In the course of researching his biography on Irwin Cotler, John Ivison spoke with Cotler's old McGill debating partner, Moses Znaimer, the CityTV and MuchMusic founder. Znaimer wondered aloud what the former Liberal party justice minister thought about his old party, which he said "betrayed the Jewish community, in favour of the huge Muslim influx, of which they are largely the authors."
Znaimer is no stranger to provocative statements. But the enmity toward the Liberals is a view that is widely held in the Jewish community — and there is evidence to suggest the accusation is grounded in fact. Not least, there was the candid admission by Mélanie Joly, the then foreign affairs minister, that local politics was shaping Canada's more hostile official approach to Israel during its war with Hamas. According to former NDP leader Tom Mulcair, she said to him: "Thomas, have you seen the demographics in my riding?"
The influx Znaimer referred to is also a reality. There are around 1.8 million Muslims in Canada, of which 500,000 arrived between 2015 and 2021, compared to just 300,000 Jews. You don't need to be a conspiracist to connect the demographics to policies like resuming funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, an organization with documented ties to Hamas; to the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state; to the ban on export permits of military equipment to Israel in the middle of the conflict; and, perhaps most egregiously, to the failure to stand up to Islamic and progressive extremism in Canada, a toxic witches' brew of hatreds that has seen antisemitic incidents surging to record levels last year.
The systemic removal of missing-person flyers, torn from lamp posts in Toronto after the recent disappearance of 14-year-old autistic Jewish girl, Esther, is perhaps the purest evidence that evil is afoot on our streets. She is, literally, the poster child of the irrational, timeless disease of antisemitism.
It is against that background that Prime Minister Mark Carney on Monday walked into the Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, Canada's oldest Jewish congregation, to acknowledge that his government and its predecessor have made mistakes that need to be fixed. He leaned on the teachings of the Hebrew prophets in his definition of a just society as one that is sustained not merely by laws "but by obligations we owe to each other." He said that is the covenant that made Canada possible, a covenant that is being tested by the scourge of antisemitism, but which needs to be renewed. "Canada's civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians," he said, adding that if the covenant fails one community, it fails all.
There probably weren't that many votes up for grabs in the room, but Carney will have earned grudging respect for citing Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, the late Elie Wiesel, who said the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. However, former Liberal minister Irwin Cotler says that Carney's speech was well intended, but "there was no mention of Israel and no acknowledgement that, for Jews, Israel is part of the Jewish peoples' covenantal reality."
