(LifeSiteNews) — LifeSiteNews recently sat down for an interview with Jack Fonseca, director of political operations for Campaign Life Coalition, the largest and most significant pro-life group in all of Canada. The group facilitates major pro-life events including Life Chain, 40 Days For Life, and the March For Life. In his position, Jack oversees the responsibility of electing pro-life, pro-family, and pro-Christian candidates across Canada. Jack is a devoted Catholic, father, and quietly one of Canada’s most important figures in the pro-life movement. In this discussion, Jack holds nothing back in discussing the evils of the left-wing abortion movement, the failure of the Conservative opposition, and the strategy behind turning Canada into a pro-life country once again.

LSN: How would you describe yourself and what you are fighting for?

Fonseca: Campaign Life Coalition is seeking to restore legal protection to children in the womb who are being murdered at an enormous rate of 100,000 a year. This really is the human rights issue of our day. There’s no other human rights tragedy that compares to what children in Canada are facing, with 100,000 of them [per year] being slaughtered by the knives and suction tubes and burning chemicals of abortionists. I proudly consider Campaign Life Coalition a human rights organization and, in fact, the leading human rights organization in Canada.

LSN: What is the state of the Canadian pro-life movement at this moment in time?

Fonseca: The fact that the pro-life movement exists and hasn’t been shut down in this far-left, radical left country of ours is a small miracle. The fact that we’ve managed to hang on to as much as we have with the Liberals in power for a decade now, and with the various human rights tribunals and left-wing judges that constantly are against us, trying to strip away our freedoms and our ability to speak and to oppose evil, it’s something to be extremely thankful to God for. The pro-life, pro-family movement is still around, we’re still able to voice our demands, and we’re still able to muster a resistance to the evil that all these institutions are pushing. So in that sense we’re still strong, we’re still committed, we’re still growing, I think the pro-life movement is healthy. We are still seeing a greening of the pro-life movement; there’s more and more young people entering into the movement. In spite of the darkness of what the Liberals have done to the nation, we’re still growing. I think when you side with truth, and when you commit yourself to standing for truth, God will provide ways for you to continue to advance, and that applies to us as individuals and as a pro-life movement.

READ: Liberals, allies shut down debate on bill about to become law that threatens religious expression

LSN: What about the legal side?

Fonseca: In terms of legislation, of course, things don’t look good. The Carney Liberals now, and Trudeau Liberals before, are just constantly advancing more and more abortion funding, more ways to increase what they call “access to abortion,” and they’re constantly trying to strip away our freedom of speech and our ability to protest against the evil of abortion. So things do not look good from a legislative level, and from the fact that the Liberals are still in power after 10 years, and there’s enough low-information Canadian voters that continue to apparently re-elect them. However, I’m always encouraged by God’s faithfulness in providing fresh soldiers, if you will, to the pro-life movement.

LSN: Unfortunately we are now one of the most pro-abortion countries in the world. If you could just provide a timeline of the history, how did we get to this point?

Fonseca: The first legislative milestone was in 1969 when Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, legalized abortion by making it part of an omnibus bill. It made it that much harder to oppose passing the legislation. But nonetheless, that bill in 1969, what we call the “day of infamy,” made it legal for a mother to have an abortion and kill the baby in her womb. With that Trudeau Sr. law, everyone who wanted an abortion got an abortion, for lifestyle reasons. It was never for health reasons. And very quickly after becoming law, abortions went up to 67,000 abortions per year.

The abortion industry was not happy with any restrictions at all. They did not like the idea of doctors being able to say, “Well, no, you’re not allowed to have an abortion because there’s no health reason for it. The baby’s not at risk; you’re not at risk.” So Henry Morgentaler, the father of abortion in Canada, started opening up private abortion mills where he broke the law, challenging the Canadian law to put him in prison. Ultimately he was charged at some point, and then that led to a big political battle.

The Liberals and the media pushed hard claiming the usual lies about women dying from unsafe back-alley abortions. That was always a lie. That was never true, not even in 1969. It was always a myth. Even the illegal abortions were committed in doctors’ offices, in very clean conditions. So it was always a lie, but they pressed very hard. The media, the Globe and Mail, all of the CBC, the Toronto Star, they all pushed really hard to brainwash the Canadian public, and that had an impact. It had an impact on legislators and the Supreme Court, and in 1968 the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the existing law that required three doctors to sign off that the abortion was medically necessary [the Morgentaler decision].

