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By Alison Auld, The Canadian Press

The Liberals in New Brunswick could face a tough internal debate if they win Monday's election and have to grapple with the question of access to abortion, says a political observer who warns the party could have trouble finding a unified voice on the divisive issue.

Geoff Martin, a political science professor at Mount Allison University, said Liberal Leader Brian Gallant has been ambiguous at best on whether he would repeal a regulation that restricts public funding of abortions in New Brunswick.

Martin says the strategy is not surprising for the front-runner, who is trying to appeal to liberal voters by indicating there may be a change in policy following a review, while not frightening off those who do not want to see access to abortion eased.

But Gallant's position risks causing divisions in party ranks, Martin said.

"I think this is going to be one of their significant challenges in the first six months to a year is stickhandling this issue because there's still a significant body of opinion that's not going to be all that happy," Martin, who ran for the provincial NDP in 2003, said from Sackville, N.B.

"It's an issue that's strong enough that you may see some Liberals bolt from caucus over it if there's a whipped vote."

Some Liberals who oppose abortion have insisted their leader won't impose his beliefs on them, but Gallant has said the party will adopt a policy similar to the federal Liberals' and promote a position "that respects a woman's right to choose."

Gallant has made it clear his party members would be expected to support access to abortion.

"We can't let personal beliefs get in the way," Gallant said when asked about abortion during a televised debate. "A Liberal government will act swiftly to find the barriers and eliminate them."

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Abortion a problem for New Brunswick Liberals

Stefan Molyneux liberals and government VS society

By: PeteTsim CultureDemolition

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Stefan Molyneux liberals and government VS society - Video

Teaching moral development is a process, the lessons more complex as the child grows up. "You can teach the little ones right and wrong pretty easily. As they get older, the areas of gray become more complex. We believe that besides being intentional, it needs to be systematic," said Sipos of her organization, a national nonprofit that works primarily with schools on character education.

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While parents take seriously the task of teaching children values, a new Pew Research Center survey released Thursday shows a gulf between how conservatives and liberals, women and men, young and old and different races order the values they believe children should be taught.

The report, "Teaching the Children: Sharp Ideological Differences, Some Common Ground," looked at 12 different qualities parents might try to inculcate in children. It found chasms between liberals and conservatives, but also near universal agreement despite ideological differences.

"We found a remarkable amount of consensus about certain traits responsibility, hard work, helping others," said Jocelyn Kiley, Pew associate director of research and one of the report's authors. "There are also some rather striking differences across ideological groups."

People categorized as "consistent conservatives," for example, tended to place a high premium on teaching children religious faith, while "consistent liberals" did not. The consistent liberals found great value in teaching tolerance, which was much lower on the conservatives' priority list. Curiosity ranks high on liberal rankings, but low for conservatives. Obedience comes in last on the consistent liberal list and was ranked fifth among consistent conservatives.

The report noted that women and men had similar priorities, although women listed helping others and empathy as important more often than men did. Women put a "somewhat higher priority" on teaching religious faith.

Breaking the priorities down by age showed differences in valuing obedience 68 percent of those 65 and older prioritize it, compared to 56 percent for those younger than 30.

World as classroom

Numerous surveys, studies and organizations have looked at how kids learn character and values.

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Liberals teach kids tolerance over faith; conservatives teach faith over tolerance

The Pew Research Center offers fresh evidence that the divides in American politics run deep, stemming from real differences in values among Americans.

The nonpartisan research group asked Americans which of 12 different qualities were especially important to teach children. Respondents also were given the chance to choose up to three as most important. Pew then correlated the answers with political ideology.

The resulting report,being released Thursday, finds some clear divides. Conservatives are more likely to value teaching religious faith and obedience. Liberals are more likely to value teaching tolerance, empathy for others, curiosity and creativity.

Those findings are not exactly shocking. Conservatives often hold positions aligned with their religious values, such as opposition to abortion, and liberals are often express the need for public policy to show empathy for others, such as aid to the poor.

Still, they are another marker of the deep differences driving politics today, said William Galston of the Brookings Institute, a White House adviser to former President Bill Clinton. Political orientation, broad political commitments are not shallow or transient, he said.

