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Grand opening: Think-tank to launch next week!

February 7, 2006

Next Thursday, February 16, marks the official opening of a new Ottawa think-tank that will undertake independent research on a broad range of issues important to Canadian families.

An initiative of Focus on the Family [FOTF] Canada, the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC) is mandated to conduct research and distribute its findings to various decision makers and influencers including MPs and journalists.

Focus on the Family Canada senior vice-president Derek Rogusky says the institute, which has been in the planning stages for about the past five years, will both strengthen and complement what the ministry has been attempting to do in Canada for the past 20 years.

“The IMFC will be devoted to looking at how families interact with society and public policy, and suggesting ideas [for new legislation], and Focus on the Family will continue producing resources for individual families and the challenges they face,” he says.

As IMFC executive director Dave Quist told ChristianWeek, the desire to have a faith-based think-tank located close to Parliament Hill grew out of “a general awakening by the social conservative community across Canada . . . people asking, ‘How did we get here and what can we do to strengthen family in the years ahead through policy?’”

Having himself worked on the Hill for six years as executive assistant to former B.C. Conservative MP Reed Elley, followed by one year in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition, Quist believes that MPs will welcome the kind of information that the institute will offer.

“I know how busy an MP’s office is, and quite honestly, there just simply isn’t time in the day sometimes to do all the necessary research that it takes to debate an issue,” he says.

The IMFC intends to make a difference through the strength of the ideas it produces and the communication of these ideas to the people who have a role in developing public policy. Quist emphasized that just as Focus on the Family Canada is strictly non-partisan, so is the IMFC. “We’re not going to be organizing the petitions and letters to the MPs. [There are] other groups that will do that,” he says. “We want to say, ‘Here’s the impact on children, here’s the impact on moms or dads or couples, if you go down this road.’”

The institute’s official opening will take place February 16 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. at the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa. Special guests will be family scholar Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, and Ottawa Citizen columnist John Robson. Senators and Members of Parliament are also expected to attend.

Focus on the Family (FOTF) Canada is the Canadian version of the U.S. group that took out ANTI-GAY ADS in Canada's largest newspapers in their $1.5 million ad campaign against equal marriage. http://www.fotf.ca

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