August 22, 2016: Green Party vote puts Elizabeth May in difficult position

By Michael Regenstreif

Elizabeth May may or may not (pun intended) be the leader of the Green Party of Canada by the time you read this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.

May – the party’s long-time leader and the only federal MP ever elected under its banner – was put in an awkward, difficult and, in my opinion, unsustainable position at the party’s convention this month in Ottawa when it voted to support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel despite May’s fierce and often-stated opposition to the movement.

In June, when it emerged that the proposal to support BDS had been put forth for the convention, May told many media outlets – including the Bulletin – that she would oppose the proposal at the convention.

And May, who was supported by 93.6 per cent of the Green Party membership in a leadership review earlier this year, did stand firmly against BDS at the convention, noting she believes the BDS movement is “polarizing, ineffective, and unhelpful in the quest for peace and security for the peoples of the Middle East,” adding, “I will continue to express personal opposition to BDS.”

May’s position is untenable because the Green Party membership – or at least the majority of voting delegates at its national convention – knowing her strong feelings on the BDS issue, put her in the position of having to represent a party platform containing a policy with which she fundamentally disagrees.

And, indeed, May now says the Green Party’s BDS vote calls into question whether she can stay on as party leader. In a revealing CBC radio interview that was scheduled to air August 13 on “The House,” but posted online in advance, May said she was “heartbroken” and would spend an upcoming vacation thinking about whether she can continue as leader and consulting with her family about her future.

May added that representing her constituents – she is MP for the West Coast riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands – was a much higher priority for her than being leader of the Green Party and that a decision to step down might come very soon.

“I would say, as of this minute, I think I’d have real difficulties going not just to an election but through the next month,” May said. “There are a lot of issues I want to be talking about with Canadians, and this,” referring to BDS, “isn’t one of them.”

This past February, the House of Commons passed a resolution condemning the BDS movement against Israel. The resolution was supported by the governing Liberals and the Conservatives, now the official Opposition, while the NDP voted against. May, herself, did not show up for the vote in the House.

In the debate preceding the vote, NDP members and May spoke against the motion, saying the motion itself was an attack on freedom of speech and dissent while stressing their opposition to BDS and their support for a two-state solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.

May is absolutely correct in recognizing BDS as “polarizing, ineffective, and unhelpful” in the quest for a solution to the conflict. For one thing, it puts 100 per cent of the onus for the lack of progress in the peace process on Israel and completely absolves the Palestinians of any responsibility.

While the case can certainly be made that certain policies of the current Israeli government stand in the way of progress toward a solution, there are also policies and actions – including incitement to violence and glorification of terrorists – of the Palestinian Authority which, perhaps, do even more damage to the pursuit of peace.

At least Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps calling for direct negotiations with no preconditions between Israel and the Palestinians, while Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas keeps refusing to even come to the negotiating table.

And let us not forget the Palestinians have walked away, refusing further negotiations, when offered peace agreements by previous Israeli governments.

And let us also not forget that Gaza is governed by Hamas, a terrorist group that rejects peace and compromise with Israel.

Groups that advocate for peace between Israel and the Palestinians – for example Peace Now, J Street, the New Israel Fund, etc. – reject BDS as a tactic for the same reasons cited by May: the tactic is “polarizing, ineffective, and unhelpful.”

While some BDS advocates sincerely believe that BDS is simply a tactic to push Israel toward a peace settlement with the Palestinians (May said she thought that was what motivated its support in the Green Party), the reality is that support for BDS comes primarily from anti-Zionist individuals and groups seeking to delegitimize the State of Israel as the Jewish homeland.

And that brings us to the issue of antisemitism. As renowned human rights activist Irwin Cotler, a former justice minister of Canada, has pointed out, there is a “new antisemitism,” in which Israel is targeted as “the collective Jew” among the nations.

BDS, which singles out Israel, is an aspect of the new antisemitism. It is a tactic not meant to bring the sides together; it is meant, as May points out, to polarize them, to drive them further apart.

Even U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a harsh critic of the current Israeli government, rejects BDS and points to its inherent antisemitism.

So, what will happen with Elizabeth May? Will she stay on as leader or resign? Will she stay in the party or cross the floor? Could a post in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet be in her future?

And, if she does resign as party leader, will there be a future for the Green Part of Canada.

July 25, 2016: How far do we go in restricting freedom in order to protect freedom?

By Michael Regenstreif

As I write – just before this issue of the Bulletin goes to press – the world is reeling from yet another massive terrorist attack in France.

On the night of July 14, just after the fireworks celebrating Bastille Day, France’s fête nationale, in the city of Nice on the French Riviera, a terrorist drove a truck into the assembled crowd and then jumped out and opened fire.

When the news first broke, the death toll was reported at 30. However, as the hours wore on, the number of dead kept rising. As of Bulletin press time the number is 84, but may rise even higher.

France has been particularly hard hit by the wave of Islamist terrorism that has plagued Western nations in recent years. There were the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks on a satirical magazine and kosher supermarket in January 2015 and then the coordinated terrorist attacks last November near the Stade de France during a soccer game and at the Bataclan Theatre during a rock concert.

Other major terrorist attacks on Western countries recently have included the Brussels airport bombings this past March and the massacres in San Bernadino, California, last December and in Orlando, Florida, just last month.

