Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - August 8, 2024, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 THURSDAY AUGUST 8, 2024 Ideas, Issues, Insights More grace for refugees “ WE just want people who will fit in.” I’ve heard this said countless times around the dinner table and the outdoor firepit over the last several months. People will clutch their imaginary pearls and talk earnestly about “those people” seen protesting the war in Gaza or at- tempting to find homes after fleeing war in Syria. Those are just the polite barbs — the micro- aggressions about not fitting in. The more sinister ones can be seen on social media from those more emboldened by anonymity. Muslims and Arabs branded as terrorists, dangerous rapists just by virtue of their country of origin or religion. Of course, the Liberal government is roasted for allowing even more of “them” to come into the country. That two men have recently been arrested and charged with multiple terrorism offences in To- ronto late last month has only fuelled that flame. Nine charges, including one count each of con- spiracy to commit murder for the benefit or at the direction of a terrorist group — namely ISIS, a Sunni Muslim militant organization — have been laid against a 62-year-old and his 26-year-old son. Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer wants to know how these men were allowed into the country as the Tories go for blood with polling numbers heavily weighted in their favour. Maybe it’s time for them to dust off failed leadership candidate Kellie Leitch’s idea to run an RCMP tip line to report barbaric practices. Anything to get folks up in arms about the current government. Stoke the fires. There has been widespread rioting and numer- ous injuries in the U.K. fuelled by anti-immigra- tion sentiments. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starm- er denounced “far-right thuggery” as responsible for the attacks on a hotel housing asylum-seekers. At least 10 police officers have been injured fac- ing a barrage of missiles made up of bits of wood, chairs and fire extinguishers as the attacks have continued in numerous locations. The assaults follow fake news on social media suggesting that the man charged with killing three girls at a dance recital in Northern U.K. was a Muslim asylum seeker. In fact, the man charged was born in the U.K.. Protesters taking part in the melee could be heard shouting: “Save our kids,” “We want our country back” and “Stop the boats.” In Canada, we did stop the boats, literally. We were so afraid of allowing in people who did not look like us, our government prevented “those people” from taking over our country, our schools, our government. In 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apolo- gized for the actions of the Canadian government that stopped a boat filled with 900 European Jews escaping Nazi Germany from landing in Halifax. The MS St. Louis sailed from Germany to Cuba in 1939 but was refused entry, despite having proper documentation. Both the U.S. and Canada then denied the passengers safe haven. It was forced to return to Europe and from there, 254 of its pas- sengers died in Nazi concentration camps. In his apology, Trudeau pointed out that “Bitter resentment towards Jews were enshrined in our policies.” In fact, Canada accepted fewer Jewish refugees than any other Western nation during the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 with none- is-too many, a phrase, attributed to Mackenzie King’s attitude to Jewish immigration while prime minister. Jews were not considered assim- ilable. It was a different response to a different kind of boat that won Canada recognition for service to refugees from the United Nations. When thou- sands of refugees left Southeast Asia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of them arrived in Canada, thanks to the introduction of a new policy allowing private sponsorship of refugees. Winnipeg-born Senator Peter Harder was part of that experience as the founding executive director of the Immigration and Refugee Board and a former deputy minister of Immigration. He spoke about the significance of the signing of that agreement for the sponsorship of refugees with the Mennonite Central Committee on its 40th anniversary in 2019. As Harder pointed out, private sponsorship “al- lowed individual Canadians to put into action the compassion they felt when faced with the horrific plight of desperate families in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, risking everything to flee to safety in small boats that were anything but safe.” Two different stories of refugees to this coun- try with so many more stories to tell. How do we want this latest chapter to read? Canadians can fall down the rabbit hole and feed anger and resentment of the unknown by scapegoating Muslims and Arabs, believing that they are taking our jobs and depriving our chil- dren of safe housing (all empirically untrue) and that they are unsafe. Or there’s the compassionate alternative to act with grace. More grace in our response to refugees could