Selina Robinson will release her memoir, Truth Be Told, in a special launch event on Dec. 18. Robinson, who served in senior cabinet portfolios in British Columbia’s government, was fired earlier this year after offhand remarks about the land on which Israel was founded.
In Truth Be Told, Robinson tells the behind-the-scenes story of what happened as she worked with the Jewish community to confront the antisemitism that erupted after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks on Israel. Dubbing herself the “Jew in the Crew,” Robinson was the voice of the BC Jewish community in government.
Then, when anti-Israel protesters and a group of Muslim clergy threatened the government unless Robinson was fired, Premier David Eby called a meeting of the entire New Democrat caucus – except for Robinson herself – and immediately afterwards she was told that she needed to resign.
The book is a cautionary story of the dangers to ethnocultural communities, multiculturalism and democracy itself when leaders stay silent – or worse, capitulate – in the face of coercion and place expediency ahead of principles.
Robinson will launch the book in conversation with Global BC legislative reporter Richard Zussman at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 18, in Vancouver. The specific location will be shared the morning of the event for security reasons.
There is no charge to attend the event, but registration is required at selinarobinson.ca. Copies of the book can be reserved on the website and will also be on sale at the event, with Robinson on hand to sign copies.
Isobel Mackenzie, left, and Selina Robinson will be honoured at Jewish Seniors Alliance’s AGM Nov. 3.
The Jewish Seniors Alliance of Greater Vancouver’s annual general meeting on Nov. 3 will serve as an opportunity to welcome the organization’s first-ever executive director, Jeff Moss, and to honour two prominent women in provincial politics who have been dedicated to seniors throughout their careers: Selina Robinson and Isobel Mackenzie.
JSA chair Tammi Belfer will introduce Moss, whose hiring marks a significant change in the alliance’s 21-year history. The shift, she said, will enable the board of directors to focus on policy-making and high-level planning, while collaborating with the new executive director and staff on implementation.
“This transition is a gradual process, and I want to extend my heartfelt thanks and appreciation to each board member for their years of unpaid work,” said Belfer. “Together with our executive director, we can now strategically plan every event, raise much-needed funds, and improve and expand our services to our ultimate clients – the seniors of Greater Vancouver, the Lower Mainland, and the entire province.”
Moss told the Independent that he is looking forward to his first AGM as executive director, a job he started in July, and that, in his new position, he plans to recognize the past and look ahead to the future of the “modern, inclusive and dynamic charity.”
“I am pleased to work alongside our incredible community partners, with the support of our generous donors, a committed board and motivated staff,” he said. “I look forward to continuing to build on our strong reputation for positively impacting the lives of lonely and isolated seniors.”
Belfer praised Moss as JSA prepares for its move away from an operational board, noting that the coming year will not be an easy one, but it will be exciting.
“Jeff and I form a great partnership and I hope, together, we bring the name and extreme value of JSA to the forefront of all seniors. This population is growing and the need is increasing. Vancouver and BC can count on us to be there for seniors. We are seniors stronger together,” she said.
“Jeff’s caring nature and strong management skills are the exact combination we need for our first executive director,” she added. “When he reaches out to you, make a point of meeting with him – you are in for a treat.”
Robinson, who has been the member of the legislative assembly for Coquitlam-Maillardville since 2013, is not running for reelection on Oct. 19. She made the decision to retire for several reasons (jewishindependent.ca/the-aftermath-of-resignation) and is in the final stages of writing a memoir, which is set for release in November.
Before gaining a seat in the legislature, Robinson worked as a family therapist and was a city councilor in Coquitlam for two terms. Her career includes having been associate executive director of Vancouver’s Jewish Family Service Agency. As an MLA, she served as opposition critic on seniors, mental health and addictions, and other issues. In government, she served as minister of municipal affairs and housing, and as British Columbia’s finance minister. She was minister of post-secondary education and future skills until earlier this year.
“Representing people in my community and being their voice in government has been the greatest honour, and having JSA acknowledge that work warms my heart,” Robinson told the Independent. “Thank you, JSA, for being such great partners.
“Jewish Seniors Alliance understands that, in order to have a strong community, you need to make sure that the community has what it needs,” she said. “JSA engages Jewish seniors to provide them with services and supports, and to better understand their needs so that they can advocate for resources to better meet those needs.”
Mackenzie – who is nominated for a term this year on JSA’s board of directors – served for 10 years under both Liberal and NDP governments as the province’s first seniors advocate, before her retirement earlier this year. Her efforts won her widespread plaudits and dispelled initial skepticism concerning the effectiveness of the new office.
In a piece for the Orca in March, shortly after it was announced that Mackenzie would leave her role as seniors advocate, political commentator Rob Shaw wrote, “She left widely respected by all sides at the legislature, inside the Ministry of Health and even amongst the seniors care groups she has occasionally clashed with in her reports.
“Mackenzie’s work highlighting care hour shortages in long-term care homes, first-bed refusal policy problems, partners split up in assisted living, consent and admission concerns, and the underperformance of private long-term care facilities using public funding have all led to government reforms. She created a useful and relevant database on care homes. And she’s still fighting for a hike to the Shelter Aid for Elderly Renters (SAFER) rates.”
In the 1990s, long before she became the province’s seniors advocate, Mackenzie was chief executive officer of the provincial nonprofit Beacon Community Services, where she led a new model of dementia care that has become a national best practice, and established safety accreditation for home-care workers.
Jewish community member Dan Levitt is the new provincial seniors advocate, taking over from Mackenzie.
The JSA AGM on Nov. 3 will be held at Congregation Beth Israel, starting at 5 p.m. Dinner tickets are $75 and attendees are requested to RSVP by Oct. 20 to [email protected] or 604-732-1555.
Anyone who has made a donation to JSA of $18 or more in the past 12 months is considered a member in good standing and is eligible to vote at the AGM.
Sam Margolishas written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.
This summer, Jeff Moss became the first executive director of the Jewish Seniors Alliance of Greater Vancouver. Moss has long served the local community, following the example of his parents, who were deeply involved in building the Jewish community in Richmond.
The father of three adult children, Moss was co-chair of Richmond Jewish Day School, where, he said, the board took an active role, which helped him build a solid understanding of how an involved board could work alongside professional management. Moss spent three decades in the private sector before leaving to work at United Way British Columbia and then making his way to JSA.
“I reached out to United Way for an opportunity to become a campaign manager,” Moss told the Independent. “I went into work helping them with fundraising and campaign management, telling their story. And I had the opportunity to connect with a lot of great people and got some experience working in nonprofits. I had really wanted to get engaged with the nonprofit world. My desire was to go out and make an impact in the community.
“Then, Oct. 7 happened,” he said, “and I felt very strongly that I wanted to make an impact on the Jewish world if I could. So, I began to look for opportunities to serve in Jewish nonprofits and, eventually, the opportunity with JSA came along.”
Moss says that the executive director role has allowed him to tie his experiences of leading an organization and fundraising together. Further, it is an opportunity to bring his commitment to the community and bring a positive effect for those in need. He is thankful for the framework the late Serge Haber, JSA founder and often its guiding light, set in place.
“It is a great opportunity for me personally, and I hope I am able to meet the needs of JSA as we look to build upon the incredible successes that Serge and his team had built in terms of being able to create this organization,” Moss said, adding that he is intent on bolstering the pillars of the organization: peer support, education, outreach and advocacy.
“After 20 years of success so far, the way I see it, my role is to make sure that, as an organization, we are set up for the next 20 years,” he said.
Moss, who started the new position on July 2, praised the “incredible” board members at JSA and is planning to connect more with the organization’s stakeholders – that is, the community partners, donors and staff – to make sure they get the support they need. He looks forward to the future of JSA and its ability to have a beneficial influence in the Jewish community and the community at large.
“I am trying to ensure that we are going to be set for building out the structures that are needed to grow and be a sustainable organization,” he explained. “I want to continue the amazing work we are doing and enhance it – and to make sure that we are able to meet the needs of our growing seniors community.
“We are eager to connect with more volunteers in our Jewish community for our friendly visitor and peer support programs, and to connect with more Jewish senior clients to be matched in our seniors programs. We would like to extend beyond our current geographic reach, as our advocacy and outreach work is province-wide.”
The positive role JSA has goes well beyond the 140 clients and 100 volunteers who offer peer support – it impacts people’s family and friends, as well, Moss said. “The support we provide reduces the needs of others within the community, it makes it easier for kids and relatives to know there is additional home support for their loved ones.”
JSA also publishes Senior Line. With more than 4,000 copies per print run, JSA is hoping to expand the magazine’s presence into more seniors residences, through Vancouver Coastal and Fraser Health,and province-wide.JSA recently updated its website, which includes archives of the magazine going back several years.
Moss said JSA is “grateful to the Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation for supporting JSA’s organizational restructuring, and to all our valued donors who have been keen to help us along the way. We look forward to continuing to work and partner with them and other community organizations to meet the goals and objectives that we all set out.”
According to JSA’s mission statement, a senior is a person aged 55+. Those who volunteer for peer services are all 55+ but anyone who wishes to participate in the Friendly Visitor Program needs only to be 18 or older.
JSA will hold its annual general meeting on Nov. 3. The proceedings will include the recognition of former BC seniors advocate Isobel MacKenzie and retiring MLA Selina Robinson for their work on behalf of seniors.
This year’s JSA Fall Symposium will take place Nov. 17 and will feature Dan Levitt, current BC seniors advocate.
The weekly rally at Vancouver Art Gallery marked nine months since the pogrom of Oct. 7. (photo by Anna-Mae Wiesenthal)
Selina Robinson, the former BC cabinet minister whose planned speech at Vancouver’s weekly rally for the hostages was canceled over security concerns earlier this year, was the surprise speaker Sunday at the vigil marking nine months since the pogrom of Oct. 7.
“I was out here nine months ago, representing government and the Jewish community … as we mourned together the slaughter of young people, the rape of women, the death of so many innocent people perpetrated by Hamas,” Robinson said. “I took it upon myself to make sure that we did right by the Jewish community and I took that honour with great reverence and commitment. I did so at the request of [then-premier] John Horgan and then I did it at the request of [current premier] David Eby and I did it diligently, as best I could. And we watched as a government what happens when hate goes unchecked. I never thought in my life, really, that I would see this level of hatred directed toward Jews.”
