TORONTO - Canada has picked the right issue to push at the G8 meetings in Huntsville, Ont., June 25 and 26, but it hasn't got the math quite right, according to aid groups.

Leaked drafts of the final Huntsville communique indicate Canada is offering $1 billion over five years to tackle maternal and child deaths in poor countries — a commitment that comes in less than the $1.1 billion security budget for the G8/G20 summit and less than the $1.5 billion recently pledged for maternal and child health by Bill and Melinda Gates.

Targeting the health of women and children is the right thing to do, said Michael Casey, executive director of the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace.

“It is certainly a huge development priority,” Casey said.

TORONTO - On any given day on Bay Street, Infinium Group makes between 500,000 and one million trades in stocks, stock options, currencies, futures and financial derivatives. As the largest single trader most days on the Toronto Stock Exchange — bigger even than any of the Big Five banks — that’s what it does every day.

Infinium doesn’t make its trades based on the value of companies involved or their plans for new investment. The thousands of trades per second are triggered by computer programs based on mathematical models.

At the G20 meetings in Toronto June 26-27 European countries want to slow down companies like Infinium and their breakneck, second-by-second bets on financial products. Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper says no.

It’s a pretty sure bet the Pope is not on Harper’s side on this one.

A Canadian Jesuit gunned down in 2001 standing by his rectory door in Jamaica will have his name attached to an AIDS clinic in Burundi.

“The decision to name this clinic after Martin Royackers has been motivated by two things,” said SYM director Jesuit Father Desire Yamuremye in an e-mail to The Catholic Register. “The principal one is that the centre is at the service of the poor living with HIV and AIDS. I think Martin Royackers was murdered while he was at the service of poor people. The second reason is that part of the funds came from the Canadian Jesuit province.”

In the criminal justice system there are more grey areas than black and white, particularly when it comes to 20- and 30-year-old sex crimes.

When an adult tells church officials that as a child he or she was abused in the church, the internal process these days is pretty clear. But what about the police?

When Fr. George Smith was accused this May of inappropriately touching a young person while working in Deer Lake, Nfld., between 1986 and 1991 he was immediately suspended from his duties as a parish priest in Prince Edward Island. An internal investigation was launched in the diocese of Corner Brook and Labrador. Police, however, were left out of the picture.

As Jeremy Hinzman faced final judgment on whether Canada would keep him, Parliament began debate on a bill that would force the government to respect the conscience of U.S. soldiers like Hinzman who fled to Canada rather than fight in Iraq.

The Federal Court of Appeal has reserved judgment on legal issues underpinning Hinzman’s application for humanitarian and compassionate leave to remain in Canada despite a 2008 deportation order. The court’s decision on Hinzman’s case could take months.

Time is running out on people’s hopes for a tolerant Middle East where the Christian minorities can live in peace, said Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast, S.J., on returning from a trip to Lebanon and Syria.

“We have to create a climate now for the Christians to stay, for the Christians to go back to Iraq and go back to the villages in Galilee. That’s the hope,” said Prendergast.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Recalling the story of how Jesus’ family was forced into exile in Egypt (Mat. 2:13-23) refugees and the volunteers who support them sang “Jesus was a refugee” at an ecumenical prayer service on the eve of World Refugee Day in Trinity-St. Paul United Church in downtown Toronto.

Refugees from every continent were represented at the June 19 event. Actors recruited from FCJ Hamilton House — a transitional home for women refugees run by the Sisters of the Faithful Companions of Jesus — portrayed life in a refugee camp and related their experience to the Bible in God Sees the Refugee, a play by Sonya VanderVeen Feddema.

TORONTO - Canada can and should use its military to ensure the safety of civilian refugees in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region before a Dec. 31 deadline could see African peacekeepers removed from the area, according to Canada’s largest churches.

TORONTO - Everybody who graduated from Grade 9 biology knows governments can’t make babies. But in the wake of 2006 census numbers which show Canadians failing to replace themselves, some people think the government should help the process along.

TORONTO - Rape as a weapon of war, rape in the form of the globalized sex trade, rape among school children, rape as the means of transmitting HIV, rape inside marriage — former United Nations special ambassador Stephen Lewis urged Catholic teachers to think about how rape is defining the world we live in and the future we face.