The Jew in Canada's Political Landscape

17 Nisan 5785 (15 April 2025)

On January 6th of this year, Donald Trump pulled off his first successful government overthrow with the announced resignation of Canada’s Justin Trudeau, whose already wildly unpopular government had been thrown into further chaos by Trump’s threats of tariffs. Trudeau has since been replaced by Mark Carney, a man who I can only fairly describe, despite my hesitancy to use these type of terms, as an arch-globalist, and Canada is now in the thrust of an election to decide whether Carney should get to keep the job he recently inherited, or whether Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre should get the top job.

Trudeau’s resignation was welcomed by the majority of Canadian Jews, who already lean Conservative but have been especially repulsed by the Liberal government’s response to the war in Gaza. Under Trudeau’s leadership, Canada sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Gaza Strip, brought little attention to two Canadian citizens who were kidnapped and eventually murdered by Hamas, delisted Jewish charities over their activities in Israel, repeatedly issued condemnations against Israel for actions which were later proven to be hoaxes, and pledged to cooperate with the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu.

None of this was particularly surprising; the Liberals have held a reputation within the Jewish community as being ‘fence-sitters’ on this issue since the Second Intifada. What came as a bigger surprise to the Jewish community, however, were the mobs.

Much like in the United States, one of the most notable features of the Israel-Hamas war in Canada has been massive pro-Palestine protests and encampments and, due to the lack of any law enforcement against them, they’ve become increasingly emboldened. In Toronto, there is now a weekly pro-Palestine demonstration at the corner of Bathurst Street and Sheppard Avenue, a suburban residential Jewish neighborhood far north of any government buildings or the Israeli consulate. Protesting outside of synagogues has also become commonplace under the guise that these synagogues are organizing “illegal land sales” in Israel. 

The Liberals have not made much of a serious attempt to counter or respond to these mobs. When asked, the Liberals on multiple occasions would point to their Online Harms Bill, an attempt to bring European-style hate speech laws to the internet, as an example of a protection against the Jewish community that Conservatives opposed, even though this has nothing to do with real life harassment mobs. They might also point to the fact that they outlawed Holocaust denial, a new law on the books which also has nothing to do with the current threat of anti-Israel mobs, and which was proposed by a Conservative MP anyway, and I suspect the law will go the way of the dodo when it’s inevitably challenged before the courts (contrary to popular belief, Canada’s constitution does not allow for the type of oppressive speech restrictions common in Europe). They did list Samidoun, an affiliate of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as a terrorist organization (although you’ll never catch them bragging about it), but the people behind the group just rebranded and continue to roam free in Canada. To the government’s credit, they did genuinely invest in security programs for Jewish institutions, which appears to have paid off since there have been no deadly antisemitic attacks in Canada through the course of the war.

Then there was the National Forum on Combating Antisemitism, the brainchild of Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) Anthony Housefather, who represents the extremely wealthy and extremely Jewish riding (electoral district for non-canadians) of Mont Royal in Montreal. The man is a rather pitiful character– being the only sitting MP who attended Trudeau’s wedding and never received a cabinet position. He also received national attention when he broadcasted his moral conflict over Trudeau’s sympathy for terrorists to the country, but when he was given the chance to make this conference happen, he chose to stick around. The results of the conference were mixed; some funding for Hasbara Inc, ‘anti-hate’ grifters and the Holocaust Industry piled in with some supposed improvements to law enforcement, although it’s questionable whether this will have much effect if the government’s catch-and-release attitude towards criminal justice continues.

But now Justin Trudeau is gone and Mark Carney is in charge, at least for now. Could there be a change in the tone of the Liberal Party?

