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Both have justified their scaremongering through guilt by association

The “people who do” are a pro-life group called Right Now. In an interview with them, Scheer said he supports the right of individual MPs to speak out on the issue. This rang alarm bells for Coren. From its tone, a reader can easily come away from Coren’s column with the strong impression that a return to the horrors of back-alley abortions is a legitimate fear to entertain under a Scheer-led government.

Richard Martineau also refuses to take Scheer’s promise seriously, and he also finds deep suspicion in Scheer’s willingness to associate with a particular pro-life group. In his Journal de Montréal column earlier this month, Martineau wrote a denunciation of Scheer, titled “Scheer et l’Opus Dei.”

In Quebec, where the Catholic Church is in general held in suspicion or even contempt because of its pre-Quiet Revolution abuses of power, Opus Dei (Work of God), a conservative prelature of the Catholic Church, is particularly liable to demonization, a trend encouraged by the publication of Dan Brown’s scurrilous and luridly anti-Opus Dei 2003 mystery-thriller, The Da Vinci Code.

Photo by Graham Hughes for National Post

In May 2010, Scheer invited all his parliamentary colleagues to a luncheon meeting with Father Fred Dolan, vicar of Opus Dei in Canada, as the speaker. About 16 to 18 Conservative MPs reportedly attended. Martineau finds it scandalous that Scheer should have offered Father Dolan such a platform.

Martineau approvingly quotes from a Le Devoir reporter’s account of the luncheon, in which Opus Dei is described as “ultraconservative,” arousing distrust because of “its secret character” and dedicated to infiltration of elite institutions, which it accomplishes by recruiting highly educated members who seek positions of influence in the corridors of power.