A Canada Day caution

Why is this Canada Day different from all other Canada Days? For Jewish Canadians, the past year has been one of conflicted emotions and difficult allegiances.

North American fears of repeat terror attacks have led to an atmosphere of heightened discomfort for Muslims and, curiously, for Jews; two groups that seem to act as domestic lightning rods for international tensions. While Muslims and Jews are viewed by many around the world as competing peoples, we are oddly unified in our placement slightly outside the North American mainstream as Middle East conflicts have put both religious groups in the uncomfortable roles of domestic representatives of external events.

It has been said before that Jews are the canaries in the coal mine of civil society. When things begin to go askew, it is frequently the Jews who suffer first and who are among the first to speak up.

The world is a more troubled place than it was a few Canada Days ago. World peace, if it was ever attainable, seems farther away than ever, not because of the Middle East alone. On every continent, tragic violence continues at rates and in fashions that challenge our substantial ability to become inured.

For Canadian Jews, this year's Iraq war accentuated the uniqueness of our community. While a majority of Canadians opposed the war, many tacitly or even explicitly defending Saddam Hussein and his regime, Canadian Jews were incapable of forgetting the missiles the Iraqi dictator sent raining down on Tel-Aviv during the last Gulf War.

On the Iraq issue and others, the Canadian government sent messages that were anathema to, or at least, ambivalent towards, the concerns of many Canadian Jews. The Iraq war and the ongoing Palestinian violence put into stark relief the differences that Canadian Jews feel from the larger body politic in this country.

Where many Canadians view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a vacuum, choosing to see a stateless people oppressed by a powerful military force, most Canadian Jews see a tiny repository of millennia of Jewish tradition, as well as democracy, civil rights and pluralism, surrounded by a sea of Arab and Islamic theocracies and dictatorships bent on destroying hatikvah, the hope of restoration.

Since last Canada Day, census results have been released showing that the Jewish minority in this country is still tiny, while the population of new Canadians from Muslim countries has spiked. This presents a challenge, but not an insurmountable one.

Muslim Canadians are not, by definition, prejudiced against Jews, by any means. But there are among that immigrant group a significant number who are products of education systems that attempt to instil genocidal hatred of Israel and of Jews. Canadians have always welcomed the diverse worldviews of newcomers but along with the hospitality has come a need to instil in all citizens an overarching appreciation for diversity and tolerance. This seems certain to become a more urgent and complicated matter if some immigrants demonstrate hatred against an identifiable group of other Canadians.

Since last Canada Day, we have heard the words of a former Saskatchewan First Nations leader, David Ahenakew, which have recently led to charges against him under hate crimes legislation.

Unlike some other hate crimes cases in Canada, Ahenakew's does not hinge on denial of the Holocaust, but rather on the acknowledgement of it, support for it and the expressed wish that it had succeeded in total genocide. That is a new perspective in the Canadian context.

The Ahenakew case in Saskatchewan raises practical issues in British Columbia, where our multi-jurisdictional Hate Crimes Team has suffered from government cutbacks to the point of near irrelevance. This is not to suggest that British Columbia lacks the resources to prosecute such a case; but the cutbacks in this province affect the education efforts with which the Hate Crimes Team was originally mandated, aimed at forestalling the next Ahenakew from developing horrific views of minorities. We have the means to prosecute but not to prevent.

Canada Day is traditionally a time of celebration, and it should be. This country remains a magnificent experiment in multiculturalism and egalitarianism. But as a country, it is also a fluid entity, undergoing changes as quickly as ever before. Not all of these changes are good. It is a tradition and a mitzvah for Jews to be sensitive to change and, when that change is not for the better, to name it, fight it and triumph over it.