Years later the Brian Mulroney PC government did come back with a bill, but it was terrible. It was basically designed to give the appearance of some legal protections, but to provide abortion on demand. The justice minister at the time [Kim Campbell] admitted that she said to the abortion industry, “Hey, don’t be alarmed by this bill. This is to protect you. This is going to be good for you. The public will get the appearance of there being some legal protections for children in the womb, but there, in fact, won’t be any, and we’ll have abortion on demand.” We’ve actually been in a lawless state ever since.

No government, even no Conservative government has had the courage to bring forward a bill to protect children in the womb. So we are literally a lawless nation here in Canada. There is no law for or against abortion. It’s just permitted because there’s no law against it. Basically you can get an abortion right up to the moment of birth if you can find a doctor who’s callous enough, cruel enough, and vile enough to commit it.

LSN: So how would you compare Mark Carney, who is a self-proclaimed Catholic, to his predecessor Trudeau in terms of abortion?

Fonseca: So far he appears to be about the same as Trudeau, which is terrible. Trudeau worked to bring about the maximum number of abortions. He campaigned on that at election time. Every election that Trudeau was in office, he campaigned on increasing the number of abortions, with the euphemism of increasing access to abortion. And of course, if you’re going to increase access to abortion, you want to kill more babies. It means you don’t believe enough babies are being killed in Canada, and you want even more to be murdered.

Carney has the same stance. He’s still funneling money to pay for abortion organizations domestically and abroad. They’re both pro-death to the max. Neither one of them are true Catholics. They call themselves Catholics; I don’t believe it. I think it’s an act to win the Catholic vote. I think both Carney and Trudeau before him were in fact atheists, and they just don’t want to admit it. I think they are God-hating atheists, if not something worse. They wear the label Catholic like you might wear a baseball cap to show off your favorite team at the moment. They wear it so that Catholic voters are fooled and say, “Okay, well, he’s a Catholic, I’m a Catholic, I’m going to vote for him.” It’s terrible.

LSN: The Conservative Party is still the only remaining major party that is not explicitly pro-abortion, yet many still feel disgruntled with the lack of pro-life support within the party. When it comes to abortion, what are your thoughts on the party’s direction?

Fonseca: Obviously we’re extremely disappointed with Pierre Poilievre’s pro-abortion position. He just doesn’t push it the way the Liberal leader does or past Liberal leaders have done, but he pulls out his pro-abortion bona fides when the Liberals attack him or when the media attacks him. It’s extremely disappointing, especially given the fact that Poilievre himself used to be pro-life. He ran for something like five or six elections as a pro-lifer. Campaign Life actually helped him win his first nomination when he was a young guy and he didn’t know anybody. We helped recruit memberships in the party to help him win that nomination, and he’s won ever since. We always green-lit him. We got out the vote for him. And then I believe it was in 2020 when he decided he was interested in running for the leadership, he decided, “Well, this pro-life identity doesn’t work for me anymore. I’m now going to become pro-abortion.”

So that was a huge betrayal from him–especially as someone who’s adopted, who should value the sanctity of life, who should value the life or the choice that his birth mother made to give him life instead of killing him by abortion. It’s really shameful and scandalous that he is aping the Liberals with this pro-death position.

READ: Mark Carney’s budget with millions in abortion, pro-LGBT funding passes House

Now the party, in terms of its policy declaration, is not explicitly pro-abortion; in fact, there are some pro-life policies within the official party policy declaration. So there’s some good, but there is one bad policy that Stephen Harper parachuted in at the Montreal convention in 2005. It wasn’t put forward or advanced or championed by any EDAs. He unethically dropped it into the policy convention to help get the media off his back. It states that the Conservative government or a Conservative government will not support any legislation to regulate abortion. So that’s a policy that doesn’t fit with the other more pro-life policies that are there. I think eventually we’re going to be able to delete that.

The other thing that’s disappointing right now in the Conservative Party is there’s a little over 40 pro-life Conservative MPs in the caucus right now [who are] not allowed to speak on the abortion issue. They’re not allowed to say too much. The leader will attack them, punish them, and silence them. For a party that claims to believe in democracy, and even sends billions of dollars to Ukraine to so-called “defend democracy,” to not allow party democracy here in Canada at home, in our own caucus? It’s crazy. It’s hypocritical. So that’s disappointing.