She lauded fellow elected officials who stand with the Jewish community and said there should be unanimity.
“On this issue, we should not be divided,” said Robinson, a former minister of finance who was minister of postsecondary education when Eby, the premier, demanded her resignation after comments she made on a webinar calling pre-state Israel a “crappy piece of land.”
She credited Jewish organizations and allies for the work they are doing, but warned of a steep road ahead.
“We have a lot of work to do, my friends,” she said. “The antisemitism that has been unleashed is going to be hard to put back in the bottle.”
Congregation Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld had harsh words for Robinson’s treatment at the hands of colleagues.
“Let’s tell the truth of why Selina was kicked out of cabinet,” Infeld said. “The reason is because Selina was the one representative of the Jewish people in cabinet. Selina was the one person in cabinet, in our government, willing to stand up not for some people’s human rights but for all of our human rights. Selina was kicked out of cabinet because she was a strong woman who stood for all that our province is supposed to stand for and she was kicked out of cabinet because she is a Jewish hero.”
BC Conservative Party leader John Rustad spoke, and was joined at the rally by fellow Conservative MLA Elenore Sturko and a number of Conservative candidates standing in October’s provincial election.
“I am proud to say that I stand here with you,” said Rustad. “I stand against terrorism. I stand against Hamas and what they have done.”
The government in British Columbia needs to do more to counter antisemitism, he said.
“People who come to this province, to live here, come here with the expectation that they will live in peace,” Rustad said. “They come with the expectation to be able to raise a family, to be able to build the future, and what we are seeing today, with the antisemitism that is happening throughout our communities, I just find completely wrong.”
Ezra Shanken, chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, expressed pride in the community he serves. He urged elected officials to stand with the community.
“We remember who was there on day one and we see who’s there now and that’s something that we have to stand up for here in our province and in our country,” he said. “We need them side-by-side by us and you need to be the ones to continue to tell them at all levels of government that we need them now more than ever.”
Lior Noyman, an Israeli-Canadian educator and filmmaker, expressed sorrow for victims of violence in Israel and Gaza. He warned the audience to be vigilant against expanding antisemitism.
“Leaders, teachers, parents, Canadians, I am calling to you all,” he said. “Don’t let them walk us back in time.”
Dov (David) Rosengarten, a Vancouverite who is chief of staff for donor communications at United Hatzalah, Israel’s network of 7,000 volunteer first responders, brought greetings and gratitude from Israel.
“Your display of unwavering solidarity every weekend here continues to give us strength through this difficult period,” he said.
Noting the nine-month period since Oct. 7, Rosengarten drew parallels with the human pregnancy term, except that these past 40 weeks have been a time of unprecedented trauma. He sees hope in news of a ceasefire plan and hopes that “these painful birth pangs will end and the citizens of Israel and the Jewish people at large, including here in Vancouver, will be reborn again. After these many painful months, these cries of sorrow will be transformed to jubilation and we will finally hold our beloved hostages and loved ones again and celebrate the victory of unity and, like with a newborn child, we will shape for ourselves a bright future full of new dreams and possibilities.”
An X post about an antisemitic takeover of the Simon Fraser University library downtown, named after Jewish philanthropists Samuel and Frances Belzberg. Khalida Jarrar is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which Canada listed as a terror entity in 2003. (screenshot)
More than 250 members of the Jewish community gathered at Congregation Beth Israel last week to learn more about antisemitism occurring on BC campuses. The discussion was led by a panel of Jewish students representing the University of BritishColumbia, the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University, as well as educators and a spokesperson from Hillel BC. Panelists spoke about how pro-Palestinian activists have created an environment that has made Jewish students and educators feel unsafe, and that their concerns are, by and large, not being taken seriously by university administrators.
“Hillel has shifted from being a place where students explore their identity to being an emergency room for antisemitic incidents,” said Ohad Gavrieli, executive director of Hillel BC. “What we’re encountering is unprecedented, and our main role has been to protect and defend Jewish identity.”
Hillel is focused on safety, education, programming and advocacy, said Gavrieli. It is assisting students as they try to file complaints about antisemitism, while continuing with events like Shabbat dinners and bagel lunches, critical components that allow for the continuity of Jewish life during this crisis.
Gavrieli said universities’ approaches to antisemitism have been very ineffective.
“While they understand we’re hurting as a community, they’re politicians and they care about their institutional reputation. They want to please both sides,” he argued. “So, when we talk with them about the encampments, they tell us to be patient, that they’re working on it and will come up with a solution.”
Member of the Legislative Assembly Selina Robinson described a similar “deafness and silence” when she spoke about antisemitism with her political colleagues.
“I heard stories from Langara students who were afraid to leave the bathroom because there was marching in the hallways. I got calls from students whose instructors were telling them they needed to participate in a march, and from educators whose administrators were involved in BDS [boycott, sanction and divestment] activity,” she recalled. “I felt I needed to say something, so I said lots – to the attorney general, the solicitor general, the chief of staff. And I got silence, or responses like, ‘we’re looking into it’ – but nothing happened.”
For Aria Levitt, a Jewish student leader entering her second year at UVic, the campus environment is daunting.
“When an encampment was established in the Quad at UVic, the university issued a statement that overnight camping there was not allowed. But the encampment is still there, and they’re not doing anything about it, which is a statement in itself,” said Levitt. “I heard the marches, protests and chants and it was very scary. I don’t feel proud to weara UVic sweater,” she added.
At Simon Fraser University, Rachel Altman, an associate professor, said the Faculty for Palestine group has been relentless about holding anti-Israel events, and that those events even count towards the educators’ professional credit. “I attended one of their events and I was shaking by the end of it, it was so deeply unsettling,” she confessed.
“The hatred in the room was palpable,” said Altman. “They were clearly talking about me and my colleagues, misrepresenting my responses and not giving me a chance to defend myself. I felt hated by colleagues who have never spoken to me face-to-face. One person made a claim that Israel is stealing organs. This group is large and it’s having an impact on the general climate at SFU.”
Altman is trying to get her faculty association to adopt a neutrality policy and to develop institutional neutrality. Dr. Estie Ford, a professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at UBC, is working with her colleagues to establish the Jewish Academic Alliance of BC, with the goal of being a face for Jewish faculty who are not anti-Zionist, across the province. “This is a new time when people are coming together and there’s so much amazing work being done,” Ford said.
Gavrieli fields calls from Jewish parents wondering how safe BC campuses are for their children. He tells students to continue to hold their heads high, to not be afraid and to tackle the issues head-on.
“Antisemitism right now is being driven from campus and it’s rooted on campus,” he said. “Any parent with a child entering university should encourage them to engage in Jewish life on campus, to make it more vibrant and to deal with this issue fearlessly, because this is the time to fight.”
Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond.
Selina Robinson, centre, with then BC premier John Horgan and Kate Ryan-Lloyd, clerk of the Legislative Assembly, at Robinson’s swearing-in ceremony in 2017. (photo from Selina Robinson)
Selina Robinson says she was fired from the British Columbia cabinet. Premier David Eby says she quit.
This is merely the tip of an iceberg in the conflicting stories that have roiled BC politics since Robinson’s cabinet career ended in February – and which burst into an even bigger storm when she left the New Democratic Party caucus March 6 with an incendiary letter to caucus colleagues.
Whether Robinson jumped or was pushed, Jewish community leaders and opposition politicians are denouncing what they say is a double standard, with multiple people – including the premier – getting second chances for remarks that were at least as impolitic as Robinson’s.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Independent, Robinson maintains the premier prevented her from doing precisely the work he called on her to do – another point that Eby contradicts. He thought her acts of contrition were proceeding just fine and suggests he was blindsided by her resignation from caucus.
Perhaps the prickliest aspects of the entire controversy are the motivations of the individuals involved. Robinson, opposition officials and many in the Jewish community see antisemitism at play. Government officials – including the cabinet minister Robinson says the premier “trotted out as the new Jew” – say that the evidence doesn’t amount to racial bias.
The bones of the story are familiar by now – but Robinson shared with the Independent personal reflections and sharp critiques of former colleagues, including Eby, fellow New Democrats who she accuses of profound insensitivity in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks, a death threat that is now in the hands of international policing authorities, and how everything might have been different if John Horgan were still premier.
Poor choice of words
The drama began with words Robinson spoke in a Jan. 30 webinar organized by B’nai Brith Canada featuring Jewish elected officials from across Canada – or, at least, that is how most media coverage frames the controversy. Robinson said she has had a target on her back since much earlier, as a Jewish woman with emotional, spiritual and familial connections to Israel. That targeting came from within her own party, she claims, and she went into some depth about her fights with fellow New Democrats in recent months and years over the issue.
During the January webinar, Robinson said that the area designated for a Jewish state under the 1947 United Nations Partition Resolution was “a crappy piece of land with nothing on it.”
She immediately clarified in the webinar that there were people living there and she was referring to the arability of the land and the limited economic development in the region. But the genie was out of the bottle. Robinson told the Independent that what happened in the succeeding weeks – and continues roiling – is not so much a result of what she said, but of who she is.
Marvin Rotrand, the outgoing national director of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights, was host of the now-notorious webinar. In a statement afterward, he said that a small part of Robinson’s speech was distorted and taken out of context, leading to a campaign against her by groups and individuals “too well known for their hate of Israel.”
Within days, thousands had signed a petition calling for Robinson’s firing. Leaders of more than a dozen mosques and Islamic associations sent a letter to Eby warning that NDP representatives would not be welcome in their sacred spaces as long as Robinson remained in cabinet. Days later, her constituency office was vandalized – including with the words “Zionism is Nazism” – and she received a death threat that international police organizations deem credible.
While pressure was building, Robinson and Eby both appeared to be feeling their way through uncharted territory. Robinson apologized – twice. She also offered to take anti-Islamophobia training.
“My words were inappropriate, wrong, and I now understand how they have contributed to Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism,” she said.
Parallels Robinson drew between Indigenous peoples in British Columbia and Jewish indigeneity in Israel also brought condemnations, and she specifically apologized for those remarks.
“The experiences of First Nations people are not mine to manipulate,” she said. “That was wrong and I am deeply sorry.”
“Her comments increase divisions in our province,” Eby told media. “They increase the feelings of alienation of groups of people, especially people of Palestinian descent and people who are concerned about the death and the destruction in Palestine that is happening right now.
