In March of this year Listen Up evangelical host Lorna Dueck gave the five federal candidates two uninterrupted minutes to answer this question: Describe your faith and the role it plays in your life?”The end few seconds of the clip is the most interesting.
Dueck is a bit like David Brody (a good reporter working for CBN) and both play past their evangelical base. Recently Dueck had Dennis Gruending on Listen Up to talk about the role of religion in the 2008 election.

Former MP and historian Gruending believes as to researcher and scholars that religion is having an influence on Canadian politics, faith plays a role in voter behavior.

While he believes an alliance of Catholics and conservative evangelical ‘family voters’ had an impact on the last election, it is too early to tell whether that will be the case in ‘08. He outlines
Canadian history, while it was important to Canada’s early leaders, faith and politics were separated by the fathers of Confederation.
He mentions the Laurier/Catholic fight in Quebec in the 19th century and two ways the depression introduced the social gospel into the Canadian political landscape.

Gruending follows up with a post at his blog breaking down the election kits of various religious groups: KAIROS, The Catholic Bishops, The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and single issue US styled religious right groups such as The Canada Family Action Coalition.

Social ‘values’ voters are not happy with Stephen Harper and The Conservative Party for sidelining their issues. Suzanne Fortin at Blue Wave Canada who runs the SoCon blog aggregator, (a 2007 Family Coalition Party candidate) has told her readers not to vote for the Conservative Party because of the withdrawal of c-484 and the the SoCon push for fetal rights similar to extremist groups in the US. SoCons also lost ground on their desire to restrict and censor Canadian film industry funding, and their protest on Morgentaler’s Order of Canada.
It remains to be seen where they’ll put their efforts when the next government takes their seats in the House of Commons.

No, Harper is not into the abortion issue.

He is not interested in the abortion issue.

He does not want to deal with the abortion issue.
During an Ottawa news conference on Monday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said his government has no plans to re-open the abortion debate or change Canada’s abortion laws.
That should settle it. But they’re not happy, are they?

People who care that much about abortion rights probably wouldn’t vote Conservative in any case.

That’s what I suspect.

Most people would probably welcome some abortion restrictions in any event. Most people are sorely ignorant about abortion, in this country. If they knew what really goes on, they’d be very much in favour of abortion restrictions.

Canadian SoCons emulate the advocacy attacks family values groups, lobbyist and religious corporations use the US, and have pushed hard for a repeal of C-38, fetal rights C-484, and desire federal and provincial laws outlawing abortion.

I think the election as they say, is primarily about the economy stupid. I’d rather have experienced, flexible leaders prepared to propose and implement what solutions they can for Canada, than focus on their relgious views .
We seem to be heading into a recession as the US sinks into depression, and I believe voters aren’t stupid and don’t want to be distracted or lied to. The the global financial crisis will continue to dominate the news cycle and our lives over the next few years and how the financial market meltdown affects Canadians is going to to take primacy in the lives of most of us for a long time.