By Conrad Black
Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto several weeks ago and denounced antisemitism and stated that, “Unity is not uniformity … our differences are strengths to be nurtured, not risks to be managed.” All Canadians of at least the age of seven have heard similar remarks by public figures, but they do not address the requirement of the comprehensive defence of minorities, and in particular the Jewish popu
lation. Carney flattered himself and his government for introducing Bill C-9, the Combating Hate Act, which has been described in this column before and has raised more concerns about the curtailment of freedom of expression than comfort for threatened minorities.
Of greater use perhaps was the additional $75 million provided to the Canada Community Security Program, designed to strengthen the defences of houses of worship against hate-motivated incidents. In a statement, Carney assured that, ” Our government will always protect the inalienable right of the Jewish people to live openly in freedom, safety and dignity. Protection is fundamental, but not sufficient. The Jewish community must be able to flourish in every aspect of Canadian society.” To promote this admirable and undoubtedly sincere view he announced a ministerial advisory council on rights, equality and inclusion. This is not something that really requires a committee; it requires the enforcement of existing fundamental rights. Nor is the composition of the committee reassuring: the one Jew is a retired Liberal senator and other members include an authority on supporting LGBT members of the Armed Forces, a former Olympic women’s speed skating champion, a Syrian-born former federal cabinet minister, a prominent Métis spokesperson, an academic authority on inter-community dialogue of Iranian ancestry and a lawyer of South Asian background who appears to specialize in various forms of underdog litigation.
It is almost inconceivable that such a group will effect any improvement in the lot of the Jewish community, which as the prime minister noted, is the subject of approximately two-thirds of religious hate crimes, though its population is less than one per cent of Canadians. In addition to speaking in the synagogue, he should have addressed a mosque and advised its worshippers not to bring the prejudices and hatreds of their families’ former nationalities into this country. This committee may conduct some useful research but the basic problem is the cowardly sluggishness of elected officials at all levels to support one minority when it is under attack. This is a craven misjudgment. The huge outpouring of Muslim support for the opposition in Iran in Toronto several months ago, estimated at around 350,000 people, demonstrated their absence of hostility toward Israel and support for the Toronto police. They proved that febrile Judeophobia is, as any reasonably widely acquainted Canadian knows, a minority Muslim opinion. But many of our politicians and most of those in western Europe also, placate the Islamists and give lip service only to affronted and threatened Jews because of their miscount of votes.
We should not be subjected to the shame of political leadership that imagines that more votes lie in indulging the bigotry of a minority of one minority over a separate minority, rather than recognizing that the majority of Canadians of all ethnicities seeks the fair treatment for everyone.
This brings us to another subject of national shame, involving the treatment of Indigenous people, specifically the defamation of this country with the slowly crumbling narrative of the surreptitious disposal of wrongfully deceased Indigenous children who were pupils in so-called Indian residential schools and were supposedly buried in unmarked graves. No such graves have yet been identified despite the orgy of national self-petrification the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inflicted upon us, and now even the Globe and Mail, long a standard-bearer of this narrative, is in full retreat. This did not deter for a moment the acceptance of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal to conduct a sham trial on this subject in Montreal from May 25 to May 29. According to an account written by Skw’akw’as Dunstan-Moore and published on the David Suzuki Foundation’s website, this was the brainchild of Na’kuset, executive director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal (NWSM), who sought to produce “the closest thing to a Nuremberg trial.” The tribunal’s initial scope, according to Dunstan-Moore, was expanded on the advice of Kimberly Murray, who served as Canada’s “special interlocutor” for missing children and unmarked graves.
This monstrous outrage has been indirectly supported by federal government funding to both the “special interlocutor” and the NWSM. As the redoubtable Nina Green of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy wrote in her Substack newsletter last week: “Parliament must get to the bottom of this. The federal government knows, from its own files, that there are no missing or disappeared Indian residential school students. The federal government can no longer allow the Canadian public to be deceived with claims of thousands of missing children and nefarious unmarked burials when it knows those claims are not true, and it cannot allow the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal process to continue based on that false pretext.” Canadians are entitled to know when the federal government will debunk this appalling falsehood.
There is another tenuously related point that has arisen lately, not involving anyone’s rights but Canada’s seriousness as a country. All of the G7 countries (except Germany) — as well as Russia, China, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates — have extremely skilled demonstration aerobatic jet teams that perform in air shows and are a matter of pride to their air forces and to the people of all these countries. Ottawa has announced that following this season, Canada’s Snowbirds, which have impressed and delighted Canadians and others for over 50 years, will be grounded until the 2030s at the earliest, if they come back at all. This must not be allowed to happen. As Winston Churchill said, “An efficient and a successful administration manifests itself equally in small as in great matters.”
If Canada wishes to be taken seriously as a country, it has to behave like a serious country.
First published in the National Post