“She has apologized unequivocally, as she should. And she’s got some more work to do,” Eby said. Robinson, the premier told media, was in the process of reaching out to community leaders to repair the damage her remarks caused.
What happened in those hours sowed the seeds for further conflict within the party, including, Robinson now says, the premier’s refusal to allow her to do what she could do – and wanted to do – torepair the damage she caused.
Was she wrong?
Some commentators have defended Robinson, saying that pre-state Israel was indeed a crappy piece of land in terms of arability. Robinson reflected on what she said and the reaction to it.
“I said things that I did not intend to hurt anybody,” she said. “I did not intend to make Arab, Muslim or Palestinian people feel like they are ‘less than.’ I understand that just the way I described Israel made them feel like they were poor land stewards, that they somehow were to blame for the conditions.”
Nevertheless, she said, she did not invent a narrative that Mandatory Palestine was a poor piece of land, she said.
“Other people have characterized [pre-state] Israel in that way,” she said. “I didn’t create that narrative. I was repeating a narrative that others had stated, from Mark Twain to land economists.”
For the purposes of historical accuracy, she said, she blames the Ottomans, whose empire had controlled the land for 400 years, for a lack of economic vibrancy in the region. That long-ago history, though, does not mean her words did not affect contemporary audiences, she acknowledged.
“Those words impacted them,” she said of people who expressed disappointment and other emotions at her remarks.
Criticism she rejects, though, are assertions that she espoused hate.
“I didn’t espouse hate,” she said, slowly, quietly and firmly. “I said words that hurt people. There was no hate in those words.”
These nuances, for what they may be worth, made no difference when it came to Robinson’s continuation as a cabinet minister.
Jumped or pushed?
“The depth of the work that Minister Robinson needs to do, in order to address the harms that she’s caused, is significant,” the premier told media Feb. 5. “[S]he screwed up, she made a really significant error and so we need to address the harm that was caused by that.”
At a news conference, Eby said a “joint decision” was made that Robinson would leave cabinet.
While she agreed to that wording, Robinson told the Independent, that is not a correct assessment of what happened.
“I didn’t think that I needed to leave cabinet,” she said. “That was not my choice. The premier was insistent that I had to.”
Robinson says Eby seized on something she said during discussions around her future.
“I said, ‘If you are asking me to step down from cabinet, if that’s what you want, I will,’” Robinson recalled. “It’s not what I want. And he said, ‘I can’t see a path forward for you in cabinet.’ So I said, ‘So you’re asking me to resign.’”
Robinson said she insisted the announcement from the premier’s office say that the premier asked her to resign.
“And they said, no, you offered your resignation,” Robinson continued. “And I said … the most you’ll get from me is that it was a joint decision and that’s what the press release [said], a ‘joint decision.’ But … let’s be really clear, as I said in my letter [resigning from caucus], I was told that there was no path back.”
Eby denies this.
“I did not remove her,” the premier told the Independent. “I can certainly believe that she didn’t want to do that, but I did accept her resignation.”
Leaving caucus
Robinson’s successive apologies and commitment to undergo anti-Islamophobia training didn’t save her cabinet job. But, she said, she was committed to making amends.
“The concept of teshuvah [repentance], for us as Jews, I take it seriously,” Robinson said, “It’s not enough to say you’re sorry, what are the deeds that go with it?”
Robinson came up with an idea she terms “The Project.”
In the aftermath of her firing, followed by the vandalizing of her constituency office and a death threat, Robinson and her family took off for a week in Mexico to recuperate.
“I called the premier from Mexico and said I have an idea, what do you think?” she recalled. “It was around outreach, working with the [Jewish and Muslim] communities, bringing them together … what did he think?
“And he said that’s a really interesting idea, let’s think about it,” Robinson said.
When she returned from Mexico, she talked to the premier’s chief of staff, Matt Smith. She fleshed the idea out some more, proposing that she and perhaps someone from the civil service – a Jewish person and a Muslim person – “would work with these communities and try to find ways to do dialogue and engagement and break bread and do the things that bring about peace and what could that look like,” said Robinson. She discussed the concept with Deborah Lyons, Canada’s special envoy on Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, who was supportive and offered to do anything she could to support the effort, Robinson said.
After contemplating the idea, Smith came back with his decision: “Too political,” Smith said, according to Robinson.
The premier told the Independent that the idea that a civil servant would work on the project with an elected official is what was “too political.”
Robinson doesn’t believe that. “It was more, we’d prefer to be silent on the whole thing,” she said.
Silence, she contends, is a root of the entire problem – not just with her firing but around the government’s approach to antisemitism. The premier and the government, she contends, are more concerned with success in this fall’s election than with doing the right thing.
“We are in election mode,” she said. “And, frankly, we’ve been in election mode since [Eby] became the premier [in November 2022]. I get it. I’m a politician. I understand the gig, I know how these things work.
“However,” she said, “we are also government. We are a party trying to get reelected and we are government, and you have to be able to do both at the same time. It’s hard. I’m not saying it’s easy. But you can’t give up the governing part and just do campaign mode. You campaign and you govern simultaneously and I think what’s happened is they stopped governing. A government says, we have a problem, what are we going to put in place to help this community that is being terrorized? And it’s controversial, because there are others who think it’s appropriate to terrorize this community. I think what governments are supposed to do is bring people together. Right now, the actions are ripping people apart.”
The fact that the premier’s office would not allow her to engage her colleagues in a broader discussion about both antisemitism and Islamophobia led her to believe there was nothing she could do that would satisfy the government.
“I committed to a number of deeds and have acted on them and that still wasn’t good enough,” she said.
While the government seemed unsatisfied with her efforts, many Muslim people have been more forgiving, she said. Many have expressed forgiveness for her words and accepted her apologies – she has accepted Iftar invitations and extended seder invitations to Muslim friends and acquaintances, she said.
“There are Arab and Muslim leaders that I have had wonderful conversations with, heartfelt conversations,” she said. “I could hear the agony in their voice and they could hear the agony in mine.”
That kind of amity, though, was not something she found among her NDP colleagues. On March 6, her 60th birthday, Robinson released a statement resigning from the NDP caucus.
Harsh words for Heyman
The day after Robinson’s resignation, the premier’s office organized a news conference at the Legislature. George Heyman, BC minister of environment and climate change strategy, told the media that he took exception to the assertion that Robinson’s resignation represented “our government [having] lost the only Jewish voice in our caucus or cabinet.”
“They should know,” said Heyman, “that I’m also Jewish. I grew up as a Jew.”
His experience in the NDP, Heyman said, does not comport with Robinson’s perceptions.
“My experience is that our caucus and our cabinet are deeply committed to fighting antisemitism, to opposing hatred and I have found them to be personally supportive of me on an ongoing basis,” he said.
“He was trotted out as the new Jew, which was a shonda [shame], as they say, on so many different levels,” claims Robinson. “I believe George was put up to it. I know how things work. They didn’t want me to be the only Jewish voice.
“But George doesn’t identify as a Jew,” she said. “He’s told that to so many people. He’s not connected to the community.”
Robinson thinks Heyman allowed himself to be used.
“You thought it was OK? So, the premier asks you, you could have said I’m not going to do that.”
Heyman takes exception to Robinson’s comments about his identity and especially about the idea that he was put up to anything.
“People who know me know that I don’t do things that I don’t want to do,” he told the Independent. Heyman said he was moved to address the issue as soon as he heard opposition MLAs claim the government had lost its only Jewish voice.
On the larger issue of his identity, Heyman said it is up to individuals to self-define.
“I think it’s actually my and every Jew’s right and responsibility to determine in what ways they identify and connect with their own heritage, which is not the same as practising a particular religion,” he said. “My position as a child of Holocaust refugees and as a grandchild of Holocaust victims is, I think, fairly well known. I certainly haven’t hidden it. I may not be a member of the Jewish community in the same way that Selina is. I am not a practising Jew, but to say that I don’t identify as a Jew I think is simply inaccurate.”
Is it antisemitism?
Robinson said media have tended to misrepresent her comments about antisemitism in the NDP. She did not say the party was rife with antisemites. Her letter of resignation from caucus included several incidents – and most of these were matters of record. She herself has experienced antisemitism directly only from two colleagues, she said.
Immediately after the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Robinson said, she sent a message to her colleagues noting that the Jewish community in British Columbia was experiencing trauma as a result of what was happening, including the murder of a young Vancouver man, Ben Mizrachi, and expressions of solidarity and condolences were in order.
Days later, she said, two of her colleagues – Aman Singh, MLA for Richmond-Queensborough and parliamentary secretary for the environment, and Katrina Chen, MLA for Burnaby-Lougheed – responded to her message by stating that the government should express solidarity with Palestinians.
“Three days after, maybe four days after the massacre, [they] felt that it was appropriate to put out a statement about how Palestinians were treated,” Robinson said. “Ben Mizrachi hadn’t been buried yet. The [Israeli military] hadn’t responded.”
Robinson was outraged.
“This isn’t about that,” she said of responding to expressions of Jewish suffering with demands for solidarity with Palestinians. “Could you not take a moment – a moment – to reflect on how horrible it is that a terrorist group came in and slaughtered 1,200 people? Just acknowledge it. Just acknowledge that that was wrong and we need to fight against terrorism.”
Robinson does not understand how people cannot see antisemitism in the erasure of Jewish suffering.
“Jewish suffering is discounted,” she said. “It’s [perceived as] not real, it’s fake. It has no value and diminishes another group of people who are suffering.
“This isn’t a competition of who is suffering more,” Robinson said.
She called the premier immediately upon seeing the messages from Singh and Chen.
“I said, I can’t deal with this. I can’t deal with those two. I just can’t,” she said. “And he said, let me deal with it. I was grateful. It felt like he had my back.”
Robinson never heard from Chen, whose social media feed frequently shares Palestinian memes and messages. On the day Robinson released her resignation letter this month, Chen tweeted: “Not wanting to see more kids and people die in Gaza is not antisemitism.”
An hour after she took it up with the premier, Robinson said, she heard from Singh.
Neither Singh nor Chen responded to the Independent’s request for comment or clarification on Robinson’s version of events. However, the Independent has seen the text Robinson referenced and, in it, Singh called the Oct. 7 attacks “absolutely horrific” and said Hamas “should be brought down.” He also expressed empathy with Robinson and her family in Israel.