But as a movement, we are working hard to eventually transform the Conservative Party into a pro-life party. The party cannot ignore us forever. There’s a strong base of social conservatives in the party, between 40 and 70 percent. It’s nothing to sneeze at, and the party cannot ignore us forever. We’ve got to get better at flexing our muscles and having the seat at the table that we deserve.

LSN: Do you believe a Pierre Poilievre-led Conservative Party can and ever will bring forward pro-life legislation, or will it take a different leader to do so?

Fonseca: That’s hard to answer. I think it would probably be more likely with a different leader, one who himself, or herself, still identifies as pro-life. Poilievre, like too many politicians, goes with the wind. If there was a massive culture change in Canada where he was convinced that the way to win would be to be pro-life and to promise pro-life legislation, I think he’d probably go there. Not just him, but believe it or not, I think even the Liberals would go there. If they felt that’s what was necessary to hang on to power, or to win power, they would probably do it. That’s the kind of weathervane politicians that we have, unfortunately, in Canada.

LSN: Are there any other Conservatives that could take the party in a more pro-life direction if named leader?

Fonseca: Right now none are standing out as championing that issue. I guess Arnold Viersen is, as a backbench MP, the most vocal on pro-life issues in terms of making the occasional statement. When Roe v. Wade was overturned in the United States, he put out a good statement supporting the decision. But he doesn’t have a high profile in the party. He doesn’t strike me as wanting leadership. We’ve also supported people like Leslyn Lewis in the past, but again, that’s not an issue she’s talking about right now. We’ll have to wait and see who, the next time there’s a desire by the party to install a new leader, steps forward as a pro-life candidate.

LSN: What are other pro-life options?

Fonseca: I also shouldn’t neglect the other parties that have pro-life offerings. There is the Christian Heritage Party, and that’s a great option for pro-life Canadians to support as well. We wholeheartedly encourage Christians and pro-lifers in Canada to vote for local Christian Heritage Party candidates, if they have one. The same also goes for PPC candidates who are pro-life come election time. That’s actually also a good strategy to put pressure on the Conservative Party to become more pro-life. If they see that they’re losing a significant number of votes to the CHP and the PPC because of the pro-life issue, then they’re going to pay more attention [chuckles]. They’re going to make a greater effort to offer something, in terms of a policy commitment, to pro-life voters. So I don’t want to neglect those parties. They’re an important mix of strategy options for advancing the pro-life cause.

LSN: There are many conservative, Christian Canadians who feel as if the abortion issue has already been lost. What can you say to assure people that there is still hope for the pro-life cause? 

Fonseca: I’ll say what keeps me going and prevents me from giving up, in spite of the onslaught of evil that we’ve seen over the past decade from the left. That is that God does not demand victory from us. God demands faithfulness. God demands that we step forward and follow Him. That we do what is right, that we obey his commands, that we defend the orphan and feed the poor. In this case, those categories encompass the unborn child in the womb. We stand up for them. If you go read the Gospels, you read the Old Testament, it doesn’t say anywhere, “I command you to win.” He says, “I command you to be faithful. This is what I want from you: fidelity, faithfulness.” So long as I’m being faithful, I am stepping forward and doing the right thing, standing up for the unborn, standing up for the elderly who are being killed and culled like animals, then I know that I’m doing what God put me here on this earth for. I know that I’ll be rewarded for it, and that keeps me going. I don’t have to win, and we don’t have to succeed in passing a law today.

We need to be thankful to God for the lives we are able to save. He’s good enough to us, He’s kind enough to us, that He shows us those lives saved all the time. Every year there are reports of babies’ lives being saved from our Life Chain, March for Life, and 40 Days for Life campaigns. There are reports all the time of, “I had an abortion scheduled, and I didn’t do it because I saw all of the people with their signs on the street corner during Life Chain. So I changed my mind. I decided to keep my baby.” So God is good enough to us that He shows us the lives that we are saving, the good that we are doing, even if we’re not able to save them all yet.

I think that’s something for everyone to take to heart, and to try to remember every day in this battle. Maybe you can’t save all the babies right now, but being part of this movement, you’re helping to save some. That’s why you can’t give up.