According to former British Columbia cabinet minister Selina Robinson, Canada’s Left has an antisemitism problem. Robinson should know. Until 2023, she was the only Jewish member of the leftist BC government’s provincial cabinet. That ended abruptly when she was fired on trumped-up allegations of racism and Islamophobia.
On December 18, 2024, Robinson released a tell-all book about her experiences with the apt name, Truth Be Told. The first truth Robinson tells is that she was an experienced and effective cabinet minister brought down by a mob of angry activists who were looking for a Jewish target in the BC government in the wake of the October 7 attacks in Israel. Indeed, since her 2017 appointment to cabinet, she served at the highest levels of the BC government, including minister of municipal affairs, finance, and then post-secondary education.
Robinson had always been on the political Left, driven by a practical desire to implement the Jewish values of tikkun olam. So, when she entered provincial politics, she ran as a member of the traditionally social democratic and labor-oriented New Democratic Party (NDP).
The Canadian political spectrum generally consists of three main parties with variations at the federal and provincial levels. The NDP is the furthest to the Left but would have easily felt at home with Israel’s Labor Party or similar European social democrats. The NDP, and its predecessor, the Canadian Commonwealth Federation, were among the earliest Canadian supporters of the young Israeli nation, attracted to its progressive, universalist, and inclusive democracy. Even as the balance of power shifted in the Middle East after the Six Day War and the Palestinian issue took over headlines, the NDP retained a balanced view of the conflict.
All that has changed, something Robinson learned in a painful way in 2023.
Robinson’s would-be crime occurred in the context of a heated discussion during an online panel of four Canadian Jewish officials on January 20, 2024. The topic was the spike in Canadian antisemitism, and while attempting to point out the ignorance of many of Canada’s younger generations about modern Israeli history, Robinson made the comment that youth “don’t understand that it [Israel] was a crappy piece of land with nothing on it.”
This nondescript line about the lack of a modern productive economy in Palestine was immediately ripped out of context and thrown back at Robinson. She was accused of the usual slurs: promoting genocide, racism, and Islamophobia. Radical Muslim groups demanded her termination. The cancel culture mob came out in force. As is standard with cancelation targets, Robinson tried to mollify the fury with an apology, followed eventually by a second apology. As is almost always the case, the apologies did nothing but feed the fire as imams, mosques and Islamic centers accused her of “blatant bigotry.”
Robinson’s political allies abandoned her, culminating with then-BC premier David Eby removing her from cabinet in early February 2024.
But Robinson didn’t go down without a fight. She resigned from the NDP caucus, turning the tables on her former colleagues and pointing to numerous instances of antisemitism within the BC NDP that were overlooked and quickly forgotten, with no consequences for the perpetrators.
Then she wrote her book. It names names. It paints a picture of an NDP government that was rife with indifference or outright hostility to Jews after October 7, immediately calling for statements of solidarity with the Palestinians, glossing over the murder, rape, and abduction of thousands of Israelis and foreign nationals on that bloody day.
If this were a one-off thing, we might decry how Robinson was treated, condemn her cancelation, and move on. As she notes in her book, however, this visceral hatred for Israel and all things Zionist, has become the hallmark, the norm on Canada’s social and political Left. The New Democratic Party, has abandoned its balanced approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, at both the provincial and federal levels, in favor of a radical pro-Palestinian position.
Additionally, with virtually every Canadian election, we see NDP candidates called out and sometimes turfed for their past antisemitic comments. This is not only a problem with the NDP, however. The centrist Liberal party, currently in power in Ottawa, has turned from Canada’s traditional fair brokerage roll to joining the bandwagon of criticism directed at Israel internationally.
Not a traditional case of blood libel
Still, as Robinson notes, this isn’t just a case of traditional blood libel antisemitism.
This is antisemitism wrapped up in the ideological vitriol of anti-colonialist and anti-Western hatred in which every global ill is laid at the feet of those who are white or, in the case of the Jews (and even east Asians), “white adjacent.”
The problem for Israel is that it has historically been cast as the useful scapegoat, ripe for attack. Today, the Canadian Left has happily bought into this mixture of ancient hatred and modern ideology. What happened to Selina Robinson is a sad testament to this fact, but her book is a remarkable and often uplifting effort to shine some light into Canada’s deepening darkness.
The writer is a lawyer in Calgary, Canada; an adjunct lecturer in community health sciences at the University of Calgary; former chief of the Alberta Human Rights.