Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Vancouver Kingsway for talking about racism. Canada has to learn from our past. I am an Irish-Canadian. Probably the first group to be discriminated against was the Irish: “No Irish need apply”. Then we saw it with Ukrainians, Japanese, Italians and Sikhs. We have seen discrimination, and that is something we should all condemn, which is sort of the language of the motion.
However, with the BDS movement, we see groups that really want to promote hate dressing it up. We saw similar efforts to tarnish the gay pride parade in Toronto by entering a float related to attacking the State of Israel. It had nothing to do with celebrating diversity, and the parade was about that. These groups are trying to use legitimate organizations, or covers, to promote their underlying objective, which is anti-Semitism and a rejection of the right of the State of Israel to exist. We should call these things what they are.
We have a tolerant and open society. People can have opinions on a whole range of things, and that is encouraged. However, when it is creeping into hate and discrimination, and we do not go so far in the motion to do anything like banning it, as some in the NDP suggest, it is a responsibility of parliamentarians to condemn a conduct that is fuelled at anti-Semitism and rejection of our ally.