Toronto Police have started applying crowd control tactics against demonstrations, instead of waiting for them to end
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Canadian anti-Israel demonstrators spent the Easter weekend rolling out new pressure tactics — including a campus rally in London, Ont., that read out a shame list of individual Zionist students.
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Meanwhile, they were met with two rare instances of official pushback: Police forcibly disbanding an illegal demonstration in Toronto, and a B.C. city council backing off from a “pro-Palestine” motion because of their disgust at the “hate” within the movement.
On Thursday and Friday, McGill University in Montreal saw widespread class cancellations and building closures as part of an ongoing “Shut Down McGill” campaign organized in part by the campus group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights. This is the same group that was ordered by university administrators to stop using the word “McGill” in its name after an early October statement in which it openly celebrated Hamas’s taking of Israeli hostages as a “heroic” act.
Although anti-Israel demonstrators have staged McGill blockades before — including a February shutdown of a building named for Jewish philanthropist Samuel Bronfman — this one represented an escalation in both scale and aggressiveness.
In one video circulated by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, a group of about a dozen activists in keffiyehs can be seen pounding on the locked doors of a classroom and chanting through megaphones, “You can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
Demonstrating is one thing, intimidating is quite another.
Yet another day on a university campus when students and staff were intimidated by hate-fuelled and hate-spreading groups that blocked classroom entrances and disrupted students’ classes. @mcgillu security asked the… pic.twitter.com/bWOJsnyxVo
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“While nearly all academic activities continued over these two days, the University recognizes that the behaviour of some protesters intimidated and unnerved many members of our community,” McGill said in a statement summing up the two days of disruptions, for which police were repeatedly summoned to campus.
At Western University in London, Ont., a Thursday rally included a speaker naming three specific Jewish students and alumni and urging attendees to report them to campus authorities for alleged Islamophobia and “Palestinian racism.”
“We are now rolling out a list of names — you guys want to take a video, take a video — record this on your notes,” said Bara Banat, head of the university’s Palestinian Cultural Club. Banat then read out three names, interspersed with cries of “shame” from the crowd.
The rally was organized by the London, Ont., branch of the Canadian Palestinian Social Association, a group that has made no secret of its allegiances in the current Israel-Hamas war.
Within two days of the Hamas-led massacres, the CPSA organized a “stand with Palestine” rally in London, and their Instagram page would specifically feature a protest sign reading “resistance against occupation is a human right.”
The Thursday rally was intended to pressure Western University into adopting a “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) motion under which they would suspend all academic ties to Israeli universities, and sell any assets that organizers deemed to have even peripheral connections to Israel.
“Western University; we’re not going anywhere. BDS has to exist … you are next!” said Banat, adding, “Free, free Palestine!”
Video of the speech was circulated in an Instagram livestream taken by CPSA themselves.
A post shared by CPSA London ON (@cpsa_london)
The weekend also yielded two notable instances of unprecedented official pushback against anti-Israel demonstrators.
Amid the more than 500 individual anti-Israel demonstrations that have occurred in Toronto since Oct. 7, Toronto Police have typically played an observer role; arresting demonstrators who explicitly violate the law, while otherwise allowing illegal demonstrations to continue.
The situation at Parliament and Gerrard is pretty volatile atm pic.twitter.com/ZaddADaoV2
But un-permitted demonstrations on both Saturday and Sunday ended with police conducting crowd control and forcibly blocking the path of demonstrators, rather than waiting for the marches to disband organically.
On Sunday, the Toronto Police Association issued a statement reading “our members deserve the same respect they extend to the protesters” after incidents including a woman allegedly throwing horse manure at officers and one recorded incident of male protesters surrounding and berating a female officer.
On Thursday, meanwhile, council members in Port Moody, B.C., rescinded a relatively routine motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza after they deemed that the council had unintentionally aligned themselves with “a group that has spread hate.”
More information on arrests and charges can be found in our news release: https://t.co/Jo3RYC9Dm9 pic.twitter.com/1bkxAYLoO2
A group known as Free Palestine BC had packed council chambers to push Port Moody to adopt the motion earlier in the week, but council members soon balked at revelations that anyone who spoke against the motion had been barraged by insults and threats encouraged by Free Palestine BC.
“I cannot in good conscience agree to send a letter to our federal government on behalf of a group that does not practice what it preaches, and is actively stoking fear, hatred and division in our community,” Coun. Kyla Knowles said in reversing her vote calling for a ceasefire. “I regret not listening to my gut on this one.”
Yesterday marked two notable landmarks in terms of federal policy. First, yesterday was when the federal carbon tax rose automatically from 14.3 cents per litre of gasoline to 17.6 cents per litre; for a fill-up on a base model Ford F-150, that’s going to represent a differential of about $2.87. It was also the day when the salaries for members of parliament rose by $8,500 to $203,100 per year. As calculated by the National Post’s Bryan Passifiume, Canadian parliamentarians are now among the world’s highest paid elected representatives, second only to members of U.S. Congress.
It was three months ago that the B.C. Supreme Court released its controversial decision declaring that it was a human right to be able to do hard drugs in playgrounds. The decision didn’t use that language explicitly, but that was the effect: It slapped down a B.C. law forbidding the consumption of illicit drugs within 15 meters of a playground or skate park on the grounds that it violated the “life, liberty and security of the person” of drug users. The decision was only a three month injunction, but the Supreme Court just extended it to June 30. Mike Farmworth, a cabinet minister in the BC NDP government of David Eby, called the extension “absolutely frustrating.” “It is unbelievable that courts can say, ‘We can regulate tobacco, we can regulate cannabis, we can regulate alcohol, but we can’t regulate where hard drugs are used,’ that’s just nuts and, in my view, completely out of touch with the general public,” he told Global News.
One aspect of Canadian politics that sets us apart from much of the rest of the world is that our country has disproportionately been led and shaped by uncharismatic loners with few friends and questionable social skills (think Mackenzie King, John Diefenbaker and R.B. Bennett, among others). It now appears that Canadians are returning to their roots of electing leaders that they don’t personally like very much. A new Leger poll asked Canadians which federal party leader they would least like to sit next to on a long-haul flight. While respondents were relatively lukewarm about being seat-belted next to NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh or PPC Leader Maxine Bernier, a tied 21 per cent of Canadians said they would “prefer not to sit beside either Justin Trudeau or Pierre Poilievre.” This was despite the fact that Trudeau and Poilievre were the clear favourites to be prime minister.
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