At face value, there’s reason to believe there could be. Justin Trudeau is a quintessential product of Canada’s so-called ‘Laurentian elite’, an insular group of aristocratic Catholic families from Ontario and Quebec who exert a hugely disproportionate degree of influence over Canadian institutions. Like most elites these days, the Laurentian elites display a cosmopolitan disposition, but this is not a group that has historically been particularly friendly towards Jews. Meanwhile, Carney comes from a more authentically cosmopolitan background. He attended school at Harvard and Oxford before landing a job at Goldman-Sachs, and then went on to become the Governor of the Bank of Canada, and later the Bank of England. Since leaving the UK, he’s served on the board, and eventually as the chair, of Brookfield Asset Management, a massive international alternative investment firm, and held positions at the UN and various international NGOs for climate-related initiatives. While the record these sorts of institutions have towards Jews and Israel is mixed at best, at the very least, it’s likely that Mark Carney personally knows more Jewish people than Justin Trudeau.

When Carney announced his cabinet, there was more reason to be hopeful that his government would be better dispositioned towards Jews. Marco Mendicino (who I personally detest for unrelated reasons), a former MP for a Toronto riding with a lot of Hasids and a staunch ally of the Jewish community since the war broke out, was named as Carney’s chief of staff. Rachel Bendayan, a Morrocan-Jewish MP from Montreal, was put in charge of immigration. He also dismissed Ya’ara Saks, a Canadian-Israeli dual citizen peacenik yoga mom affiliated with the New Israel Fund, from her position in cabinet. Saks, who is not very bright, was originally chosen to join the cabinet as an appeal to the Jewish community, where Trudeau has long been bleeding support with, but has since become persona-non-grata in her own riding due to her unwillingness to stand firmly against her own party during the war. At one point, she even had a photo-op of herself with Melanie Joly, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, holding hands with Mahmoud Abbas. She can’t even show up in her own riding when bullets go flying through the windows of Jewish schools anymore.

But it’s not all good. Melanie Joly, who has directed much of Canada’s policy towards Israel since the start of the war, got to keep her position. After the announcement that she would be sticking around, one of the first things she did was announce another $100 million in ‘humanitarian aid’ for the Palestinian Authority and Gaza, much of which will run through the United Nations. She has continued to issue foreign policy statements making baseless attacks on Israel. Carney’s Liberal MPs, meanwhile, have continued signing statements and letters attacking Israel (For Americans reading this, the leader of a political party in Canada has essentially full control over the party, and they routinely boot MPs who take stances that differ from the party line). The Carney government has made no indication that they’re going to take a different approach to criminal justice, including the active and targeted harassment of Jewish people, Jewish communities, and institutions by pro-Palestine lunatics.

Things got worse last week when Carney, in response to a heckler shouting about “genocide in Palestine,” responded that he’s “aware” and “that’s why we have an arms embargo.” Carney clarified the next day that it is not his position that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide and that he merely misheard the heckler who, in his defense, was shouting over a loud room. However, given Carney’s response to her, it’s hard to imagine what else Carney could have thought she said. His initial response was both directly responding to the claim and directly offering his solution to the imagined genocide. So what does Carney really think?

I think it’s likely that Carney doesn’t really care about what happens in Gaza, or about human rights abuses whether real or imagined anywhere in the world. In 2021, during Parliamentary committee hearings concerning the fiscal response to the pandemic, Pierre Poilievre, who at the time was serving as the Conservative finance critic, grilled Carney on a number of issues both financial and ethical. One of the issues he brought up was China’s ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs. When asked if he considered China’s actions to be genocidal, Mark Carney responded that he was “concerned” about the situation but largely chose to dodge the question, likely because giving too harsh a condemnation of China would have harmed his business’ interests in the country. I don’t say this as a criticism of Carney–I care more about my stock portfolio than I do about Uyghurs too–but it lends credence to the idea that Carney probably doesn’t really care what Israel does in Gaza except insofar as he can use it to score political points. This will save us the headache of having an explicitly anti-Israel ideologue running the Liberal Party, but this type of cynical attitude towards foreign policy doesn’t work to the benefit of Jews in a party where they are outnumbered by Muslims and leftist crackpots multiple times over.