Its not just that political fights divide the nation; its that the nations divisions over values often drive political fights.

Keith Appell, who works on behalf of many conservative issues, posited that religious faith, the most popular value for conservatives, encompasses a wide range of values: love, honesty, courtesy, respect for family.

Traditionally, families have seen these as principles to build on for success in life, he said.

Eighty-one percent of the most conservative Americans said religious faith was especially important to teach kids, and 59% said it was one of the most important qualities to teach.

Among the most liberal people: just 26% said it was especially important, and 11% said most important.

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Study: How Liberals, Conservatives Split on Religion and Tolerance

Kids are the cutest Rorschach inkblot tests. If you want to get a sense of people's "values," the go-to contemporary term for social mores, there's no better way than to ask them what they think children should be taught. And, in fact, that's exactly what Pew did in a recent survey, asking a panel of respondents about the importance of lessons about "responsibility," "creativity," and "perseverance."

The results reinforce a certain Protestant-work-ethic caricature of America. Out of 12 choices, "being responsible," "hard work," and "being well-mannered" were consistently ranked as the most important values to teach to children. Close runners-up included "persistence" and "independence," the other qualities on the list that evoke American self-reliance.

The data also present a familiar caricature of "liberals" and "conservatives." Based on a longer survey that classified respondents along an ideological spectrum from left to right, the researchers found that "consistent conservatives" were more likely to prioritize obedience and religious faith in particular, while "consistent liberals" emphasized tolerance, creativity, curiosity, and empathy for others. They were also significantly less likely than other respondents to rate "hard work" as one of the most important things to teach childrenthey ranked 13 percentage points lower than "consistent conservatives."

Views on Empathy, Curiosity, Creativity, Faith, Tolerance, and Obedience Across the Ideological Spectrum

These results track closely with the vague sense impressions people often use to describe the poles of American culture and politics: disciplined, religion-loving, straight-laced conservatives vs. artsy, smarty pants, soft-hearted liberals. The results for "empathy," "helping others," and "hard work" seem particularly potent. "Of course conservatives want to slash food-stamp spending," one could imagine a staunch liberal saying. "They don't teach their children to empathize with others." Alternatively: "Of course liberals want to dump money into food stamps. They don't care about hard work."

That's a powerful and dangerous thing about survey-based social science. It can offer evidence that, yes, the associative thinking Americans use to understand their peers' values and priorities does have some basis in reality. But it can also reify stereotypes about how people see the world, attaching hard numbers to highly interpretive, charged concepts.

"Tolerance" is a great example: 88 percent of "consistently liberal" respondents rated it as an important thing to teach kids, with 22 percent rating it among their top three values. Among "consistent conservatives," only 41 percent placed significance on teaching tolerance, with barely anyone including that in their list of most important lessons. But it seems unlikely that most conservatives are encouraging their kids to commit hate crimes and refuse to be in the same classroom as kids who are different from them. Perhaps those respondents interpret "tolerance" as a buzzword used by some left-leaning organizations to advocate positions like support for affirmative action, or maybe exclusion of prayer in public schools. This interpretation may or may not have fidelity to what "tolerance" actually means, but that's the whole point: The words people use as shorthand for "values" actually represent complex constellations of cultural and political thought. At least in part, this survey reinforces stereotypes about liberals and conservatives because it relies on concepts that have been continuously appropriated and transformed for ideological purposes.

That's not to say the results aren't interesting. Does it seem important that the proportion of women who value empathy was 14 percentage points higher than the proportion of men, or that Millennials were half as likely to rate "religious faith" as one of the most important things to teach kids compared to people over 30? Yes. Is it curious that 62 percent of white people said curiosity is important, compared to 48 percent of Hispanicsor, actually, that anyone at all said that curiosity doesn't matter that much for kids? Yes. Does it seem intuitively correct that people older than 65 were really into obedient children? Again, yes.

But do we really know that liberals are more empathetic than conservatives? No, probably not.

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Do Liberals Really Care More About Empathy Than Conservatives?