“I wanted us as a caucus just to recognize the pain in Gaza as well,” he wrote, adding that he was not calling on the government to make a statement in that regard, “[b]ut internally I felt that needed to be said.”
Additionally, the original email Singh sent was on Oct. 12 and, therefore, after the beginning of Israel’s military actions, not before, as Robinson had claimed.
While Chen and Singh did not comment to the Independent, Heyman defended them, also noting that the emails Robinson cited were “private communications within caucus.”
“It was disturbing to me that her interpretation of actions of a number of my colleagues were that they were antisemitic,” Heyman said. “These are colleagues I respect. I’ve had many conversations with them and I know how deeply committed they are to fighting antisemitism and to fighting all forms of hatred.”
Robinson, in any event, did not consider Singh’s text an apology and did not respond. Nor has she spoken to Singh since.
“If he had come up to me and said, ‘Selina, you never acknowledged my apology, can we talk about it?’ I would have,” she said. “But I really felt like he did not get it.”
Not getting it is, Robinson thinks, the problem. It is not that her colleagues are overt Jew-haters, but that they do not know what antisemitism looks like and refuse to take the time to find out.
“What I tell them is you don’t know enough about antisemitism in its newest form,” she said. “I think for them it’s name-calling, swastikas – I think that for them is really clear. The new form of antisemitism that we are seeing … [includes] the delegitimization of Israel, [the idea] that Jews are responsible for Israel’s political decisions or military decisions, Israel as colonizer, Jews as white people, therefore, the oppressor – I don’t think they have a frame for how to make sense of that.”
Criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, she said. Denying Israel’s right to exist, which is the position of many of the people who wanted her out of office, is.
“What you’re saying is Jews shouldn’t have a homeland, that their history of continually being pushed out of those lands over time, over millennia, you want that to continue,” she said. “If you don’t recognize the legitimacy of Israel as a nation-state, then that contributes to Jew-hatred.”
Taking the North American settler-colonialism model and applying that lens to Israel and Palestine is simply wrong, she said.
“It is inaccurate, it is a false narrative, it is patently not true. And, as a result, they are engaging in antisemitism,” said Robinson, whose own comparison of North American indigeneity to the Middle Eastern model drew condemnation. “I don’t think that they want to be antisemitic but they are, because they don’t understand and they’re not taking the time to learn how that history is different from this history here in North America. I think that’s where those folks are going wrong. What’s the solution? Education. Learn the history. And you’re not going to get it from TikTok and you not going to get it from Twitter, so you need to do some – I’ll use the premier’s words – you need to do some deep learning.”
When it comes to her former colleagues, Robinson believes their culpability comes from a combination of fear of failure and refusal to learn.
“They don’t recognize this form of antisemitism and so they are silent because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing one way or the other,” she said. “But their silence is deafening and no one is saying, I want to learn more about this.”
Though that’s not quite accurate. One colleague, after she left cabinet, and another after she left caucus, reached out to Robinson and said they have been looking to learn more about antisemitism.
One asked her why they, as elected officials, are not trained in this.
“Well, you’d better ask the premier,” she responded.
Battling Zionists
In her letter of resignation from caucus, Robinson mentioned several colleagues by name, among them Mable Elmore, MLA for Vancouver-Kensington. Elmore’s example is one that has come up repeatedly among Robinson’s defenders in recent weeks as an example of someone who has gotten away with comments that are arguably worse than anything Robinson expressed.
In November, Mable Elmore rose in the house to make a routine statement. Instead, Robinson said, she went off script and delivered a two-minute talk about people dying in Gaza.
“But she never made reference to the massacre on Oct. 7,” Robinson said. “She never tied this as a response to terrorism.”
Elmore is parliamentary secretary responsible for antiracism initiatives under the attorney general.
Leaders in the Jewish community, Robinson said, have long been wary of Elmore. At the start of her political career, Elmore got in hot water for voicing a conspiracy about “vocal Zionists” in her workplace that she and other union activists had to “battle.”
“They were always anxious about Mable, given her history,” said Robinson of leaders in the mainstream Jewish community. “When she was made parliamentary secretary for antiracism, [Jewish communal leaders] expressed concerns to me but they said … we believe people can change [and] learn, and so they went along with it.
“Then, when Mable did her two-minute statement in November that sort of disconnected what’s happening in Gaza right now from the attack on Oct. 7 and left out a big chunk of the story, [Jewish community leaders] were outraged,” said Robinson. “They were absolutely outraged. I went to the premier’s office with my own outrage and then, of course, communicated the community’s outrage.”
Jewish leaders, according to Robinson, were asking for Elmore to be taken off the antiracism file completely. Instead, she said, the premier left Elmore in charge of antiracism initiatives but removed her responsibility for liaising with the Jewish community on issues involving racism. Dealing with the Jews on antisemitism and broader antiracism approaches would be handed over to Attorney General Niki Sharma.
“This is where the story gets really interesting,” Robinson said. Eight weeks after the premier removed antisemitism and liaising with Jews from the government’s point person on antiracism and handed those responsibilities over to the more senior attorney general, Robinson reached out to Sharma after the Vancouver Police Department released a report that anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city had spiked 62% in 2023.
“It’s been eight weeks now since [Sharma] has been responsible for the file. The Jewish community is reeling, numbers are through the roof,” said Robinson, who said she asked Sharma what the government was doing. “She had done nothing from November on. She hadn’t met with the [Jewish] community. She had no plan.”
Sharma promised to get Robinson a brief on how her department and the government intended to address the increase in hate-motivated crimes against Jewish individuals and institutions. Robinson never received it.
Disputed events
In the hours after Robinson released her letter to caucus, Premier David Eby addressed the controversy repeatedly with media.
“I wish she had brought her concerns to me directly so we could have worked through them together,” he said at one point. Later, he said, “She didn’t feel safe with me to bring forward her concerns and she felt she had to resign. So, I’ll examine that.”
Eby’s comments infuriate Robinson. “When the premier says that I never came to him – this is the part that really makes me crazy – I did,” she told the Independent. “I was even coming with solutions.”
Those solutions did not seem to move the dial in terms of any redemption Robinson might have expected for what she sees as good-faith efforts to make amends and her proposals to help address antisemitism and Islamophobia in government.
Target on her back
Robinson felt she had a target on her back – and not only since the “crappy piece of land” incident.
“There were targets even during convention,” she said. Before the BC NDP convention last November, Robinson warned the premier’s office that several delegates and groups were going to bring forward emergency resolutions about the war in Gaza.
“I kept saying, we are a subnational government, we don’t do international relations,” Robinson said. “I don’t even know why we would entertain international commentary.”
Convention organizers apparently felt there was a need to allow some delegates to blow off steam. Robinson said she and others then strove to create a relatively balanced resolution, “and that work happened behind the scenes.”
“But there were people calling for my head back then, back in November,” she said.
In her capacity as minister responsible for BC postsecondary institutions, Robinson gained the wrath in February of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC and the Canadian Association of University Teachers, who called on Eby to oust Robinson. The latter group accused Robinson of undermining “the democratic principles of freedom of expression, academic freedom, and a college and university system free of direct manipulation by the provincial government” because Robinson had retweeted a call for Langara College to fire Dr. Natalie Knight, an
English instructor who referred to the mass murders of Oct. 7 as “amazing” and “brilliant.”
As a result of Robinson’s vocal and visible presence on these issues, she said, there were people “paying very close attention to what I said, how I said it, when I said it. So, I was a target – I still am a target, I think.”
Warning signs?
While Robinson has felt a target on her back, including from some in her own party, there is a larger trend that has nothing directly to do with her, arguably going back to 1967 or before, when the Canadian left’s approach to Israel and Palestine began transitioning from a largely pro-Zionist position. With a few notable exceptions, NDP elected officials and rank-and-file members for several decades now have aligned more with the Palestinian cause than the Israeli one. While criticism of Israel may or may not be fair, depending on context, some people, including some longtime party members, have written the party off as poisoned by antisemitism.
Bernie Simpson is one of only a handful of Jewish British Columbians ever elected to the provincial Legislature. He was the New Democratic MLA for Vancouver-Fraserview from 1991 to 1996, but his roots in the party go back decades earlier. He was mentored by Dave Barrett, the first and still only Jewish premier of the province, and Simpson was at the upper echelons of the NDP from the 1960s.
Throughout that time, he told the Independent, he struggled against far-left “ideologues.” He eventually left the party about 25 years ago, in large part because of the prominence of anti-Israel voices like Svend Robinson and Libby Davies.
“I always felt, in the years that I was involved with the NDP, that there was underlying antisemitism,” he said. “I didn’t realize the extent of antisemitism in the NDP until Selina brought it to the world’s attention, and good for her.”
Simpson believes Eby is beholden to certain segments of his caucus.
“He has to appease the left-wing ideologues or else he’d have a revolt and probably they could undermine his leadership,” Simpson said. “They are quite capable of doing that, the left wing.”
“Can a party be antisemitic?” Robinson asked. “Well, people make up a party. So, it depends who is there.”
In 2021, she called on the resolutions committee of the federal NDP convention to get some perspective on foreign affairs.
“When they had their convention, they had the top 25 resolutions [and] 16 of them [or] 15 of them, were anti-Israel,” she said. “Really, people? Do you not care what’s happening in Chad, or the Congo, or to the Uyghurs? What is your obsession? I reached out to them and I called the people in charge of the resolutions committee and the response was, and I quote, ‘It has been ever thus.’ I was stunned.
“Can you not reflect on your obsession and where that’s coming from?” she asked. “I get it if you have one or two [resolutions about Israel]. I don’t like Israeli government decisions, what they’re doing. For sure, challenge this [Israeli] government in terms of the decisions that they are making. You only have so much time to debate your resolutions, but you want to spend three days debating Israel? Then you’re not a party I can take seriously to represent us as Canadians. Not on China, not on Iran, not on these really big, despotic nations. Nope. It’s just the Jews.”
Under the late Jack Layton, who was leader of the federal NDP from 2003 to 2011, Robinson said, things were not as bad as they are now.
“I blame Jagmeet Singh,” she said of the federal NDP leader. “I hold him completely responsible for the rhetoric and the outrageousness that we are seeing. He’s party leader. This is on him…. His attacks on me because I described Israel pre-1948 [Israel] as a crappy piece of land and his vociferousness towards me was vile.”