Of course, no one who was here in Ottawa on October 22, 2014 will ever forget the lone wolf terrorist attack at the National War Memorial and Parliament Hill.

And I’ve lost track of how many breaking news stories about terrorist attacks in Israel I’ve posted on the Bulletin website in the past couple of years.

Sometimes terrorism hits too close to our own lives.

My friend Jeff Hardy was an accomplished bass player who gave up his career as a professional musician, when he started a family, to work as an executive chef for an investment firm in the World Trade Center. Jeff was cooking breakfast for the financial traders and died when the hijacked planes hit on 9/11.

The brother of another friend was seriously injured as he cheered for runners near the Boston Marathon finish line three years ago when terrorists detonated a powerful and deadly pressure cooker bomb.

Islamist terrorists – whether they are part of groups like ISIS, al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others, or lone wolf wannabes – would have the world live in a sort of strange, cruel and medieval reality.

And, for whatever currency Islamist extremists may have, it must be noted that they represent a very small fraction of Muslims. In fact, the number of Islamist terror attacks in Western democracies pales in comparison to the number of terrorist attacks in Arab and Muslim countries, where the vast majority of the victims are other Muslims.

Fighting and preventing terrorism is difficult and complex – especially for societies, like ours, which value democratic freedoms and human rights.

How far do we go in restricting freedom in order to protect freedom? How much power do we give to our security services? These are questions, which, sadly, will be on the agenda for many years to come.

Also, sadly, a world faced with terrorism increases the appeal of demagogues who seek to exploit fear and appeal to prejudice. We have seen evidence of that in Europe with the rising popularity of extreme right-wing parties and in the United States where a presidential candidate has threatened to ban Muslims from entering the country, among other measures.

Here in Canada, we seem to have rejected such demagoguery in the form of failed proposals like the charter of values proposed by the former government of Quebec and a snitch line proposed by one party in the 2015 federal election.

The solutions proposed by these demagogues will do nothing to solve the world’s problems in dealing with terrorism. If anything, they will make the situation worse as they remove our democratic freedoms and human rights.

In fact, a world without democratic freedoms and human rights is just what the terrorists want.

June 20, 2016: Is there a lesson for Canada in the recent Israeli political upheaval?

By Michael Regenstreif

In my column last issue, I wrote about the recent upheaval in Israeli politics. At the time of writing, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in the process of replacing defense minister Moshe Ya’alon – formerly a distinguished general in the Israel Defense Forces who served as the military’s chief-of-staff – with Avigdor Liberman, who rose only to the rank of corporal in his brief military service.

Liberman’s appointment to the defense ministry – perhaps the second most important job in the Israeli cabinet after prime minister – had nothing to do with merit or qualifications. It was a purely political move. Netanyahu’s governing coalition was as weak as could be with 61 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, and Liberman brought with him the six seats of his Yisrael Beiteinu party. Netanyahu had no breathing room with a one-seat majority, but will be somewhat more secure with a seven-seat majority.

Liberman, who led Yisrael Beiteinu to just 5.11 per cent of the vote in the 2015 election, was able to demand – and receive – the defense ministry, even though it meant losing perhaps the most qualified cabinet minister from Netanyahu’s own Likud party.

There may be a lesson in this for Canadians as a parliamentary committee begins to consider alternatives to our first-past-the-post electoral system.

In our system, geographic ridings elect members of Parliament. With multiple parties and independent candidates, it is the candidate with the most votes – the one who is first past the post – who becomes the MP, even if he or she does not receive a majority of votes in the riding. It is then the party with the most MPs elected that forms the government. Most governments – even majority governments – in Canadian history have been formed by parties that have received less than 50 per cent of the popular vote. The Liberals under Justin Trudeau formed a majority government with 39.47 per cent of the popular vote in 2015. In the previous election in 2011, the Conservatives under Stephen Harper formed a majority with a very similar 39.62 per cent.

The last time a Canadian party formed a majority government with an actual majority of the popular vote was in 1984, when the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney took 50.03 per cent. They were re-elected in 1988 with 43.02 per cent.

One of the Liberal Party’s platform planks in last fall’s federal election campaign was the replacement of first-past-the-post.

“We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system,” said Trudeau in speeches on the campaign trail.

Proportional representation – in which a party’s seat-count in Parliament reflects its percentage of the popular vote – is one of the alternatives to first-past-the-post that some in Canada advocate. In the last election, if proportional representation had been in effect, the Liberals would have won the most seats, but would have needed to form a coalition with one or more other parties to form a governing majority. With proportional representation in a multi-party system, it becomes virtually impossible for any party to form a stable majority government on its own. Proportional representation also allows for the electoral success of small, often single issue, parties.

Countries like Israel that have proportional-representation systems are governed by coalitions. In the 2015 Israeli election, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud was first among the many parties with 23.4 per cent of the vote.

So, Netanyahu had to wheel and deal with other parties in order to cobble together a coalition. That’s why the two religious parties, which together received just over 10 per cent of the vote, are able to impose haredi Orthodox control on many aspects of Israeli society – from who may marry to which gender may read from the Torah at the Western Wall, and much more.

And that’s why Liberman – leader of a party that received just 5.11 per cent of the vote – was able to demand and receive control of Israel’s most important ministry.

Who knows what the parliamentary committee tasked with studying alternatives to first-past-the post will come up with? But I dread the possibility of small parties wheeling and dealing for control of important ministries.