There’s also the matter of immigration. Under Justin Trudeau, Canada brought in record numbers of migrants in various forms, culminating in an official count of roughly two million in 2023. Many of the countries which Canada has received a large inflow from in recent years, particularly Pakistan and Somalia, are hotbeds of antisemitism. In the last few months of its existence, however, in response to enormous demand from Canadian voters, the Trudeau government took action to reduce the flow of migrants into Canada, particularly targeting the massive foreign student population which has basically taken over all unskilled part-time positions in Canada’s cities. Lagging indicators (such as housing prices in university towns) indicate that they are, in fact, following through on this initiative. However, immigration levels to Canada remain extraordinarily high.

Mark Carney has insisted that he will continue in this direction of reducing immigration, but there is reason to be skeptical of this. Last month he brought on Mark Wiseman, a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ who I want to describe with words that would bring shame upon my family if they were to be put in print, as an advisor. Wiseman is a former Blackrock executive who was fired from his job over some #MeToo scandal and went on to found the Century Initiative, a lobby group with the aim of increasing Canada’s population to 100 million people by the turn of the 22nd Century, which means growing Canada’s population by roughly 2.5x. He is on the record calling to just get rid of screening of migrants entirely, which would undoubtedly put his “fellow” Jews at serious risk. Carney himself has spoken to the Century Initiative although, as far as I know, he has never decisively “endorsed” their proposals. Nevertheless, Carney has not made immigration policy an important point of his campaign and he’s made no indication that he will reverse the Trudeau government’s plan to bring in 5,000 refugees from Gaza. Under his watch, foreign Palestine activists fleeing the Trump administration have come to Canada, and there’s no indication that they will be forced to leave.

Then there’s Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party who up until a month ago held a commanding lead in the polls. Unfortunately, Pierre, as his supporters endearingly call him (his opponents call him PP), is married to a big booty latina from Venezuela, and is dispositionally pro-immigration. Nevertheless, demand from within the party and the broader Canadian electorate has forced him to take a more anti-immigration stance, promising to tie immigration levels to housing starts. If truly enacted, this would bring down immigration levels to lows not seen in two decades all whilst demagoguing about Carney’s swindling, scheming, sniveling, conniving, goblin-faced ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ new advisor (these exact adjectives may not be Pierre’s). 

But if Pierre has been weak on immigration, he’s been strong on all the other issues that should matter to the Jewish community. Taking in the footsteps of Stephen Harper, Canada’s previous Conservative Prime Minister, Pierre has been unwavering in his support for Israel, going on the record to describe Hamas as a “death cult,” attending various explicitly pro-Israel events, and vowing to cut foreign aid to the Palestinians. He’s so plugged in with the brain rot of Hasbara Inc, he’s even repeated the line about Jews being indigenous to Israel. And these statements have been paired with action. He appointed Melissa Lantsman, an ardent Zionist who represents the Greater Toronto Area’s most heavily Jewish riding of Thornhill, as one of the two deputy leaders of the party, and has given her a platform to raise the most important issues to the Jewish community in Parliament. More controversial representatives of the Jewish community like Roman Baber (who, as far as I know, is actually not Jewish) have been elevated to run for office. Pierre has also taken a hardline approach on criminal justice, calling for massive mandatory minimums on repeat offenders, large-scale bail reform to keep violent criminals locked up, and the implementations of new methods to prevent smuggling and trafficking. These types of criminal justice reforms will keep violent antisemitic loons in prison where they belong instead of on the streets harassing Jewish families.

For a variety of reasons mostly related to Trump’s tariffs, Pierre’s commanding 30-point lead in the polls that he held for virtually all of 2024 has been completely obliterated in the past few months, leaving him now polling behind Mark Carney in what is shaping up to be a neck-and-neck election. Yet while Pierre’s polling numbers have declined somewhat, he’s still polling well above the results achieved by Conservative leaders in the past three elections. What’s caused the Liberals to pull ahead is the seemingly total collapse of the New Democratic Party (NDP).