Singh had called Robinson’s comments “not only factually wrong, but offensive and irresponsible” and that “elected leaders must be voices for peace and justice.” The federal NDP leader said he had conveyed his “serious concerns” to Eby.
Singh’s office did not respond to the Independent’s request for comment.
Decision to retire
When Robinson left cabinet, she let it be known that she had earlier decided not to seek reelection in this fall’s provincial election.
She had planned to announce her retirement on March 6, her 60th birthday. After three terms as an MLA, following two terms on Coquitlam city council, Robinson thought it was time to leave public life after 16 years. In December, she shared the news with the premier.
There were lots of reasons to wind up her elected service, she said. Her (adult) kids are talking about having kids and she wants to be a hands-on bubbe. Her father turns 84 this year and she wants to spend more time with him, and with her husband’s parents, who are of a similar age. Her husband, Dan, wants to travel.
The premier, Robinson said, was kind when she shared her decision with him late last year.
“He was surprised I wasn’t running again,” she said. “He thought I’ve been a very competent minister. He had lots of nice things to say about me.”
But there was something else.
“I said, caucus hasn’t felt the same since Oct. 7,” she told Eby who, she said, opted not to ask her about that. “It just hung. He didn’t ask. He didn’t say, tell me more about that or what do you mean – he knew what I was referring to, of course – but he didn’t push, he didn’t pursue. It saddened me a little bit because I would have hoped he would have been at least a little bit interested to understand what that was about.”
Still, she acknowledges, the purpose of the call was to share her retirement decision and the conversation soon turned to logistics – when she would tell the party brass, whether she had groomed a successor, when to go public.
March 6 did involve a major announcement, of course, but it wasn’t about the decision that she wouldn’t run in the next election. Instead, she released an open letter to colleagues, telling them why she would no longer be sitting as part of the New Democratic caucus.
Death threat and vandalism
The hate Robinson experienced after her webinar comments went viral was extreme. At her offices, voicemail reached capacity. Staff were days behind keeping up with the bombardment of email.
It was a Saturday when an email came in threatening to shoot Robinson in the head, but staff didn’t discover it until four days later. They knew the procedure, having dealt with a similar incident a year earlier – a threat against Robinson not because she is a Jew but because she is a woman. Staff found the death threat email the same day they had arrived at the Coquitlam office to find it vandalized and festooned with hate messaging.
“The police have found the perpetrator,” Robinson said. The email came from the United States, so US Homeland Security and the FBI are involved. “It’s legitimate and it’s credible. It helps that it’s someone at a distance but it’s also in a place where guns are easily accessible, so it’s a bit of both.”
Robinson’s husband now keeps a baseball bat next to the bed.
Kindness amid chaos
To look at social media posts targeting Robinson is to dive down a rabbit hole of varying degrees of outrage and a great deal of hatred. In the real world, she said, she has experienced an outpouring of compassion.
An acquaintance sent her a bouquet of blue and white roses – Israel’s colours. Robinson was walking in the park with earphones in and a passerby made the heart sign. Heaps of cards, letters and emails have poured in. People have sent art, including a rendering of a woman reaching for the sky, which is displayed prominently in her office.
“I want to weep, actually, because it feels validating,” she said.
But that outpouring of support from the public is not mirrored in the reaction of her former cabinet and caucus colleagues, she said.
While Robinson’s experiences among the NDP officials with whom she spent more than a decade is a testament of profound loneliness, that is not entirely the case, she said. Some people have been dependable and supportive. She can count them, she said, on one hand. And she won’t mention them by name for fear of throwing them to the wolves.
“I’m not going to single them out, only because I’m worried about their backlash,” she said. “I want to protect them for being there for me.”
What ifs …
When she left cabinet, Robinson cleared out her personal possessions from her ministerial office. The day the Independent visited her, she had just been going through those boxes.
“I came across a card from John Horgan, when he stepped down,” she said, referring to the former BC premier, who retired in 2022, and was replaced by Eby. The card, she said, “just talked about how much he values my input and that I brought all of me to cabinet.
“He trusted my judgment vis-à-vis the Jewish community,” Robinson said. “He really wanted to understand that he was doing right by the Jewish community, so he would regularly check in with me about what did I think. I would say, ‘You were a mensch.’ He really took to that word, ‘Was I a mensch?’ ‘You were a mensch.’”
Might things have played out differently if Horgan had been in the top job when all this blew up? Robinson believes so.
“I think he might have heard my concerns differently earlier on,” Robinson said. “If I would have told him that, since Oct. 7, caucus hasn’t felt the same, he would want to know why. What’s changed? What’s it like for you? And that may have had a different outcome.”
When the webinar comment grew into a crisis, Robinson suspects the former premier might have responded differently than the current one did.
“I think he would have stood by me. I think he would have weathered the storm,” she said.
Second chances?
One of the things that Robinson’s defenders, including Jewish community leaders, have pointed out is that everyone seems to get second chances but the Jew. The offences outlined in Robinson’s letter of resignation, as well as documented incidents like Elmore’s multiple transgressions, suggest a willingness to forgive, if not forget.
When Robinson was hauled on the carpet for her comments and thrown out of cabinet within days, the official voices of the mainstream Jewish community noted that, mere days earlier, the Jewish community had been asked – and agreed – to overlook an egregious misstatement on the part of the premier himself.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27, the premier’s social media feed noted the occasion and declared: “We stand with the Muslim community throughout Canada on this sorrowful day of remembrance.”
The message was soon taken down and an apology posted.
“Do you know who managed that debacle for the premier’s office?” Robinson asked. “Me.”
Robinson was not the only one to catch the grievous error, of course. BC United, the official opposition party, screen-captured the post before it was deleted. Robinson, meanwhile, was on to her leader’s office to get to the bottom of it.
“I spoke to folks in the premier’s office,” she said. “I learned who made the error. I was assured it was an error.”
An apology is not enough, she told them. “You need to explain how this could happen.”
The explanation was that two days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day was the anniversary of the 2017 Quebec City mosque attack during which six people were killed and 19 were injured. A lower-level social media staffer had apparently mixed up the messages for the two separate days.
Until the clarification, some people wondered if the post was a deliberate act of baiting the Jewish community on one of the most solemn days of the year. Robinson is confident it was simple human error.
“I have to believe that, otherwise I’m way too cynical about the world,” she said. “I have to take people at their word … and that’s what I guess is heartbreaking for me, that people couldn’t take me at my word. They chose to think the worst of me, after all this time.”
Political fallout
Robinson’s departure – and the broader issues of antisemitism she raises – absorbed the Legislature and the press gallery for days.
Kevin Falcon, leader of the BC United official opposition (formerly known as the BC Liberals), has repeatedly called for an independent investigation into what he calls “the antisemitism that is rife not just within the government but within their own cabinet, caucus and party.”
Speaking with the Independent, Falcon raised what he and so many others have called a “double standard” in the treatment of Robinson, while there are members of the NDP who have not apologized for intemperate remarks and yet have suffered no consequences.
“I can’t help but note the worst that Selina could be criticized for is using perhaps a poor choice of words,” said Falcon. “But she did the honourable thing and fully withdrew the comments, apologized for the comments and, even after saying that she would go through anti-Islamophobia training, whatever that is, [it] still wasn’t enough for the premier to [not] drop her out of cabinet, which is in stark contrast to how they’ve dealt with other people within their own government who have made terrible statements in the past.”
Recent concerns about racism against Indigenous people in the healthcare system, Falcon said, resulted in quick action.
“They couldn’t move fast enough then to appoint an independent investigation into the allegations of racism in the healthcare system,” he said. “But, when it comes to investigating antisemitism within their own government, caucus, cabinet and party, well, nothing to see here. They just continue to delay.”
Another double standard, Falcon said, is the different reactions to claims of antisemitism versus other forms of racism.
“They’re always out there professing to be so concerned about racism, except when it comes to racism against the Jewish community,” he said. “The double standard is certainly so glaringly obvious. That’s the part that feels so remarkably different. That’s the part that none of us can just get over. It’s amazing to me that they say all the right things about [being] so concerned about this, we have thinking to do, we need to create safe spaces and this word salad of woke-isms that they can spew out very easily, but fail to address the two fundamental issues that concern us on this – the double standard as a result of Selina being fired out of cabinet and people who have said far worse antisemitic statements or tropes [but who] continue to serve, some of whom have never apologized.”
Falcon said that critics of Israel, like those who targeted Robinson, are missing crucial moral principles.
“In war, tragically, there are always innocent lives lost,” he said. “It is an unavoidable aspect of war. That breaks my heart when I see innocent people dying on both sides.
“We have to understand some important principles,” he continued. “One is that Israel has a right to exist and Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Politics, legendarily, makes strange bedfellows. Robinson seems to have few reliable friends among her former colleagues, but Falcon said her new seatmates are literally and figuratively on her side – she is now on the opposition side of the House, awash with BC United, Conservative and Green MLAs.
“She’s got a lot of supporters on the opposition bench,” Falcon said.
John Rustad, leader of the BC Conservative party, a long-moribund party that is showing surprising strength in opinion polls, said his heart goes out to Robinson.
“That Selina was brave enough to share that I think speaks volumes to what is going on within the caucus and within the [New Democratic] party,” Rustad told the Independent. “David Eby has known about this for months and he’s refused to take action. I think the province is not interested in having a premier that won’t stand up and defend British Columbians and Canadians.”
The Conservative leader echoes Robinson’s allegations that the premier is more concerned with politics than fighting antisemitism.
“I don’t think they are looking to doing what’s right,” he said, suggesting that electoral calculations based on the disparity of sizes of the Jewish and Muslim populations are driving their decisions. But, Rustad warns, this approach could blow up in their faces.
“I think, quite frankly, they are miscalculating where people in this province are because I think people are not interested in antisemitism, they’re not interested in hate, they want a government that’s going to stand up for everybody in this province,” he said.
The letter from Islamic leaders warning that New Democrats would be unwelcome in Muslim sacred spaces that came shortly before Robinson’s firing was concerning, Rustad said.
“When I saw it, the first thing that came to mind was government bowing to threats,” he said.
“It takes courage to do what Selina did, it takes courage for a government to stand up for what’s right and that’s where David Eby has failed,” said Rustad. “I was, I guess, a little shocked to see how quickly David Eby backed down and bowed to that pressure that was put out there. It was disappointing from my perspective because government sometimes has to do things that some people may be upset with because it’s the right thing to do.”
