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Jean Chretien is turning 90 this week. And what a life he has had.

Let me tell you one of my favorite Chretien stories, about just one afternoon in that extraordinary life.

One sunny day a few years ago, I was in Vancouver for business. Turned out Chretien was, as well. We decided to get together for lunch, down near Water Street in Gastown.

It was a nice day, so the former Prime Minister suggested we go for a walk. Off we went, along with the one (1) RCMP guy assigned to him. We headed towards Waterfront Station. People would do a double-take when they saw him, then smile, then wave to him and say “Hey Chretien!” Things like that. Happened a lot.

We got to Waterfront Station, and there was a great big guy there. He was sitting on the sidewalk, looking pretty rough, and he might have been homeless. He got up and started walking rapidly towards us, his face stern.

Just when I was thinking that I would need to become a bodyshield for the former Prime Minister, the rough-looking guy stuck out a hand as big as a ham.

“Chretien!” He bellowed. “Thanks for keeping us out of Iraq! You did a good job! Got five bucks?”

We all laughed, of course. And Chretien, still laughing, reached into his wallet – and it wasn’t one of those fancy Italian wallets, either, it looked like he got it for a fill up at Petro Canada – and took out five bucks and gave it to the guy. And then they proceeded to talk about all manner of things, like they had known each other forever.

There are a million other stories like that about Joseph Jacques Jean Chretien, 18th of 19 children, 20th of 23 Prime Ministers.  A million.

You just need to walk along any street in Canada, and I mean anywhere, and people will stop him to shake his hand or offer best wishes or ask for a selfie. I don’t know if anybody has ever done a poll on the most-loved Prime Minister, but if they had, I’m pretty sure my former boss would top it.

He turns 90 this week. He still goes in to the office. He still talks on the phone with Presidents and Prime Ministers, Kings and Queens.

He still offers free political advice to whoever asks for it.  The recipients of the advice include unabashed fans, like one Stephen Harper, P.C. (Not so much the woke bloke, however, the one with the Chewbacca socks.  That one doesn’t like getting advice from people with experience. And it shows.)

At 90, Chretien still waterskis at his little place in Shawinigan, or plays pickleball, or goes kiteboarding – or he heads to Harvey’s for a burger, a bemused Mountie in tow. And then people stop by his table to say hello, or ask for a selfie. He always stands to greet them.

That’s an important distinction, I think. Chretien is beloved, in part, because people sense that he does not regard himself as better than them, or better than anyone. And he doesn’t.

He didn’t let the job go to his head, you see, and the statistics suggest he was pretty successful at his day job. When he offered me the job of speechwriter in the Summer of 1990 – and, believe me, if there is a Maytag repairman equivalent in Canadian politics, it’s being speechwriter to Jean Chretien – lots of friends and family told me I was crazy. He’ll never become Prime Minister, they said. You’re throwing away a promising legal career, they said.

“Well,” I’d say many times over the subsequent years, “he kind of did all right, didn’t he?”

He certainly did. Forty years in elected politics, never a defeat. Held just about every major portfolio in federal politics, never a finding of wrongdoing by him. Balanced the budget more than once, kept Canada together more than once, won three majorities in a row.  Fiscally prudent, socially progressive. Gave the Shawinigan Handshake™️ to a guy who deserved it.

And, through it all, he kept his connection to the people. One time, we were waiting for him to arrive to start an event at a restaurant somewhere. I asked one of my fellow aides where the leader was. He laughed. “He’s in the kitchen,” said the aide. “He always enters through the kitchen, so he can talk to the staff and shake their hands.”

That’s Chretien. That’s the little guy from Shawinigan.

Some of us who worked for him and who love him are gathering in Ottawa this week to sing happy birthday. Ninety years: by any standard, that’s a long life.

And Jean Chretien did some amazing things with that life.

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What does it take?

What does it take for police and prosecutors to do their job, that is.

What does it take?