For those unfamiliar with Canadian politics, the NDP is a left-wing political party that itself is a weird creature of the country’s political culture. Technically it is Canada’s fourth largest political party, but it is typically imagined as Canada’s third largest since the actual third party, the Bloc Quebecois, is a Quebec nationalist party which only fields candidates in Quebec and does not campaign for the votes of English Canadians. Ostensibly founded as a socialist party, the NDP has historically been hesitant to fully embrace socialist ideology or align itself with the broader international left. Especially during the Cold War, the NDP focused more on incremental changes, representing the interests of trade unions and government employees, and finding common cause with American progressives over European communists. 

This embrace of American progressivism reached totality with the election of Jagmeet Singh as the leader of the NDP in 2017. Under Singh’s leadership, the NDP has fully adopted American-style left-wing identity politics as a guiding principle of the party and he has been more explicit than any NDP leader before him in making alignment with American progressives part of his personal brand, courting the endorsements of popular American progressive politicians, and engaging in direct content collaborations with figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Much like US progressives, the NDP has gone all-in on Palestine. Within less than a week after the war began, the NDP was already issuing condemnations targeting Israel. Since then, their MPs have shown up to Parliament dressed in keffiyehs to advocate for the formal recognition of a Palestinian state, sanctions on Israeli officials, import bans on goods from settlements, and an arms embargo on Israel, the latter of which the Liberals eventually complied with. Their MPs have spoken with and provided open support for the mobs that have marched through Canada’s downtowns and Jewish residential communities. 

Also like US progressives, this total embrace of the Palestinian cause has not appeared to pay off for the NDP. While the party managed to reach second place in the polls prior to Trudeau’s resignation, this was largely due to the dire unpopularity of Trudeau himself. Even as they surpassed the Liberals in the polls, the lack of enthusiasm for the party was made clear by their inability to translate their newfound support into fundraising dollars. Now half their prospective voters have fled the party since Trudeau’s resignation and Jagmeet Singh is forced to travel around the northern half of this continent by bus, the party being too poor to afford a campaign jet.

The result, regardless of whether Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre wins the next election, will be similar to what has happened during the recent election in the United States: progressives will be relegated to the back seat of liberal politics. While sympathy for ‘Palestinian civilians’ may be popular on paper, politically this much more closely translates into supporting a negotiated ceasefire to end the war than it does having dorky college kids and Middle Eastern immigrants cosplaying as terrorists screaming at mothers with their children at the mall. And since the Palestinian liberation movement has chosen to embrace the latter, this has only alienated normal people. It’s rumored that once Jagmeet Singh inevitably brings the NDP down to a third crushing defeat and resigned that he will be replaced by Avi Lewis, a Palestine-obsessed Jew married to Naomi Klein, so it’s unlikely that the NDP will be dramatically shifting direction on this issue any time soon either.

This is an unambiguous good for Jews, containing the most fanatical pro-Palestine activists to one irrelevant party (or two, since that seems to be what the Green Party exists for these days as well) as the Liberals appear insistent on moving in a more moderate direction. With the Carney government’s insistence on moving away from reliance on the United States for military technology, increasing collaboration with Israel on that front could even be within the realm of possibility in the event of a Liberal victory. That isn’t to say that you can expect the Liberals under Carney to ever take an unambiguously pro-Israel position. You can still expect the usual two-sided statements, the occasional foreign aid handouts, and fence-sitting at the UN. You can also certainly expect far less emphasis on the needs of Palestinians as Carney rebuilds a Liberal coalition that's much more reliant on the established middle class over so-called “New Canadians.”

Of course, the Conservative Party still remains Canada’s most unquestionably pro-Jewish party, and their policies of unwavering support for Israel, locking up criminals, and moderation on immigration (although not nearly ideal) will be best for Jews among all the parties. But regardless of the outcome of this month’s election, the medium-term trends appear broadly positive for the Jewish community, at least compared to the past few years.

- Beau Chasse