this issue by gathering 50 community stakeholders, including several aldermen (who have been very supportive) at the Ranchmen's Club. Our proposal is to conduct an audit of the Centre City's existing faith infrastructure and report back on its capacity to serve the needs of the additional tens of thousands of Calgarians who will be moving to its core. And, as we work with funders, we will also propose innovations to meet needs that are identified. Current parking bylaws, for instance, make zoning for institutions of faith problematic. In fact, if the current parking bylaw had been in effect during the past and previous centuries there wouldn't be any churches at all in Calgary's core. But that doesn't mean a project as innovative as the Centre City plan couldn't create space, for instance, for churches built right into condominium buildings, or mosques within the plus-15 network or even shared-space venues available for Muslim worship on Fridays, Jewish Sabbath on Saturdays and Christian worship on Sundays. Whether you care about faith or even have one is not the point. The good work that is done by these institutions is vital to sustaining any community's social capital. Centre City may give Calgary a new heart. It's important that it also cares for its soul.

Cardus is announcing a new research initiative to Build Capacity in Canada's Charitable Sector The project aims to stimulate the civic core and strengthen the so-called "third sector", a progressively critical industry in times of economic decline. Browse the research proposal below, or click here to download the PDF.

Cardus warmly congratulates Senior Fellow, and Comment Editor Gideon Strauss on his appointment as the new President of the Center for Public Justice, in Washington. Gideon will continue to serve as Editor and Senior Fellow with Cardus, but from a somewhat greater distance. We congratulate both Gideon and the Center on an excellent new appointment! To read CPJ's news announcement click here.