Right off the bat, the NDP sympathetically quoted an extremist Palestinian terror-supporter
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Monday was certainly not the finest hour of the Canadian House of Commons. Amidst any number of pressing domestic crises requiring Parliamentary attention, the NDP forced a lengthy debate over a non-binding motion for Canada to recognize a Palestinian state.
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The NDP didn’t get what they wanted. The Liberals deleted the clause calling for Palestinian statehood, and a majority of MPs passed a watered-down motion calling vaguely for a “just and lasting peace.”
But that only happened after hours of back-and-forth, which frequently strayed into the ridiculous. Below, some of the highlights from one of the more ignominious debates from the House of Commons.
The motion’s main backer began her speech with a quote from a pro-terror antisemite
The motion was tabled by Heather McPherson, the NDP MP for Edmonton-Strathcona. In doing so, she began her speech with a quote from the Gazan poet Refaat Alareer.
“Mr. Speaker, ‘If I must die, you must live to tell my story.’ Those are the words of Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza on December 6,” said McPherson.
Alareer was indeed killed on Dec. 6 and had published a 2011 poem anticipating such a fate entitled If I Must Die. But his other statements — particularly those in the weeks before his death — are much less eloquent. When revelations surfaced of Israeli babies burned to death on Oct. 7, Alareer asked in a social media post if it was done “with or without baking powder.”
In the years leading up to the Oct. 7 attacks, meanwhile, Alareer’s social media was replete with open calls for violence, and comparisons of Israelis to Nazis. “No form, act, or means of Palestinian resistance whatsoever is terror,” he wrote in July 2021.
The motion uncritically cites casualty data from Hamas
One of the introductory clauses of the NDP’s motion states that “the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 30,000, with 70 per cent of the victims women and children.” That number comes from the Gaza Ministry of Health, an organization wholly controlled by Hamas.
The “Ministry of Health” has never differentiated between civilian and combatant deaths. What’s more, there’s good evidence that the figures are falsified. A recent statistical analysis published in Tablet Magazine noted that casualty figures are rising at a suspiciously consistent rate of about 270 per day. “This regularity is almost surely not real…. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less,” it read.
Liberal MP Anthony Housefather would gently hint in his own address to the House of Commons that the NDP were uncritically entering Hamas figures into the Parliamentary record. “The Honourable member mentioned the figure of 30,000 from the Hamas ministry of health, but I do not know how accurate that is,” he said.
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McPherson would also weirdly claim that Hamas — which has been the autocratic ruler of Gaza since 2007 — doesn’t actually have any political power. “Hamas is a terrorist organization and it is not the government of Gaza,” she said in tabling the motion.
The NDP caucus dressed up for the occasion
As a rule, props are forbidden in the House of Commons. But several members of the NDP were able to skirt the rule by wearing keffiyeh, a type of scarf first popularized by Palestinian nationalist Yasser Arafat as a symbol of violent resistance against Israel.
During the final vote on the motion, a scattering of keffiyeh could be seen in the NDP benches, including on McPherson and fellow Edmonton NDPer Blake Desjarlais.
Hamilton NDP MP Matthew Green — who has occasionally been a keynote speaker at rallies organized by the extremist group Toronto4Palestine — wore a keffiyeh and lifted his fist into the air when voting “aye.”
Jagmeet Singh falsely claimed the motion ‘forced’ the Trudeau government’s hand on foreign policy
Although the NDP failed in their signature bid to have MPs back a motion to recognize a Palestinian state, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh would trumpet the motion as an unbridled victory. In a post to X, he wrote that his MPs had “forced the Liberals” to, among other things, “stop selling arms to the Israeli (government)” and “support the … (International Court of Justice).”
For starters, both of those things were already Trudeau government policy (although the claim of selling “arms” is tenuous, since Canadian military exports to Israel were already non-lethal). Secondly, the motion didn’t “force” anything, since even in its unamended form it had always been intended as a non-binding motion.
BREAKING
The vote is in and we have forced the Liberals to:
- Stop selling arms to the Israeli govt,
- Support the ICC and ICJ,
- Place sanctions on extremist settlers,
- and much more
Every single Conservative MP and some Liberals tried to block it - they failed.
The Conservatives accused the NDP of attempting to “reward” murderers and kidnappers
The Tories rolled out two MPs to make the case against the motion. The first was Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong, who said Conservatives support a “two-state solution” and the “aspirations of the Palestinian people to have their own state” — but that such things cannot be responsibly obtained “just by a declaration.”
The second was Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman, who was much blunter in her assessment of what the NDP was trying to do.
“The motion is about a vote to reward the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israelis, and the motion is deeply irresponsible for Parliament,” she said, calling it a “blind sellout to the forces of evil at home and abroad.”
None of this makes any difference in Gaza whatsoever
Monday’s debate may yet have implications for Canada, particularly in terms of what it does to an increasingly emboldened anti-Israel movement. This was the main theme of Housefather’s speech opposing the motion, where he said “the war in the Middle East has torn the fabric of this country apart.”
But it seems important to note that this was never going to have any effect whatsoever on the situation in Gaza. On Monday night, the motion drew an official response from Israel politician Benny Gantz. While Gantz is currently a senior member of a coalition war cabinet governing Israel, in normal times he is considered the chief political rival to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
To mark the motion, Gantz called Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and told him that whatever the Canadian Parliament decided, it wasn’t going to affect Israel’s plan to de-Hamasify Gaza. “I expressed that unilateral recognition, particularly following the 7th of October, is counter-productive to the mutual goal of long-term regional security and stability, and would ultimately reward terrorism,” he wrote in an English-language social media post.
I spoke today with Canadian Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau.
I conveyed my appreciation to The Prime Minister for his personal commitment to Israel’s security.
In light of the upcoming vote in Canada’s parliament calling for the unilateral recognision of a Palestinian State, I…
MPs did think to point out how pointless this all was
Several MPs thought to bring this up on Monday. Liberal MP Leah Roy, for instance, asked McPherson to explain how a “non-binding motion in the House of Commons of Canada” would have any impact on “alleviating the suffering” of Gazans.
To this, McPherson replied that Roy obviously wanted children to die. “What the member is suggesting is that children around the world should die, should be killed, should starve to death and that the Canadian Parliament should not act,” she said.
For Canadians, Europe is usually the benchmark for progressive policy. However generous our social safety net or however libertine our criminal justice system – chances are good that the Western European status quo puts it to shame. So it’s somewhat notable that an increasingly wide gap is opening up between Europe and Canada on the issue of gender transitions for minors. As noted in a feature by National Post’s Sharon Kirkey, England just became the latest European country to ban “puberty blockers” – a hormonal treatment on minors intended to arrest puberty. Canada not only has no ban on the therapy, but a recent undercover investigation by Radio-Canada found that Canadian teens can obtain prescriptions for testosterone after just nine minutes of consultation at a private gender clinic.
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