CANADA’S HAVING AN ELECTION!
WAIT. DON’T NOD OFF! THIS IS GOING TO BE FASCINATING — AND IT COULD HOLD PORTENTS FOR THE ANTI-ISRAEL LEFT ACROSS THE DEMOCRATIC WEST.
Canada is having an election.
Quick catch-up for the outsiders: Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party was prime minister for about a decade and, for a couple of years, polls indicated that he was about to go down to a landslide defeat at the hands of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party. Trudeau resigned (he was basically pushed out by his party’s own sense of self-preservation) and the Liberals elected Mark Carney leader.
Carney was head of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 Great Recession and head of the Bank of England during Brexit. Carney is 60 and he has never been elected to anything before.
Poilievre, by contrast, is 45 and has been in Parliament for 20 years.
In any event, the polls inverted. A seemingly inevitable Conservative landslide is now in great doubt.
As a political junkie, I am liable to deliver far TMI.
However, anyone with knowledge of Canadian history has seen a similar scenario before.
John Turner was the Golden Boy who was going to “rescue” the Liberal Party when Justin’s dad Pierre had driven the party to similar lows in the polls, in 1984.
In 1993, Kim Campbell was the miracle worker who was going to save the Conservative Party after Brian Mulroney squeezed every last drop of popularity out of it. Both were elected leaders of their respective parties, became prime minister (that’s how the British parliamentary system works) and subsequently led their parties to their worst electoral showings in history.
So things can change quickly.
The election campaign only started yesterday and, as it’s said, a week is a lifetime in politics. So anything could happen. And, indeed, I can’t think of an election — I worked on my first campaign for Justin’s dad (the real Prime Minister Trudeau) 45 years ago — with so many variables.
It’s all about Trump at this point. The US president started a trade war with Canada and (in a weirdly American response) Canadians have become a flag-waving, patriotic mass of red-and-white.
At this point, the ballot box question seems to be: Who can best stand up to a bully on the economic front?
I’d rather be in Carney’s shoes, if I had to choose. For all the Canadian nationalist bravado, Trump has evoked a great deal of economic anxiety here. My guess is that, with the lightning rod of Trudeau gone, Canadians will opt for an experienced team with a new face at the helm. At least that’s how it looks on Day 2 of the campaign.
This would be a grave disappointment to probably a vast majority of my Jewish and pro-Israel friends.
Canada’s Jews traditionally voted Liberal. That changed — with a thud — around the time of the Second Intifada.
Liberal governments — representing a wide swath of the political middle — are the proverbial “big tent.” The party contains a few strongly pro-Israel voices, a handful of overt Jew-baiters and a mass of people who wish the whole issue would go away. That last bunch — the bystanders — are, to the minds of many, the worst. There is a special place in hell for those who refuse to stand up when moral clarity is so deeply needed.
More significantly, though Jews have traditionally been socially liberal, Jewish Canadian voters appear to have moved en masse (surveys are sketchy but I can tell you from decades of hanging around) to the Conservatives.
When Stephen Harper became Conservative prime minister in 2006, he made Canada the best ally Israel had on the international stage. Not one of the best allies. The.
At a time when Jews were feeling the isolation of the Second Intifada and witnessing the spread of Jew-hatred (in the guise of anti-Zionism) that proved merely to be the fuse on the dynamite that exploded after October 7, Harper’s unwavering (critics say “uncritical”) support for Israel was deeply and honestly felt.
The Conservative Party of Canada is now unequivocally, monolithically pro-Israel. The Liberal Party, always a bit ideologically erratic, is viewed by many of my Jewish friends as anti-Israel. (I think it’s a little more nuanced. A little.) Some are withholding judgment on Carney’s leadership on this front — though initial signs are not promising. Due to his apparent lack of facility in French — I say “apparent” because I’m no judge — Carney mistakenly said he supports Hamas. More substantively, the new Carney government dropped a money bomb on Gaza last week.
On the other hand, the new PM selected as his chief of staff Marco Mendocino, a retiring Member of Parliament who was one of the strongest voices for Israel in the last government. This has sent Israel-bashers into delicious paroxysms of outrage. So it’s probably a little more nuanced than some of my Conservative friends would suggest.
At this point in the election, commentators are suggesting a polarizing, two-party race, in which Canada’s several minor parties are shunted to the side as Canadians make the choice around which of only two men who have a realistic chance of becoming PM would be best to stand up to the mango Mussolini.
But one of those “minor” parties is what I am going to focus on in my next post. The New Democratic Party — the left-wing party I gave a chunk of my life to — has become an almost monolithic bastion of anti-Israel extremism. It is not without a little schadenfreude that I watch the NDP plummet in the polls, although that seemingly impending electoral disaster has little to do with their radical extremist positions on Israel and Palestine (at this point — something that could change as “pro-Palestinian” activists predictably begin disrupting our election campaign).
