Now that protesters have burned the Canadian flag and shouted “Death to Canada” on the steps of the old Vancouver courthouse, might the prime minister be prompted to action?
Not in his usual way, with a solemn, “This is not who we are” pronouncement, but with something more concrete, something that might alleviate, even stop, the hate on our streets?
Lest anyone has been asleep for the past year, all is not well in Canadian society. We have entered a dark time, a very dark time.
The antisemitic, anti-Canadian and hate-filled protests over the weekend and into Monday — in places like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — weren’t aberrations.
It wasn’t a mistake when the masked ranks of chanting thugs burnt the Canadian flag; when they shouted, “We are Hezbollah and we are Hamas”; when protesters smashed the windows of a building at McGill University because it was to be named after an Israeli-Canadian; when they shouted, “Long live intefadeh” (referring to armed resistance against Israel); or when they celebrated the Al-Aqsa Flood (the name Hamas uses for the horrors of October 7).
Fears that demonstrators could turn violent led to police in bulletproof vests watching over Jewish mothers as they dropped their kids off at school.
This may not be who most Canadians are, but large numbers are clearly antisemitic and anti-patriotic terrorist supporters.
Thankfully, most Canadians are happy to condemn this behaviour, unless, of course, you happen to be the minister of foreign affairs.
Mélanie Joly found herself on Monday unable to condemn the protests despite being pressed to do so by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in Parliament.
Burnishing her empathy credentials, Joly said October 7 was a day to remember the dead, the injured, the abused and the hostages. All true.
It should also be a day to condemn those who celebrate the slaughter and the suffering, who glorify the killers as martyrs and who call for the destruction of Israel.
Sympathy for the victims and condemnation of the grotesque protesters who are flooding Canadian streets with vile antisemitism can go hand-in-hand.
October 7 was a day to show support for people and “moral leadership,” said Joly in a scrum after her parliamentary fracas with Poilievre.
“You don’t frickin’ gaslight people,” she said of Poilievre’s call to condemn the protests. “Clearly, that was what Pierre Poilievre was doing today.… Clearly, the guy isn’t fit to be prime minister.”
We have been living in an Orwellian world for some time, but we are now at a place where our foreign affairs minister is unable to bring herself to condemn protests that include people burning Canadian flags and shouting, “Death to Canada.”
And anyone asking the minister to denounce them would — in her view — make that person ineligible to become the prime minister of Canada.
Joly’s worldview appears to be that the prime minister of Canada shouldn’t condemn anti-Canadian protests, which at least explains her being a member of the Liberal party under Justin Trudeau.
Contrary to Joly’s insinuation, the Trudeau Liberals have shown absolutely no moral leadership on this issue since the savagery of October 7 last year. Moral equivalence, perhaps. But leadership? No.
Contrast the speeches Trudeau and Poilievre gave on Monday night to the Jewish community in Ottawa.
Trudeau rightly said of October 7, “What makes this barbaric attack that much more agonizing is the fact that you’re reliving this nightmare every single day.
“You relive it when cowards shoot and smash the windows of your schools and synagogues in the middle of the night. You relive it when antisemites wave the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah on the streets of our cities. You relive it when too many of our fellow Canadians downplay or dismiss your pain.”
Yes, but what is the prime minister, the man leading the country, doing about it? Where’s the moral leadership that leads to action?
“Let me be frank, I believe it is unacceptable for any of this behaviour to be normalized,” Trudeau continued. “It is incumbent on me and on every leader — premiers to police chiefs — to give antisemitism no quarter, to stop this rising hate and to reverse its spread.”
This should have been followed up with, “And here’s what I am going to do about it.” But it never came.
Trudeau and his government have done nothing over the past year to reverse this rising tide of hate, and it appears as though they’re still unwilling to take action.
For his part, Poilievre laid out some firm proposals to combat antisemitism. He pledged to stop giving federal funds to universities that fail to combat antisemitism (Canadian universities have been allowed by weak, sympathetic administrators to become hotbeds of Jew-hatred.)
He promised to defund the controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency, whose members are believed to have taken part in October 7. (The Liberals temporarily stopped funding the agency but have since resumed sending it money.)
Poilievre vowed to vote against anti-Israel resolutions at the UN. (The Liberals have taken to cowardly abstaining from voting on anti-Israel resolutions, as they did in September, despite pressure from their own MPs to take a stand.)
On Tuesday, Poilievre also said he would list Samidoun as a terror organization, calling it “a front for an already banned terrorist group,” a reference to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Samidoun is already listed as a terror group by Israel and banned in Germany. It is also one of the main groups behind the anti-Israel hate-fests that have been so prominent in Canadian cities — you know, the ones where Canadian flags are burned.
What are the Liberals doing about Samidoun? Well, they haven’t decided. The Liberals are “considering all options,” they said on Tuesday, once again preferring indolence over decisiveness.
For the vast majority of peace-loving Canadians who know they are living through dark times, this simply means that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably just another Canadian flag, or a church, being set ablaze.
National Post