The incoming vice-president of the United States, JD Vance, has come to the defence of a Conservative MP who says Canadian Christians are being persecuted and need protection from Ottawa.
Durham MP (and former National Post columnist) Jamil Jivani, is promoting a petition that he intends to present in Ottawa in February 2025. In a video posted to the X social media platform, Jivani says he is “sounding the alarm. We must protect Christians in Canada from governments and corporations abusing their power in our country, and from anti-Christian bigotry.”
The project got a boost from Vance, who also happens to have been Jivani’s roommate at Yale Law School, a connection that Jivani wrote about when he was a National Post columnist in a Nov. 2020 article.
Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, posted his support for Jivani in a Dec. 8 X post reposting Calgary journalist Max Fawcett, a National Observer columnist who said of Jivani’s tweet: “So much of contemporary Christian Conservatism revolves around cultivating and validating a sense of victimhood in groups that aren’t actually victims.”
Within nine hours, Vance’s response had itself been shared more than 6,000 times, and liked nearly 40,000 times:
“Canada has seen a number of church burnings in recent years thanks to anti-Christian bigotry. All over the world, Christians are the most persecuted religious group. Jamil is speaking the truth. Shame on journalists who refuse to see what’s obvious.”
In his own X video, Jivani stands in front of a Christmas tree somewhere on Parliament Hill. He asks: “What good is a Christmas tree when you have a federal government that will not lift a finger to protect Christians from governments and corporations abusing their power?”
As examples, Jivani points to “parental rights” and “conscience rights” that need to be defended and cites widely-reported church arsons and vandalism.
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