Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Tries to Bash Israel for Electoral Gain on Monday

After nearly nine years under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada’s foreign policy has drifted into a kind of high school debating club — where policy positions on foreign affairs are usually taken on the fly, and solely for domestic consumption.

Where Israel is concerned, the end result has been an increasingly alienated Jewish community.

In the wake of Hamas’ October 7 terror attack, the Canadian government sounded the right notes, with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland calling “for the [Israeli] hostages who were seized in this vile, horrific attack to be released immediately.”

Not surprisingly, the terrorists didn’t comply with her polite request.

And the sympathy and goodwill for Israel quickly dissipated once the Jewish State began its inevitable and necessary military response.

By mid-October 2023, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly and her Parliamentary Secretary Rob Oliphant were gullibly parroting talking points from Hamas’ Ministry of Health, which claimed that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli hospital, killing 500 people.

Days later, in a weekend press release that got lost in the news cycle, Defense Minister Bill Blair grudgingly accepted the facts: that the initial story was a lie, and the “hospital bombing” was in fact a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that landed in a parking lot.

Neither Joly nor Oliphant ever apologized.

In March 2024, the socialist New Democratic Party (NDP) — on whose support the minority Liberals have relied to avoid a non-confidence vote and early election — put forward a motion that sought to recognize Palestinian statehood and reinstate funding to UNRWA, which had been paused due to some of its employees’ involvement with Hamas and the October 7 massacre.

In a last minute compromise, UNRWA got their money (the “pause” was removed before Canada ever missed a payment), and the aspiring State of Palestine had to make do without Canadian recognition.

But it was the Trudeau government’s decision to cease the further authorization of arms exports to Israel that was seen by many so-called progressives as the prize in the negotiations.

The gesture was mostly symbolic, as Canada’s military exports to Israel — which totaled C$21.3 million in 2022 (US $15.7 million) — are a rounding error and a shade more than the C$18.1 million (US$13.3 million) the country sent to Algeria that year.

Even tiny Qatar, which has provided both safe haven and hard cash to Hamas for years, bought more than twice the value of weapons than the Israelis.

And the military exports to all of Canada’s other non-US trading partners are dwarfed in magnitude by the C$1.15 billion (US$ 847.5 million) that Canada sent to Saudi Arabia, which represented more than half of 2022 military exports outside of the US.

When the Saudis were fighting a brutal war with the Iranian-backed Houthi terrorist group, Trudeau’s Liberals resisted calls for an arms embargo.

Saudi Arabia is by no means perfect, but in a choice between supporting a steadfast Middle East ally or giving moral quarter to an unapologetically anti-Western death cult, there was no question about which side to support.

Yet selling a nominal amount of weapons to Israel, which was fighting an existential war against Iranian-backed terrorists on multiple fronts, while trying to exert leverage to free civilian hostages, was somehow beyond the pale.

One could be forgiven for thinking that this shameful episode ended matters, but domestic politics have taken some additional turns against the Liberals, and they’ve decided to dust off the old Israeli punching bag.

In June, the Liberals lost a close by-election in a Toronto-area riding they had held since 1993, in which roughly 15% of the voters are Jewish. According to one exit poll, nearly two thirds of those Jewish voters chose the Conservative candidate.

Last week, the NDP decided they were not going to continue to support Trudeau’s government after all — not that they were going to bring down the government and call an actual election. But they were no longer guaranteeing a rubber stamp and would henceforth start the conversation about every confidence vote with a very firmly Canadian “maybe.”

On Monday, the Liberals will face a by-election in another “safe” Montreal-area riding that they have held since its creation in 2015.

According to current polls, they’re in a tight race, but trailing the separatist Bloc Quebecois and only one percentage point ahead of the NDP, whose candidate has circulated a pamphlet featuring a Palestinian flag and a caption in French saying “I’m voting for Craig Sauvé to stop the genocide in Gaza.”

With Trudeau’s own national polling numbers badly lagging those of the opposition Conservatives, it was time yet again to do something — not of global import, which the country is powerless to achieve — but at least good enough for an Ottawa press conference in both of Canada’s official languages.

Enter Foreign Affairs Minister Joly, who is Trudeau’s fifth cabinet minister in the role, and his fourth in the last six years.

Joly failed up to her current role after a disastrous tenure in her first job as the nation’s Heritage Minister, before taking on less prominent roles in multiple cabinet shuffles.

A few days before the Palestinian statehood vote, she and Mental Health and Addictions Minister Ya’ara Saks, who is Jewish, posed for a cringe-worthy photo in which they held hands with Palestinian Authority strongman Mahmoud Abbas.

With another by-election embarrassment looming, the last symbolic arms embargo was suddenly not good enough and another was apparently warranted.

And while selling much larger quantities of weapons to Saudi Arabia and Qatar is just good business, Israel is apparently such a menace that Canada now needed to ban ammunition exports to the United States from Quebec because they would eventually find their way to Israel.

The decision will, of course, have no impact on Israel’s war effort whatsoever: ammunition is fungible, and if the Americans want the Israelis to have it, then they will have it.

But it felt like yet another slap in the face for Canadian Jews and a cynical ploy to capture NDP votes from the anti-Israel left.

Whether any of this rescues Trudeau’s government from another electoral embarrassment remains to be seen. Regardless of what happens on Monday, the only cold comfort for Canadian Jews is that their government’s hostility toward the Jewish State is blunted only by their country’s irrelevance.

Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.

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