Since October 7, when a modern shoah commenced, this country has shamed itself. This country has witnessed the biggest surge in Jew hatred since the years leading to the Second World War. It has led to headlines around the world.

Now, in the Trudeau era, it has become difficult for Canada to distinguish itself on the international stage. We are not known for very much, these days.

But since October 7, we have achieved international distinction for something few wanted and fewer foresaw: we have become a world leader in unsolved anti-Semitic crime. We are gold medalists in that.

A Jewish school in Montreal is shot up – not once, but twice. The police have no suspects. No one has been charged.

Synagogues and Jewish community centers are fire-bombed in Montreal, multiple times. The police have no suspects. No arrests.

A Muslim leader, before 20,000 witnesses, calls on God to exterminate Jews. He still walks the streets. No charges.

And, this week, a Jewish-owned business in the Toronto area is fire bombed. The supermarket had a sign out front, calling itself “IDF “– International Delicatessen Foods. Was the supermarket fire bombed, and its windows smashed, because of the sign?

Well, whoever was behind the attack erased any doubt: they spray-painted the words FREE PALESTINE on the walls.

So, again: what does it take?

What, specifically, have police and prosecutors done to end this wave of anti-Semitic crime? What have they done to signal to the Jew haters that they will be caught and punished?

Not much.

So, as a result, the Jew-hating, pro-Hamas thugs grow more bold. They hiss death threats at people, right in front of the police, and get away with it. They make lots of threats online, and giddily promote hatred and genocide. They deny murder, they deny rape.

And, for week after week, they have taken to blocking access to and from the 401. The busiest highway in North America.

What does it take?

It should be pointed out, perhaps, that the police haven’t been entirely silent. They’ve issued lots of stern-sounding tweets, yes. They’ve put out lots of press releases, yes.

But it’s been a lot of noise, signifying nothing, to appropriate Shakespeare. It’s been a lot of bluster and BS.

No arrests for the sorts of crimes described above.

The politicians, too, haven’t done much. Apart from issuing social media statements of the  “thoughts and prayers” variety, few of them have shown any real determination to stamp out this hateful crime wave.

Toronto City Councillor Mike Colle is one of the few. He actually was the first to draw the IDF fire-bombing to everyone’s attention. Colle has been livid, and fired off a second letter to federal and provincial attorneys-general, demanding that “they urgently take action and enact immediate legislative measures… to address the unprecedented rise in hate-related acts.”

We can only hope that Mike Colle gets a response, and gets some action.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can only hope that our police forces will awake from their slumber before it is too late – for Jews and for the rest of us, too.

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Sorry, partisans, but you can’t have it both ways.

January 2022: protestors start blocking Ottawa streets to make a political point. Police are ultimately used to clear them out. Some conservatives are very unhappy the police used force to do so, while some progressives are happy.

January 2024: protestors start blocking Toronto streets to make a political point. Police haven’t cleared them out using force (yet). But some conservatives are very unhappy police haven’t used force (yet) – while some progressives are happy they haven’t.

I know, I know: both sides are mad at me, now. Sorry. But you can’t oppose (or favour) clearing out the Ottawa road occupiers, and now take the completely opposite position with the pro-Palestine road occupiers. It’s illogical, it’s inconsistent, and it’s unfair.

Two years ago, this writer strongly favoured the police clearing out the Ottawa occupiers, with force if necessary. As I wrote in these pages at the time:

“Enough is enough. It’s time to invoke the Emergencies Act…The Act would give the government the ability to prevent more troublemakers from traveling to Ottawa to extend the siege there.  It would prevent ‘protestors’ from blocking border crossings — including, as they did in Windsor, with children.

“It would allow the authorities to remove trucks and barricades that have been used to shut down the national capital — and cripple billions of dollars in cross-border trade. And it allows government to compensate citizens and businesses who have been victimized by the lawlessness.”

