Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Calgary Shepard.
Madam Speaker, this should not be a partisan debate. However, I must note from the start that our official opposition is the only party that has not had a single member, or would-be member, who supported, or now supports, BDS. Both the Prime Minister and the leader of the third party have spoken forcefully against BDS. I look forward to the eventual vote on the motion to see whether we can, in this House, make the vote on this motion unanimous.
The boycott, divest, sanctions campaigners claim it to be a human rights movement. In fact, it is nothing more than a thinly disguised, multi-dimensional hate campaign.
On one hand, it targets the economy and citizens of the only democracy in the Middle East. It seeks to delegitimize and demonize Israel with hateful, hypocritical anti-Semitic attacks.
On the other hand, on Canadian university and college campuses, the BDS movement focuses the new anti-Semitism on pro-Israel and Jewish students, disrupting with hate what should be a happy, uplifting student experience.
The global campaign, funded and supported by extremist elements against Israel, has worked its ugly agenda on any number of major campuses: Concordia, McGill, McMaster, Ryerson, the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo, and York University, which sits just on the edge of my constituency of Thornhill. It is very often championed by student unions controlled by the Canadian Federation of Students. Very often, all too often, student referenda involve intimidation to discourage opponents of BDS from voting and a variety of forms of vote-rigging.
In just a few days, now, McGill students are being asked again, for the third time in two years, to support BDS.
However, there is good news to report. One hopes that McGill students will follow the lead of University of Waterloo counterparts, who rejected a referendum proposal to sever ties between that university and Israeli academic institutions. A second-year student, Ilia Sucholutsky, was quoted as saying afterward, “If anti-Israel activists at UW genuinely cared about peace, they would have proposed initiatives that bring the two sides together in dialogue, reconciliation, and cooperation.” Mr. Sucholutsky continued, “Instead, they chose to pursue a one-sided, punitive, and discriminatory effort to isolate Israeli academics.” He concluded, “UW students clearly saw through this charade.”
While we commend the insight and the courage of some student bodies to resist the BDS bullies, I regret that this House, in 2016, must again recognize the pervasive existence of a new anti-Semitism here in Canada, and around the world.
Despite the best efforts of generations of parliamentarians and private citizens, and the vigilance and determination of human rights organizations, such as B'nai Brith Canada and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal, anti-Semitism, humankind's original hatred, remains alive and hatefully well in Canada, and abroad. B'nai Brith's most recent annual audit of anti-Semitism incidents released last year revealed the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents ever recorded by B'nai Brith and the League for Human Rights. At 1,627 incidents across Canada, the year saw a 28% increase over 2013.
Canadians can remember brief periods in recent decades when we might have thought anti-Semitism was a hateful phenomenon of the past. That was wishful thinking perhaps. However, then came the resurgence of ancient and hybrid hate.
In my riding of Thornhill, there has anti-Semitic vandalism and graffiti, such as swastikas over the Star of David. In Montreal, there have been firebombings of Jewish businesses and desecration of Jewish cemeteries. Anti-Israel rallies during periods of Mideast tension deteriorated into openly anti-Semitic events in Calgary, Mississauga, and Toronto.
Israeli Apartheid Week and the boycott, divest, sanction movement represent hybrid anti-Semitism. Proponents, propagandists for IAW or BDS, say they are not anti-Semites, that they have nothing against the Jewish people, but are merely against Israel the Zionist state.
“Zionist” has become the hateful code word for “Jew”.
Now we see a new variation of BDS. The European Union has imposed guidelines for labels of Israeli products made in the West Bank or Golan Heights, regulations that are being widely viewed as soft sanctions. The EU denies the origin labels represent a boycott of Israel, but in an increasingly anti-Israel Europe, labelling could lead to broader damage to Israel's economy.
However, the policy does seem to legitimize the boycott. For example, just a couple of months ago, a high-end Berlin department store removed all Israeli wines from its shelf, not just those from the Golan Heights, but from Israel itself. When the Jerusalem Post newspaper reported that the department store had been stolen by the Nazis before World War II the store put the wines back on the shelves.
The EU justifies the soft boycott on the argument that the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the settlement occupations, and that the origin labels will speed resolution of the two-state outcome that we all in the House wish to see. However, the EU has no plans to label Turkish products from illegally occupied North Cyprus, or to sanction Morocco for its illegal seizure of Western Sahara.
The good news from across the Atlantic is the British government's new legislation that bans city councils, publicly funded institutions, and some university student unions from boycotting Israeli products, or products from Israeli settlements. Those public institutions that continue to impose boycott restrictions on goods and services and products from Israel, or against British companies that deal in these products, will face what are called “severe penalties”.
At the same time, the bad news, this time from the United States, is that the State Department and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency now intend to sanction products from Israeli settlements. A state department spokesman said the move could be perceived as a step toward a wider boycott. His boss later said the U.S. denies that the origin discrimination represents a form of boycott. Either way, the State Department action is in strong contrast to statements opposing labelling from Congress, and to anti-boycott legislation passed by states, such as California, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana.
After consultation with my Thornhill constituents and a number of human rights proponents, I considered putting a private member's bill before the House that would condemn BDS. Such a bill would compel the administrations of publicly funded institutions across Canada to take firm actions against all forms of hate speech. It would also encourage development, through the appropriate committees of our Parliament, of legislation that would bar publicly funded higher learning institutions from boycotting Israeli goods and services, in line with the Government of Canada's own trade agreements with the State of Israel.
I am, unfortunately, rather distant on the list of precedence for private members' bills, but I would be delighted if a colleague from either side of the House were to pre-empt my proposed legislation with a private member's bill of their own. As I said in opening these remarks, today's debate should not divide on partisan lines. I hope that when the motion comes to a vote the House speaks with one unanimous voice against boycott, divest, sanctions.