BC Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau called the Oct. 7 attacks “a devastating and terrible event,” and said that elected officials in this province have a responsibility to address the local repercussions of overseas developments.
“We really have to focus on the people of BC and that we are taking seriously the reality of antisemitism,” she said. The rise in hate crimes, which began most notably during the COVID pandemic, was addressed in a report from the Human Rights Commissioner in 2022. Furstenau believes the commissioner should consider actions to confront the growing prevalence of antisemitism now.
“It may be that the next steps could be for the Human Rights Commissioner to take on a project to help us recognize, address and reduce antisemitism in BC,” she said. “I think, given the very complicated nature of the war between Israel and Hamas, that we could be looking for the Human Rights Commissioner to look at antisemitism and Islamophobia and, really, how do we come out of this as a place that’s less divided and has less hatred?”
Responding to Robinson’s expressions about antisemitism in government, Furstenau said the former minister needs to be taken at her word.
“Selina is the expert on what Selina has experienced and we have to respect that,” said Furstenau. “When somebody indicates that they have experienced racism or discrimination, it’s not our place to question that.”
“I’m fine”
Robinson’s emotional health has been a concern for friends and supporters. Few people can imagine the impact of being at the centre of a public maelstrom like the one Robinson is enduring.
Amid all this, there have been physical health realities.
In 2006, Robinson was diagnosed with a rare form of intestinal cancer. She beat it. Then, in February 2023 – “February’s been a bad month for me the last few years,” she said – Robinson shared the news that routine screening indicated that cancer had returned.
After treatment, she got the good news eight months later that the tumour they had found in February was gone.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m on the chemotherapy that I’ve been on for years. I will be on this medication for the rest of my life.”
The treatment is not without side-effects.
“It makes me a bit more tired than most other people, although my husband says that might not be a bad thing in terms of people keeping up,” she said. “I get muscle cramps. They are inconveniences rather than serious implications. I really am fine.”
The joyful news that the cancer was gone came on Oct. 5.
“Lots of happy tears around that,” she said. Two days later, news from Israel turned those happy tears to something very different.
Points of pride
Although she didn’t share the news with the public until the controversy arose, Robinson was already planning for a life post-politics. She will not be the NDP candidate for Coquitlam-Maillardville in the election scheduled for Oct. 19. Every indication is that she would have been reelected easily. When she first ran provincially, in 2013, it appeared on election night that she had lost. When the final votes were counted in the days after, she squeaked in by 41 votes. Her next two elections were not at all close. In 2017, more than half the voters in the riding chose her and, in 2020, she nabbed just a hair under 60% of the vote.
During her first term, Robinson was an opposition MLA. When John Horgan formed government (under an agreement with the BC Greens), he appointed Robinson minister of municipal affairs and housing. This was a daunting role in one of the most expensive places to live in the world.
Several things really stand out for her from that time.
The BC government, under Horgan, with Robinson in the housing portfolio, was and remains the only provincial government to fund housing on Indigenous reserves.
“It’s a federal responsibility, but this is ridiculous,” she said. “They are British Columbians and they need housing.”
Another achievement she cites is that, when she became minister, she undertook to meet with officials from every municipality in the province – close to 200 local governments – and she said she still runs into current or former mayors and councilors who credit her for engaging with them.
After the election in 2020, Robinson was promoted to finance minister. Achievements from that gig? Robinson throws her arms in the air without hesitation: “The biggest surplus in the history of our province.”
Her control over the province’s wallet came in the midst of the COVID pandemic, with all that entailed. In addition to sound bottom lines, she said the government brought down “good budgets that delivered for people and that made a difference.”
When Eby replaced Horgan as leader and premier, Robinson was shifted to the ministry of postsecondary education and future skills.
In this role, she takes pride in removing the age limit for former youth in care to access postsecondary education. Those who age out of the foster system had been able to obtain tuition funding and additional supports – but only until age 26.
“If you’re a former youth in care, it takes a longer time to figure out how to adult,” said Robinson. Now, these young people (even if they are no longer so young) can access educational funding and cost of living supports to reach their academic or vocational goals.
It was also in her responsibility for postsecondary education that Robinson found herself on the frontlines of campus turmoil, with anti-Israel protests by students and pro-terrorism comments by some BC academics. She convened a meeting of the heads of all BC’s colleges and universities and laid out expectations for civil, peaceful dialogue on campus.
Voting advice?
The firestorm over Robinson’s comments, charges of antisemitism in the government and public service, complaints that the premier is not taking matters seriously enough and the related controversies come only months before British Columbians go to the polls. These crises are not coincidental to the proximity of the election, Robinson contends, but are a direct effect. The government is doing what they think is politically helpful, rather than what is right, she said.
So, where does that leave Jewish and sympathetic voters who would have cast a vote for Eby’s party in October but now feel adrift, wondering if the NDP represents their interests?
“I feel very adrift as well,” she said. “I think everyone has to make up their own mind. There is no perfect party. If you’re going to bring about change, then you need to use your voice to bring about change. That’s what this is all about.”
She puts the onus on members of her own (former) party.
“If people are silent, if New Democrats are silent on this, then you are complicit,” she said. “If you think this is wrong, if you think the direction the party is taking vis-à-vis Jews [is wrong], then you need to say something. You need to take action on it. That means challenge what’s become the status quo.”
Future plans
“Boredom terrifies me,” Robinson said.
Though boredom might seem a welcome respite from some of the emotions she has endured in recent weeks, Robinson insists she is not done contributing to the community. She just doesn’t know yet in what capacity.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’ll find something to do.”
“I’m learning to knit,” she said. She’s got local food maven Susan Mendelson’s classic cookbook Mama Never Cooked Like This and she’s thinking of pulling a Julie & Julia by trying every recipe in the book and posting them to social media.
Robinson has traveled across much of Western Europe but not Spain and she is reading about that country and its history.
She has promised her husband she will not make any long-term commitments before January.
Until the writ drops for the next election, she remains MLA for Coquitlam-Maillardville.
Those who gathered for the weekly rally to call for the release of the Israeli hostages take their message down Georgia Street on Sunday, March 17. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)
After five months of attending almost every one of the weekly rallies for the Israeli hostages, I found myself Sunday on the other side of the crowd. Daphna Kedem, the organizer of these events, invited me to address the audience on March 17, alongside Rabbi Philip Bregman and Michael Lee, member of the Legislative Assembly for Vancouver-Langara.
I was speaking on nobody’s behalf but my own, although my nearly 30 years of writing for this Jewish newspaper, my being the director of Upstanders Canada, which fights antisemitism, and just generally my being a non-Jew who is a keen Zionist, were presumably the reasons I was asked to speak.
Someone whose primary role is reporter does not like to become part of the story. This is different. I am a journalist (among other things) but there are identities and values that, in my view, supersede journalistic constraints – support for democracy, for example, and free expression. Zionism covers a wide swath of opinion and experience and I fall on that spectrum. There is no point in pretending I don’t.
Several people have requested that the Independent print the full text of my remarks. We have not done this for other speakers over the past five months, and this issue is jam-packed with news around related topics of allegations of antisemitism in the province so there is not space to run the entire speech. However, we have posted it on the paper’s website, with apologies to the dozens of speakers whose words have not been shared in their entirety over the past five months. Insider privilege, undoubtedly.
Even though the audience at these vigils is overwhelmingly Jewish, I felt my message should be aimed at non-Jewish people.
I’m also angry, and I decided to let that show. In addressing those gathered at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where the weekly rallies for the Israeli hostages are held, I observed that I was standing on the same steps where, days after the pogrom of Oct. 7, people stood and celebrated murder, rape, beheadings and kidnappings.
“We mourn,” I said, “We grieve every single innocent life lost. We do not celebrate dead innocents. Neither do we tally up bodies in a grotesque competition where the side with the most dead wins moral victory.”
I warned that it is not only Jews and Israelis who are threatened by the behaviours of anti-Israel activists.
“The violence, coercion, intimidation and racism these people embody is a threat to Canada … to our civility, our peace, our multiculturalism and political discourse,” I said.
Maybe, I suggested, there are Canadians who don’t care if the Jewish people lose their country.
“But when they wake up and see that Canadians have lost ours … Jewish Canadians and their allies will be asking: Where were you? Where were you when we were standing up for the values that Israelis and Canadians share? Where were you when we demanded ‘bring them home’? Because, if you are not standing with Israelis against extremism … you are emboldening extremism in Canada.
“This is not about choosing between Israelis and Palestinians,” I said. “Unlike the extremists, we want peace for everyone. This is about choosing between civilization and barbarism. And we need to ask every Canadian:Which side are you on?”
Before I spoke, Kedem shared comments made the night before at the weekly rally in Tel Aviv, with relatives of living and dead hostages urging Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to do everything in his power to negotiate their release.
Kedem told the crowd that former cabinet minister Selina Robinson was to address the rally but security concerns prevented her from attending.
“I think it’s very, very sad moment for us that we can’t have a Jewish representative walk the streets of Vancouver in 2024,” said Kedem.
“Resilience comes from seeing the Oct. 7 survivors of rape and torture pick up the pieces of their lives. It comes from seeing Israelis gather once again to protest their government. It comes from so many of you who have reached out with words of support, encouragement and love,” wrote Robinson.
“Resilience comes from us gathering our collective strength as we lift each other up and remind ourselves that we are not alone – that together we will find the strength – the strength to bring peace,” she concluded.
Bregman – who was the senior rabbi of Temple Sholom from 1980 until 2013 and then was executive director of Hillel BC and created the Other People, an interfaith and multicultural group that has spoken to some 7,500 students and faculty about racism and bigotry – also spoke of resilience.
He contextualized current events as part of a very long Jewish history, with almost 4,000 years of steadfastness in the face of challenges, Temple destructions, expulsions, Crusades, pogroms and worse. He spoke of his own experiences growing up with antisemitism in rural Ontario, and the firebombing of Temple Sholom synagogue, then on West 10th Avenue, on Jan. 25, 1985.
Through all this ancient and modern history, Bregman said, one thing has remained constant.
“The message is clear. We are not going anywhere,” he said. “We are here.”
Lee had just returned from Germany and a meeting of state and provincial legislators from the United States, Germany and Canada. He reflected on the extremism that is rising in places around the world.
Part of the BC United party, Lee said he strives to avoid partisanship when speaking at these rallies to help ensure “that the Jewish community is not made a political football” and he assured Jewish community members that they have allies on both sides of the Legislature.
