National President Jim Hughes | ||
Formation 1978; 39 years ago (1978) Headquarters 300-104 Bond Street
Toronto, Ontario Website campaignlifecoalition.com | ||
The Campaign Life Coalition (often called Campaign Life) is a Canadian non-partisan political lobbyist organization founded in 1978. Based in Toronto, the organization advocates for socially conservative values. In addition to its initial goals of opposing abortion and euthanasia, Campaign Life Coalition advocates for what it considers traditional family values including opposition to same-sex marriage.
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Ontario politics
At the provincial level in Ontario, Campaign Life helped to establish and initially supported the Family Coalition Party (FCP). Following the FCP's name change to the New Reform Party of Ontario and the election of Patrick Brown as the new leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario in 2015, the CLC seemingly switched support to the Ontario PCs. The CLC endorsed Brown's bid for the leadership, along with other social conservative leadership candidate Monte McNaughton, and released a statement congratulating Brown on his victory. The group later became critical of Brown after he publicly announced that he would not repeal the new provincial sex education curriculum changes if he becomes premier. Its LifeSiteNews website even called Kathleen Wynne and Justin Trudeau more honest than Brown, because they openly campaigned for the social values that they supported, while Brown's policy changes on social issues made it difficult to know what his views are.
Federal politics
In 2005 the coalition criticised the Conservative Party of Canada for nominating John Baird and Peter Kent to run as candidates, as both had supported the legalization of same-sex marriage. It expressed support for John Pacheco's "independent conservative" candidacy against Baird in Ottawa West—Nepean, and for Greg Watrich's independent candidacy against sitting Tory MP James Moore (Port Moody—Westwood—Port Coquitlam), a supporter of Bill C-38.
Campaign Life endorsed candidates Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux in the 2017 Conservative leadership election.
LifeSiteNews
Campaign Life Coalition founded LifeSiteNews, a news website dedicated to issues of culture, life, and family that was created in 1997. LifeSiteNews "is a non-profit Internet service dedicated to issues of culture, life, and family." It also runs Daily News reports and information pages "to provide balance and more accurate coverage on culture, life and family matters than is usually given by other media." Its writers and researchers "are located in various cities in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Italy, Australia, New Zealand and France," and it also runs a Spanish version of LifeSiteNews.com. A pro-choice Catholic priest, Raymond Gravel (died 2014), "who bluntly spoke out in favour of gay marriage, ordination of gay priests and a more tolerant attitude toward abortion", filed a lawsuit against the website in 2011 for defamation. In 2013, the lawsuit was allowed to advance to trial by a Quebec court.