go a long way to making sure that they “fit in” with the rest of Canada, whatever that means. Shannon Sampert is a lecturer at RRC Polytech. She was the politics and perspectives editor at the Free Press from 2014-17. shannon@mediadiva.ca Netanyahu’s game DEMOCRATS in the United States and most people who are paying attention elsewhere in the world were greatly relieved when U.S. President Joe Biden quit his re-election campaign two weeks ago and let Vice-President Kamala Harris run instead. They don’t really know much about her, but they know she is not Donald Trump. Harris now has a good chance of overtaking Trump in the presidential race, but only so long as the United States does not get dragged into a big war in the Middle East. However, she is not in charge of U.S. foreign policy. Biden is still run- ning that, and he still seems incapable of saying no to Israel no matter what it does. What Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Net- anyahu is doing at the moment is systematically crossing the “red lines” laid down by Israel’s most dangerous enemies, Iran and its proxy in Leba- non, Hezbollah. In conventional military terms, that doesn’t make sense. The Israel Defence Forces are already heavily engaged in fighting Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Israeli troops are tired and the economy is suffering from the repeated call-ups of reservists. The army doesn’t want to open up another front. Hezbollah and the Israeli army have been involved in a low-intensity exchange of rockets and artillery fire across Israel’s northern border ever since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October. However, the targets on both sides were limited to the first 20 kilometres beyond the border, where most civilians have been evacuated. No attacks on Beirut, no attacks on Tel Aviv. Iran, with 90 million people and an Islamist government, could be an existential threat to Isra- el if it had nuclear weapons, but it has deliberately stopped just short of that technology. It supports various Arab members of the “Axis of Resis- tance” with money and weapons, but it avoids direct clashes with Israel and the two do not have a common border. So it is obviously in Israel’s interest to maintain the status quo with Hezbollah and Iran — and yet Netanyahu has begun trying to undermine it. His first initiative was a missile strike four months ago that killed two Iranian generals and five other officers who were visiting Iran’s embassy in Syria. Israel often “deniably” assas- sinates Iranian officers, officials and scientists, but this was a direct challenge that was certain to evoke an Iranian military response. Neither Teheran nor Washington wanted to get drawn into a war, however, so they co-ordinated a charade in which Iran launched 300 missiles and drones against Israel but all of them were shot down or missed their targets. Honour was satisfied, and Netanyahu was thwarted. But then in July, Biden pulled out of the presi- dential race, Harris became the candidate, and the prospect of a less blindly supportive U.S. ally loomed on the horizon. How best to ensure that Harris doesn’t win and Netanyahu’s friend Don- ald Trump becomes president instead? Drag the U.S. into a war with Iran before the election. A pretext for that soon presented itself in the form of a random Hezbollah missile in the usual tit-for-tat along the Israeli-Lebanese border that killed a dozen young Druze who were playing football. It wasn’t unusual and it probably wasn’t even deliberately targeted at the football field, but it gave Netanyahu the excuse he needed. On the night of July 30-31, Israeli missiles flew to Beirut, Hezbollah’s red line, to kill Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s second-in-command. Only hours later an Israeli missile or bomb (accounts vary) killed Hamas’s political head, Ismail Haniyeh — and it killed him in Tehran, to ensure that Iran also felt obliged to retaliate. To people unfamiliar with the way the game is played in the Middle East this account may sound paranoid, or even specifically anti-Israeli. It is not. I offer in defence the analysis by Alon Pinkas in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on Aug. 1: “Israel could have killed Haniyeh anywhere in the Mid- dle East, yet chose to do so in Tehran during the inauguration of the new president … Israel left Tehran no alternative but to retaliate. “Who has no interest in such an escalation? The United States, whose makeshift Middle East pol- icy will now have to be revisited, and Iran, which clearly prefers attrition and low intensity. “Who does have a vested interest in an ex- panded war? Mr. Netanyahu. Which is why the conventional wisdom in Washington over the last 36 hours is that Israel carried out the Haniyeh assassination deliberately in Iran and intentional- ly on that day.” And what is dear old Joe Biden doing? He’s sending another aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean to “defend Israel” (and maybe fight Iran) when he should be using the leverage of the US$6.5 billion of extra military aid Washington has sent Israel since last October to force a ceasefire in Gaza. Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. Time to act on electoral reform promise “WE can have an electoral system that does a better job of reflecting the concerns, the voices of Canadians from coast to coast, and give us a better level of governance.” Those aren’t the words of some radical revolutionary bent on upending Canadian society. They are the words of our prime minister, shortly after he was first elected, and people could be forgiven for believing he might still deliver on his campaign promise of electoral reform. But here we are, nearly a full decade under the Trudeau regime, and we are stuck with the same “first past the post” system that is virtually guaranteed to keep giving disproportionate power to the Conservative and Liberal parties. And in that two-party tango which has basically encompassed the entirety of Canada’s legislative history, the Liberals are likely in the process of stepping on their last toes before being asked to exit the dance floor. While they desperately try to cling to their last vestiges of popularity, in acts like taking credit for the pharmacare or dental plans the NDP had to drag them into kicking and screaming, it seems highly doubtful the Liberals will form the next government. So what better time than now to finally act on that dusty old election promise of electoral reform? After all, the Liberals have been stoking the fires with fears of what a majority government under the Pierre Poil- ievre Conservatives would mean for Canada and the world. Rightly so. I, too, shudder at the thought of the backsteps we will see on major issues like the environment, drug/judicial policy, and protections for marginalized people. The Liberals might not have been great, or even good, on these issues. But there can be little doubt that the Conservatives will be significantly worse. If the Liberals are as concerned about all this as they claim, they have the opportunity to limit the damage the Conservatives can do. Introducing any of the many voting systems geared towards more proportional representation for the next election would almost certainly prevent the Conservatives from achieving a majority government. And all those arguments the Liberals made back in 2015 still stand. Our current system is abhorrent at rep- resenting the actual views of the populace. In the last election the NDP won over three million votes, well over half of what the Liberals or Conservatives did, yet they were only given 25 seats in parliament, compared to the Liberals 160 and the Conservatives 119. Obviously these numbers make clear ex- actly why the two traditional ruling parties want to keep this system. But the Liberals have a chance to make history in these twilight days of their regime, by giving Canada the system of real representative government that they promised. There is still plenty of time and it would pass a parliamentary vote easily enough, as the under-represented parties would surely support such a motion. So, one might ask, what is the holdup? Why does it not even seem to be on the ra- dar to give Canadians a more representative system, while also ensuring the incoming Conservative government won’t be able to do nearly as much damage should they win the upcoming election? And not only that, the Liberals have a chance to be viewed as the party that selflessly abdicated their grip on power for the greater good of the nation. We’ve seen what wonders a similar act south of the border has done for the reputa- tion of the thankfully outgoing U.S. Presi- dent Joe Biden. If Trudeau wants to salvage a legacy out of his term, this is the best way. Sure, the Liberal party would be limiting its own capacity to consolidate power in the future, after the Conservatives inevitably wear out their welcome and the electorate decides to recycle dance partners once more. But one would hope that such a craven calculation would not outweigh their chance to limit the harm of a Poilievre majority. One hopes that the Liberals’ professed fears aren’t just so much lip service, because I struggle to see any reason that they wouldn’t take this opportunity, other than a bid of class solidarity among the political caste to maintain the status quo. To have our political leaders putting such considerations ahead of the good of the gov- erned would be bad enough for Canada, but it would also be highly naïve of the Liberals. As we have seen from right-wing politicians in the U.S., and the Canadian political tides have a tendency to follow suit, I would not expect the Conservatives to be offering the Liberals any similar opportunities to consol- idate power in the future. Alex Passey is a Winnipeg author. ALEX PASSEY GWYNNE DYER SEAN KILPATRICK / CANADIAN PRESS FILES Ana Maria Gordon (second from left), who is the only surviving Canadian passenger of the MS St. Louis, stands with family and fellow survivors during a formal apology from the Canadian government over the fate of the MS St. Louis and its passengers in the House of Commons on Nov. 7, 2018. SHANNON SAMPERT ;