Lee called for the province to fully adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism because it would clarify discussions. Some of the commentary being heard today falls directly into at least one of the examples accompanying that definition, he said.
“Denying Jewish people the right of self-determination by calling the state of Israel a racist endeavour is an example of antisemitism,” he said.
Lee was recently shuffled into the role of opposition critic for the attorney general, a position he had held before, and he said he has called on the AG to take a stronger line in the justice system against potential hate crimes.
“We need the attorney general to direct Crown counsel to prosecute the Criminal Code violations which are antisemitic and hate crimes incitement to public violence that are antisemitic in nature on our streets,” he said.
Lee lauded Robinson’s work in the Legislature, especially her commitment to the Jewish community.
“I am very disappointed, like so many of you, that she is not able to be here with you,” said Lee, who has spoken admiringly in the Legislature and elsewhere about Robinson. “But she is with you, you know that. Selina has always been with you. She will always be with you.”
Throughout the afternoon, Mia Mor sang and Richard Lowy joined on guitar and vocals.
You broke my heart – not just on February 5 when the Premier told me that after the caucus talked about me he did not see a way back, that folks were wondering why I hadn’t already resigned and that the only path forward was a resignation. Resigning was not my choice but I told the Premier that if this was what he wanted and what caucus wanted I wouldn’t fight him on it – but let’s be clear – others asked for my resignation, so I gave it.
You actually broke my heart in the days after October 7 – the day terrorists went into Israel and brutally murdered, slaughtered, raped, mutilated, killed and kidnapped 1,200 civilians. These terrorists didn’t target the military, they killed children, concert goers, grandmothers, peace activists and a young British Columbian named Ben Mizrachi.
The Jewish community was in shock – we are about 40,000 here in British Columbia and we were reeling.
I had offered to the Premier that as a member of the Jewish community, I could speak at a vigil that was being planned a few days after the massacre – this was my community and our two Premiers had tasked me with strengthening the NDP relationship with the community. I put out the call for you to join me. The community was grieving, in mourning and we needed to show them as a caucus and as a government that we are there for them.
I sent out a group email. Two maybe three responded – that’s it. How is it that with more than 35 lower mainland/valley MLAs only three or four would be on stage with me – I had no idea how many UCP would be there and a poor showing would not reflect well on us. I did not have the emotional capacity to reach out individually, so Alissa offered to help … still not much response. My heart cracked.
In the end there were 7 or 8 of us, two came from the island but I was terribly embarrassed.
And then, within days of the massacre, Aman and Katrina decided that it was appropriate to ‘reply all’ to my initial email asking folks to stand with the Jewish community in grief and mourning, and ask that government make a public statement about the plight of the Palestinians.
We just witnessed the slaughter, rape, mutilation and murder of 1,200 mostly Jews. We watched as the terrorists celebrated this horrific act. Ben Mizrachi hadn’t yet been buried. The IDF hadn’t yet taken any action. The world was stunned. And two of my colleagues wanted to move quickly past what had happened and refocus government on a geopolitical conflict that has been going on for years.
But it wasn’t their antisemitism that broke my heart. It was your silence to their antisemitism that hurt the most. Not a single one of you responded to their insensitive, disrespectful and inappropriate email. No one.
Your silence broke my heart that day.
You abandoned me and my community that day.
I would have hoped that someone, anyone would have replied all to Aman and Katrina and suggested that their email was inappropriate – your silence spoke volumes to me and suggested that either you agreed with them or that you just didn’t want to deal with it because it’s messy.
It is messy. It’s complex. It’s emotional. It’s hard. You just want it to go away. I understand. I want it to go away too – but my community needed you in that moment to be there in their grief and in my grief and none of you were prepared or willing to stand up to colleagues who were antisemitic – minimizing the Jewish experience, the slaughter of innocent civilians by terrorists countering with mirrored message about the plight of Palestinians. In that moment it was not so complex – People were murdered because they were Jewish and people here in British Columbia were needing us to mourn with them.
How eager you all are to join in the #NeverAgain campaign – that the crime of being Jewish that resulted in the death of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis should never happen again. That we should fight against Jew hatred – a hatred that repeats itself over and over and over again throughout history. How eager you all are to join the few remaining Holocaust survivors as Nicholas plays Kol Nidre on the cello and we bow our heads, light candles in honour of those murdered – yet when the hordes gather and chant “from the river to the sea” – a Hamas mantra referring to their desire to destroy Israel and the Jews, you are nowhere to be found.
Holocaust survivors have been retraumatized and some have wound up in hospital in the days and weeks after the massacre as they relive the horrors they experienced some 75 years ago. They see the marches, the chanting in our streets, the threats to Jews around the world and they say “it’s happening again.”
Where are you when protesters, their faces covered, march through our campuses intimidating young Jewish adults who now hide their Jewish identity? Where are you when young Jewish students who get trapped in bathrooms on campus because the marching is happening in hallways, and they are afraid to step out into the hall for fear of becoming a target of their hate? Where are your ideals of a broad, inclusive society? How have you been standing up for your declared values?
Almost 300 Jewish physicians signed a letter calling on UBC medical school to address antisemitism on campus. Students are bringing their hate into healthcare and they were speaking on behalf of their Jewish patients and their families. In fact, it was so bad that Ted Rosenberg, a prominent physician quit, citing a toxic work environment and antisemitism in the Faculty of Medicine – I am not sure how we expect to train more physicians when almost 300 of them are refusing to work with students coming from UBC’s faculty of medicine. It was a public leaving and I heard nothing from any of you – not the Minister of Health who committed to more physicians in the system, not the Premier – no one.
In December the four Tri-Cities MLAs received a letter from the Coquitlam Teacher’s Association rife with rhetoric, misinformation and lies about the modern state of Israel. The letter was also posted on their website (which has since been taken down). Jewish parents in SD 43 are now considering pulling their children from public schools because they don’t have faith that teachers in the district will keep their Jewish children safe. I asked Fin if he received the same letter. He did and when I asked him what he was planning to do with it he said, “nothing – I am going to ignore it.” Ignore the fact that Jewish constituents feel unsafe – Is this how we stand up for our constituents?
In January the Vancouver Police Department publicly shared a startling report about the dramatic increase in antisemitic incidents since October 7. And what was government’s response to this report?
Silence.
Shortly afterward I reached out to the Attorney General, as the racism file is under her ministry. Niki had been assigned the point of contact for the Jewish community given the historical antisemitism that the Jewish community has experienced from Mable, the parliamentary secretary for antiracism.
Let me refresh your memory, in 2004 during an interview with Seven Oaks, Mable claimed “we have vocal Zionists in our work sites, and we have had to battle them” regarding her anti-war activism in her union. Carole James, as leader, had to disavow and apologize for the comments. But the Jewish community carried on noting a certain mistrust of Mable, as she never apologized for her comments and when Mable’s recent 2-minute statement in November alarmed the community again of Mable’s antisemitism and asked for her resignation the Jewish community was merely told that Niki would now be the point of contact for anti-racism work in the Jewish community.
So I reached out to Niki at the end of January, two months after she became the designated point of contact for a community that is experiencing a spike in antisemitism, a community that is grieving and fearful. It turns out that the community leadership hadn’t even heard from her. And when I asked her what she is doing about the rise in antisemitism all she could talk about what legislation she is working on, collecting data and the small amount of money that I worked on with PSSG and the PO to make available for additional security measures that the community needed.
Her response to my query was a response you would give the opposition.
There was no acknowledgement of my personal connection to the community or how my contacts and relationships could be useful. There was no sense of understanding that this community is feeling threatened, that people are afraid, that antisemitism was on display in civil society, that Jewish parents don’t want to send their children to public school, that Jewish post-secondary students are being terrorized on campus, that Jewish owned businesses need additional security, that Holocaust survivors are reliving trauma, that plays with Israeli content that actually help to provide dialogue about the conflict are being silenced, that hundreds of Jewish physicians are calling on UBC leadership to address antisemitism on campus, that members of our own public service have started incorporating the Palestinian flag in their email signature and even making a Palestinian land comment when doing a First Nation land acknowledgement at the beginning of meetings resulting in discomfort and fear. No acknowledgment and no action.
Over the past five months a few of you have reached out after caucus discussions about me without me in the room, the first right after Aman and Katrina sent their emails and then again after the February caucus meeting, offering hugs and heart emojis. My response to many of you is that I don’t need your hugs and your emojis. What my community needs however is for you to stand up to antisemitism. When I shared this with Lisa just a few weeks ago, she responded “of course, we always do.” As a government we have not been standing up to antisemitism. If you believe that then it would appear to me that you haven’t been paying attention or you don’t know what antisemitism is or what Jew hatred looks like.
Antisemitism is calling for the destruction and annihilation of Israel, where half the world’s 15.8 million Jews live. Antisemitism is making Jewish people afraid to show their identity. Antisemitism is silencing an openly identified Jewish person who is speaking out about antisemitism. Your collective decision to silence me is antisemitism and you don’t even know it.
Antisemitism is the double standard that we have consistently shown. When any of my colleagues have made antisemitic remarks it was expected that apologies should suffice. It’s not only Mable who has made antisemitic comments. In 2012 Jennifer Whiteside shared content from the anti-Israel website the electronic intifada and posts from Occupy Wall Street that attributed Israeli ‘theft’ of Palestinian land to capitalism and in 2014 shared articles that accused Israel of ‘pinkwashing’ for their acceptance of LGBTQ2S+ community and again in 2016 shared content promoting the BDS movement and was forced to apologize and distance herself from her past support of the BDS movement.
In 2017 it came to the attention of the Jewish community that Ronna Rae invited people to support Haneen Zoubi, a former Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset who negated the existence of Israel. Ronna Rae also compared the police to Nazis in 2013.
Jagrup quoted Goebbels in 2020 when he was pushing back at the Official Opposition during a speech in the house saying “Someone has said – if you repeat a lie often enough people will believe it” – he apologized the next day for his offence, retracted his comments and that was to be sufficient.
Last year Janet Routledge apologized for comments of Holocaust minimization by comparing the criticisms by the official opposition to Nazi rhetoric when she said “the Holocaust ended in death camps, but started with words.”
