The Changing Place of Jewish Canadians in Federal Politics

   By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

In their 2018 Survey of Jews in Canada, Keith Neuman, Rhonda Lenton, and Robert Brym, asserted that Canadian Jews were a model Jewish community. The 2021 volume No Better Home?: Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging, edited by David Koffman, suggested that Canada might be the most socially welcoming, economically secure, and religiously tolerant country for Jews in the diaspora. A similar narrative about Canada’s Jews is found in this year’s Faces in the Crowd: The Jews of Canada, by Franklin Bialystok.

This is the “official” story, but behind the scenes, it’s somewhat different. One of the main changes in Canadian politics in recent years has been the diminished political role of Canadian Jews, who number just under 400,000 people.

Their influence crested in the 1960s-1970s under Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau -- many Jews were well-known cabinet ministers. Their efficacy continued into the Stephen Harper era, when Jews began voting Conservative because of his robust defence of Israel.

Irwin Cotler was probably the last important Jewish political figure. He served as Canada’s minister of justice and attorney general in Liberal Paul Martin’s government from 2003 to 2006.

But today? Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are a very different bunch. You’d be hard pressed to name one important Jewish politician in his party. If anything, the community has gone back to the pre-1960s, again worried about anti-Semitism, which is harder to counter now.

Much of it comes not from old stock Canadians, but in many cases from racialized and recent arrivals – who are the mainstay of the Liberal Party’s base.

In hindsight, the country’s embrace of multiculturalism, something Jews supported and fought for in the 1960s as a way of breaking the British/French monopoly of power, turned out not an unalloyed panacea for Jewish Canadians.

The country has welcome in the last few decades millions of immigrants from parts of the world that never heard of Jews, much less the Holocaust, and if they have, some have brought their anti-Semitism with them.

Jews remain by far the most targeted religious group for hate crimes in Canada, according to the Canadian government’s annual survey of police-reported hate crimes.

The spike in anti-Semitism was caused by a variety of factors. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel has whipped up hatred, not just toward the Jewish state, but toward Jews in general. Likewise, the rise of populism has made Jews a target both of extreme-left and extreme-right ideologies. Throw in the proliferation of anti-Semitism on social media, and the results are toxic.

Jewish Canadian leaders are found wanting on this issue. They still largely turn a blind eye to left-wing anti-Semitism, since much of it comes from non-whites, and some of these leaders buy into the idea that oppressed racialized communities can’t be racists.

Trudeau’s own attitude was summed up perfectly during the winter 2022 “occupation” of Ottawa’s downtown by truckers protesting mask and vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some in the Conservative Party were sympathetic to their cause.

Trudeau dismissed the Canadian protesters and those who supported them as a fringe group of Nazi and racist sympathizers. That included Melissa Lantsman, the Conservative MP for Thornhill, north of Toronto, the most demographically Jewish constituency in the country. And she is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.

During a heated exchange in which she criticized negative comments he made toward truck convoy supporters, Trudeau responded this way: “Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas; they can stand with people who wave the Confederate flag.”

Lantsman denounced his comments. “I think the Prime Minister should think long and hard about his own history before singling out a Jewish Member of Parliament and falsely accusing me of standing with a Swastika. What a disgraceful statement unbecoming of anyone in public office – he owes me an apology.”

The prime minister refused to do so.

There was deafening silence from the Canadian Jewish community’s so-called leaders. Politically adrift, they have become the Jews of silence and have largely retreated into their own communities.