And, two years later, just about every word of that also applies to the “pro-Palestine” (read: kind-of, sort-of pro-Hamas) protestors, who are now regularly blocking access to and from Toronto’s 401, the busiest highway in North America. Not only are they hurting local businesses and residents – like the Ottawa occupiers did – they are using their presence to intimidate the people (mainly Jews) who live in those areas.

What’s fair is fair, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander – and any other cliché that applies. You simply can’t be okay with one group blocking roads and intimidating locals, and then oppose it when another group does it. The law, if it is to matter at all, has to be applied without fear or favour. It has to be equitable.

At just about this point in this opinion column, or course, partisans on the Left and the Right are steaming mad, and want to argue that the two situations are completely, totally different. Right about now, they’re dreaming up distinctions they hope make a difference.

But they are distinctions which don’t amount to a difference. In international law, blockades are considered acts of war. In statute law, it is also illegal: in Alberta, for example, the Critical Infrastructure Defence Act properly makes it against the law for “blockades, protests or similar activities” to damage or harm essential infrastructure like roads.

And in Ontario, during the Ottawa occupation, Premier Doug Ford (rightly) applied the provincial equivalent of the Emergencies Act days before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did so to stop blockades of roads and border crossings. Meanwhile, Canada’s Criminal Code’s section 423 makes blocking roads a crime – punishable by five years in prison.

For centuries, the non-criminal common law has done likewise: going back to the Seventies, the Supreme Court of Canada has held that “authorities were not only entitled but duty bound, as peace officers…[to ensure] the right of free access of the public to public streets.”

In international law, in Canada’s criminal law, in our statutory laws, in Centuries of common law – it’s the the iron-clad rule: you are not allowed to block public roads and highways with impunity. And the police have always had the authority to arrest and detain you for doing so.

So, in case of the Ottawa occupation and the “pro-Palestine” occupations, the law must be applied consistently and fairly. If it was right and proper to arrest and detain the Ottawa occupiers who refused to leave that city’s streets, it’s now right and proper to arrest and detain the pro-Palestine/anti-Semitic occupiers who are refusing to do likewise on the 401’s exit ramps.

The law is the law. If you apply it in one case, you need to apply it in all similar cases.

So, why haven’t the police arrested and cleared out the anti-Israel mobs?

For that question, I do not have an answer.

[Kinsella is a lawyer and former member of the executives of the provincial and federal bar associations.]

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“We don’t need no education.”

It’s ironic, and telling, that the author of that 1979 Pink Floyd lyric was Roger Waters. Waters is a musician, but he is also one of the most notorious Jew-haters on the planet.

He dresses up in Nazi-style uniforms for shows, he refuses to eat what he calls “Jew food,” he’s been quoted going on about “dirty kikes,” and he says “the Jewish lobby” controls the music industry. Among other things.

And, as he wrote for his band, “we don’t need no education.” It was deliberately ungrammatical (perhaps) and meant to be ironic (probably). But, these days, it rings true, although not in the way the anti-Semite Roger Waters meant it.

How else to react to the presidents of some of the world’s most prestigious universities – Harvard, M.I.T. – shrugging about anti-Semitism on their campuses, and refusing to say that promoting genocide against Jews isn’t against the rules?

How else to read about the rape crisis centre at the University of Alberta denying that Israeli women and girls were the victims of sexual violence on October 7 and thereafter? Or police being needed to escort Jewish students at McGill University – or more security being secured for Jews at UBC, Simon Fraser and U Vic?

How else to regard attacks on Jewish students at Concordia University in Montreal, and a Concordia “humanities” professor screaming at a Jewish student that she was “a whore” – and telling her to “go back to Poland” (a slur that was shouted at Jews at a counter-protest in Toronto on the long weekend)?

How else to react to the case of teacher Javier Davila, who continues to be employed by Canada’s largest school board, even after promoting the work of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a listed terror group in Canada?

