Quaker Concern newsletter, summer 2025 edition

CFSC’s Jennifer Preston facilitates a session at the closing ceremony of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015.

Reparations and the hard work of reconciliation

By Matthew Legge

In 2026 Canadian Friends Service Committee (CFSC) and Winnipeg Friends will bring forward a proposal for Friends nationally to make an annual payment of reparations to Indigenous Peoples, in response to living on and benefiting from Indigenous Peoples’ lands. This would be a natural progression of Friends’ reconciliation work... Keep reading ››

Are we backsliding on civil liberties in Canada?

By Sandra Wiens

Canadian Friends are likely familiar with news from the US, UK, and elsewhere in the world about eroding civil liberties and the criminalisation of dissent. We’ve seen stories on deportations, mass surveillance, and trampling the right to protest all becoming more common—and frighteningly—more accepted... Keep reading ››

Eagle feathers can be used to swear oaths in Alberta’s courts. Photo: Jason Franson/The Globe and Mail.

Transformative justice is happening in Indigenous courts

By Karen Ridd

It was 1991 when the groundbreaking Aboriginal Justice Inquiry (AJI) report was released in Manitoba. Following two years of interviews with a huge range of people—remote communities in the North, legal officials of courtrooms in Winnipeg, family members of people who had died due to violence, incarcerated people—Justices Murray Sinclair and Alvin Hamilton rendered a scathing and thorough indictment of the ways that the legal system fails Indigenous Peoples, and, combined with racism, structural injustices, and the legacy of colonization, leads to their mass incarceration. Among the recommendations of the AJI was a call for the creation of an “Aboriginal Justice System“ that would respond to harm and wrongdoing through culturally appropriate, transformative methods… Keep reading ››

Religious statues from a destroyed temple look over rubble in Nagasaki, Japan, 1945. Photo: Lynn P. Walker, Jr.

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki: an invitation to peace

By Mel Burns

When you walk into a quiet church and see posters depicting the aftermath of an atomic bombing, what do you feel? For Debbie Grisdale, and for the 300 visitors who came to St John the Evangelist Anglican Church in Ottawa this past May, it was a powerful mix of sorrow, curiosity, and hope… Keep reading ››

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