What happens to the NDP in this election — partly as a result of their dabbling with Jew-haters — could have consequences for the left more broadly across the democratic West.
And that, in a time of bleak news overall, could be a silver lining that both provides a comeuppance for the anti-Israel mobs and helps set the left back on the rails that it so decidedly went off on September 28, 2000.
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Lifelong Green or NDP Jewish Zionist here who will absafrickinlutely not be voting fro the Green s or NDO this time around (Reference Janica Atwin, even though she has left but she still sticks her name on antisemitic rhetoric like the “statements” the Greens put out last week (you can see them on EM’s facebook page) failed to unequivocally call out Jihadist Gazans and their fan base in Canada; never voted Conservative and can’t see that ever happening because exploiting legitimate Jewish concerns and pandering to us is using us for a value system that is antithetical to Tikkun Olam. Harper could have and should have been able to both criticize Israeli policies and support Israel by condemning the machinations behind and in front of Hamas and he could have addressed how their supporters were growing here. Trudeau Jr. referred to himself as a consist … the night before he left office. Thanks, but way too little too late. I am not against supporting the rebuilding of a peaceful Gaza with conditions of no Hamas or similar genocidal nihilists, constant monitoring of the monies, no weaponry, unequivocal recognition of Israel’s right to exist as the ancestral indigenous homeland of the Jewish Nation and that not a single rocket, bombing, terrorist act against Israel will be committed. This will also require, Israelis to vote out Netanyahu and the corrupt nutters of his government who are making things far more dangerous than they would have been or ever have been.
BTW did you notice after Carney’s election launch speech, neither the Greens nor the NDP dared to mention Israel. But we “Leftie” Zionist Canadians won’t forget what they did and did not do this past year-and-a-half and we will forever take seriously that the antisemtism in both parties (including the antisemitic racism against the smart, capable, lovely and down-to-earth Anamie Paul that forced her out of the Greens) has been growing its toxic mould over the last 45 years.
I’m hoping to hear some sanity from Carney that will have him calls out any form of misuse of the term Zionist, Jew and makes clear that Jihaidsm must not be permitted to go unchallenged and out must be crushed by Muslim and Arabs and anywhere else people import it, dress it up as “academic freedom”, chant its genocidal antisemitic and anti”western” rhetoric or deceive a myopic perspective that seeks to undermine Israel’s right to live in peace - or defend itself against those who seek to break that peace. So far, his right-hand man, Mendocino has been good on this, Hopefully, he will continue to have the courage to speak up - and, of course, Anthony Housefather has been steadfast and a mensch in the face of heat from the Right (including some Jews who have lot all sense of decency and deferred to the divisive politics and foul attack mentality of the Right instead of uniting as Jews - even with arguments and respectful debate.) In my mind, those right-wing Jews are as bad as those who have become the equivalent of the contemptible Inquisition Conversos, with defending jihadists as their new religious ideology.
I’ve started to write to you several times to thank you for your voice. It has meant a lot even though I’ve said little until now. Toda, Pat. Even for this secular agnostic/atheist … I regard you as a blessing.
"More substantively, the new Carney government dropped a money bomb on Gaza last week." It's much worse that that quarter-billion dollar dog-whistle to jihadism.
The Trudeau-now-Carney Liberal Government is also:
· maintaining a shameful (albeit symbolic but politically devastating) Melanie-Jolie-arms embargo on Israel as it defends itself against genuinely genocidal terror attacks by entities that are on Canada's terrorist organizations list;
· is supporting South Africa's Iran-funded, specious ICJ genocide case; and
· just hours after Carney was elected Liberal Leader and during the Trump Tariff onslaught he found time to carefully issue the following awful X statement:
"Mark Carney
@MarkJCarney
It has been more than two days that the supply of electricity to Gaza has been shut off. It must resume — essentials including food, electricity, and medical supplies should never be used as political tools.
Canada must work with our allies to stand up for international law to promote sustainable peace and security in the Middle East and to support full access to humanitarian aid for Palestinian families.
As this work continues, both parties must work towards the return of all hostages and the completion of the ceasefire agreement."
Talk about an upside-down, unambiguous and malignant taking-of-sides! International law does not oblige Israel to fuel, electrify and feed Hamas any more than the Allies were obliged to feed, electrify and fuel Nazi Germany during WWII. The ceasefire agreement has been killed by Hamas. And a token passing reference only at the very end of the Rt Hon Mark Carney's cynical statement to the Israeli hostages (who are being starved, tortured and chained underground by Hamas terrorists) does the Liberal Party no credit... other than as electoral dog-whistling to jihadist sympathizers in Canada (who outnumber Jewish voters many times over).
For shame.