I raise these examples not to humiliate or shame any of you, but to point out the double standard. When an elected person says something that harms the Jewish community whether the comments or position is intended or unintended, the expectation is that a simple apology is sufficient. But when a Jewish elected person says something she “has deep work to do” according to the Premier and is no longer trusted. This double standard is antisemitism.
The final straw came for me last week.
I pitched an idea to the Premier 10 days after I was asked to resign that perhaps government could show leadership on this hate and division we are seeing in two hurting communities by bringing these communities together. I suggested that perhaps I could work with the Jewish community and engage with the Arab Muslim community to facilitate dialogue – find a different path for two communities in agony. As part of that work all of caucus could participate in anti-Islamophobia and antisemitism training – set an example of how as leaders we could better understand their respective pain and fear. And government could show leadership by bringing people together.
Last week Matt Smith told me that this work was ‘too political’ and that government was not interested at this time. Antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment are at an all-time high and government doesn’t see itself as having a role in helping these communities.
This shattered what was left of my broken heart.
This is not the party I signed on with – it has become a party that is afraid to stand with people, people who are hurting. It is now a party that puts politics and re-election before people.
It is with all of this in mind that I am leaving caucus to sit as an independent. I can no longer defend the choices this government is making, and I need to mend my broken heart and I can’t do that when you simply offer me hugs and heart emojis but don’t care to educate yourselves or understand the fear and anguish of being Jewish in this moment.
Screenshot of the Jan. 30 B’nai Brith Canada panel discussion during which Selina Robinson spoke her controversial words.
Selina Robinson, who has called herself “the Jew in the crew” that is British Columbia’s cabinet, is out. The minister of advanced education and future skills resigned Monday after a torrent of protest following comments she made last week during a B’nai Brith Canada online panel discussion, in which she referred to the area that would become Israel as “a crappy piece of land.”
Premier David Eby announced Robinson’s departure from cabinet, saying her comments were “belittling and demeaning.”
“The depth of work she needs to do is substantial,” said Eby. “What has become apparent is the scope of work, the depth of the hurt. As a result, we came to the conclusion together – she needed to step back.”
The announcement came after protesters threatened to disrupt New Democratic Party events, forcing the cancelation of a major fundraising gala Sunday night and a government news conference Monday. A network of Muslim societies issued a statement over the weekend that no NDP MLAs or candidates would be permitted in their sacred spaces until Robinson was removed from cabinet.
Robinson will not run for reelection as member of the Legislative Assembly for Coquitlam-Maillardville, a decision she says she made earlier.
Response from Jewish community leaders was fast and critical.
“The removal of MLA Robinson, who apologized for her comments and promised to do better, sends a chilling message that Jewish leaders are held to a different standard than non-Jewish ones,” said Nico Slobinsky, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs’ vice-president for the Pacific region, in a statement. “In the past, when BC NDP politicians and staff have made antisemitic comments, the Jewish community has been asked to accept their apologies and – on every occasion – we have. As a show of goodwill, we never publicly demanded their resignations and, instead, placed our trust and faith in the premier and the BC government when he said that his team would learn from the incidents and not repeat their egregious errors.
“When, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day – a day to commemorate the six million Jews slaughtered in the Second World War – one of Premier Eby’s staff tweeted that ‘we stand with the Muslim community,’ we were asked to accept that stunning gaffe as a mistake. And we did.
“We were also asked to work with a Parliamentary Secretary for Anti-Racism Initiatives who made remarks that were deeply hurtful to our community,” Slobinsky said. “And, despite her repeated offensive actions, she continues to remain in her role.”
This reference to Vancouver-Kensington MLA Mable Elmore alludes to a history of problematic remarks, from claiming before her election that her union was dominated by “Zionist bus drivers” to more recently using a speech in the legislature ostensibly about transgender rights to call for Israel to end the war with Hamas.
Slobinsky added: “Today, as the Jewish community in BC is confronted by an alarming increase in antisemitism and by frequent pro-Hamas protests calling for the Jews of Israel to be eradicated, the loss of MLA Robinson is especially distressing, as we no longer have our strongest advocate – who understands the challenges and sensitivities of the Jewish community – at the table.
“The community is both offended and hurt by what has happened to a great ally and British Columbian, and it has seriously undermined the confidence of the Jewish community in the Government of British Columbia. Given this obvious double standard and loss of Jewish representation in cabinet, Premier David Eby must share what steps he is going to take to repair the relationship and restore the community’s trust in him and his government.”
“Facing an unprecedented increase in hate, the Jewish community in BC is hurting,” Ezra Shanken, chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, said in a statement. “The level of online vitriol aimed at Selina Robinson leading up to her resignation – which mirrors the reality faced by much of the Jewish community since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks committed by Hamas – shows worrying trends in our public discourse. We are saddened to have lost one of the strongest advocates fighting against antisemitism from within cabinet – especially at a time when it is needed most.
“It is shameful that Premier David Eby has bowed to pressure from a loud minority whose campaign to discredit MLA Robinson was centred in anti-Jewish bias and lacked the offer of grace they demand when others falter.
“We need stronger leadership from this government to bring our communities together – not divide us,” said Shanken.
The Rabbinical Association of Vancouver sent a letter to the premier, signed by nine rabbis, expressing disappointment.
“We believe you have capitulated to a small but loud group of people,” the letter read. “Now it feels like you have given in to bullies for political expediency. We will remember this day the next time you ask for our trust and support.”
At least one voice in the Jewish community was pleased with Eby’s decision. “The decision to remove former MP [sic] Selina Robinson from office is a crucial win for organizers including IJV-Vancouver and our allies, who stood firm and united against anti-Palestinian racism,” tweeted Independent Jewish Voices. “The rhetoric we all heard was shameful. Thank you to all who helped hold BC accountable.”
B’nai Brith Canada told the Independent they are grateful for the work that Robinson undertook to combat antisemitism on BC’s post-secondary campuses as minister.
“It is unfortunate that comments she made last week have resulted in her feeling compelled to step down from her ministerial position,” Richard Robertson, director of research and advocacy for B’nai Brith Canada, said in an email. “We believe her apology was sincere and that MLA Robinson will work to regain the confidence of the constituents who were offended by her remarks.”
“B’nai Brith Canada believes that this incident underscores the need for the province to take further steps to combat racism and hatred,” said Robertson. “One such step, amid rising levels of antisemitism, is for the BC government to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.”
Selina Robinson resigned Monday as British Columbia’s minister of post-secondary education and future skills. She also announced she would not seek reelection as the member of the Legislature for Coquitlam-Maillardville – though she said the latter was a decision she had made earlier.
The resignation Monday afternoon was the culmination of a remarkably speedy controversy that erupted late last week, after video circulated of Robinson, during a B’nai Brith Canada panel discussion, referring to pre-state Israel as a “crappy piece of land with nothing on it.” That she qualified the statement immediately, saying “there were several hundred thousand people, but, other than that, it didn’t produce an economy, it couldn’t grow things, it didn’t have anything on it,” is cut off from almost all the video clips.
The language choice was problematic and careless, no question. The Zionist movement has often been criticized for consciously or unconsciously overlooking the presence of existing populations in the land that became the modern state of Israel. One of the original slogans was: “A land without a people for a people without a land.” Robinson certainly knows this history.
What she meant – as she clarified again after the controversy erupted – was that the land had few if any natural resources or economic development. There is nothing historically inaccurate about that. Not only did Palestine not have an abundance of natural resources but, for hundreds of years, it had been an ignored piece of a failing Ottoman Empire, then, for two decades, an abused outpost of British colonialism. Regardless, the way in which Robinson spoke is not a fair or productive way to talk about a land that clearly (so clearly) means so much to so many people. Resources, economic or otherwise, are not the markers of the inherent value of a land or its significance to Indigenous peoples or anyone with a close relationship to place. That said, the feverish response to her words has been out of proportion. There is a world in which her clarification and apology would have sufficed. But, of course, this is politics.
And it is more than just politics. It is Israel and Palestine politics – and that is a particularly vicious game, even here in peaceable Canada. Annamie Paul, former head of the Green Party of Canada, learned tragically what can happen to a Jewish political leader who dares to take a nuanced position (or, really, anything but a wildly anti-Israel approach) to Middle East affairs. Some of us feared Robinson’s principles on this front put a similar target on her back. We’ve been proved right.
Robinson has been an outspoken pro-Israel voice, never more than since Oct. 7. There is no doubt that some were looking for an opportunity to knock her down – and she stumbled in a bad way, leaving her open to precisely the sort of attack some people were no doubt itching for.
Protesters, who, since Oct. 7, have been ready to mobilize about Israel with any provocation, moved into action. Social media erupted in such performative ferocity one would think British Columbians had suddenly discovered one of our leaders was a member of the Klan.
A major New Democratic Party fundraising gala Sunday night was canceled, apparently because they feared a protest that would distract from the party’s message in an election year. A news conference on Monday on a completely unrelated issue was also canceled, presumably for the same reason.
Groups accused Robinson of “blatant bigotry.” Anjali Appadurai, who ran against the current Premier David Eby for party leader, accused Robinson of “racist views.” Protesters Monday and people on social media accused her of “white supremacy.” After the controversy arose but before she resigned, Robinson had agreed to take anti-Islamophobia training.
It is perhaps most remarkable that the people most loudly condemning Robinson probably intersect significantly with the demographic that contests the widely accepted definition of antisemitism, contending, in effect, that Jews make up false “smears” about bigotry for political gain. This, of course, is precisely what happened to Robinson: an offhand (and, yes, offensive) remark is recast as “Islamophobia” by activists who have been waiting to pounce on precisely this sort of slipup. Not incidentally, it sidelines one of Canada’s few Jewish, pro-Israel elected officials.
The rhetoric being used around whiteness, settler colonialism and vulnerable communities also reinforces narratives about Israel that are deeply troubling and rooted in antisemitism and ignorance. Robinson’s comments, heard through an already flawed lens, produced a result that was all but predetermined by entrenched narratives. This is a disturbing reality, one that hurts more than Jews and their allies. Such abuse of terms like racism and white supremacy offend the serious work we must do as a society to confront these problems. Mobilizing these terms for crude political gain, as they have been against Robinson, undermines the fight against racism.
Robinson, and many in the Jewish community, no doubt feel heartbroken this week. In the long run, though, it is the people of British Columbia who are the losers. They have lost the services of a committed public servant.
More than this, our political culture and the fight against racism in all its forms have been debased.