Says lawyer and human rights advocate Michael Teper, who has complained to Ontario’s teacher college about Davila: “Ontario’s public classrooms are for learning and building critical thinking skills, not for propaganda.  Staff members such as Javier Davila, who abuse their positions and public resources to tout their own beliefs, should be shown the door.”

And so on, and so on. Our places of higher learning, increasingly, have become seen as places of ignorance and hate. A recent poll conducted for The Economist magazine, for example, came up with some shocking results:

• Twenty per cent of American respondents age 18 to 29 think that the Holocaust is a myth
• Thirty per cent of the same age group said they “do not know” if the Holocaust is a myth
• Nearly 30 per cent of young Americans think “Jews wield too much power” – five times what those who are 65 and older believe

Those results reinforce what this writer has reported weeks ago: a Fall poll conducted by Harvard University found that more than 50 per cent of Americans between 18 and 24 believe Hamas’ pogroms were “justified.”

Holocaust denial and wide support for Jew-hating homicidal maniacs: are the universities solely to blame? Perhaps not, says The Economist: “In our poll, the proportion of respondents who believe the Holocaust its a myth is similar across all levels of education.”

The main culprit, it seems, is social media – specifically TikTok, which is the number one search engine for Generation Z.

The Pew Research Center has found that the under-thirty generation trusts social media more than mainstream media – and that a third of them actually get all their news from TikTok. Meanwhile, the data-intelligence firm Generation Lab has concluded that those who use TikTok are much more likely to hold anti-Semitic views.

It can’t be disputed that educational institutions – from a school board in Toronto, to Harvard in the U.S. – have been largely indifferent to the growth of hateful ideologies in and out of the classroom. It’s also accepted that the promoters of ancient hatreds have sought, and obtained, employment as teachers and professors.

But educational institutions, it seems, are not solely to blame. Social media generally – and China’s TikTok, in particular – have made a bad situation far, far worse.

“We don’t need no education,” sure.

But, more than that, we don’t need no TikTok, either.

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Two sides.

One side hasn’t shot up schools for little kids. It hasn’t firebombed community centers and places of worship. Its clergy haven’t called for a deity to slaughter the other side. It hasn’t yelled death threats at people in shopping malls.

It hasn’t targeted businesses with threats and abuse because the business owner belongs to a particular religion. It hasn’t attacked Santa Claus and tried to shut down Christmas. It hasn’t blocked roads to keep people from getting home.

The other side? It has. It has done all of those things. Everyone knows it, too. Everyone.

But not everyone knows this part.

A few weeks ago, this writer was invited to the Israeli consulate in Toronto to see 42 minutes of raw video footage. It was mostly taken from video recorders dead (and uniformed) Hamas terrorists brought with them on the morning of October 7, 2023.

The uniformed Hamas killers wanted to keep a record of what they did in Israel that morning. They were proud of what they did: on the videos, they said so, over and over.

The footage was unedited and had the feel of a snuff film. Which is what it was. It showed 138 Jews being shot, or decapitated, or blown to pieces by grenades. Men, women, children, babies.

The video showed the aftermath, as well. Israeli women and girls, naked from the waist down, their genitals bloody and mutilated. Parents and children, wired together, then burned alive. A baby’s skull, the brain spilling out onto the ground.

With the permission of the victim’s families, some journalists and legislators have been allowed to see the video. To bear witness, the Israelis told us.

We bore witness to something else, however. Something that hasn’t been written about nearly as much, but is important.

It was easy to spot the Hamas men. As noted, they wore uniforms and looked like soldiers, even though they acted like animals. (Worse than animals, actually.)

But here’s something else we witnessed: people who weren’t in uniforms, at all, flooding into Israel to participate in the barbarity of that dark Saturday.

In the Hamas footage, a Palestinian in civilian clothes uses an oversized green garden hoe to decapitate a foreign agricultural worker who is still alive. There are videos of Palestinian civilians beating hostages – some elderly – with sticks and their fists. And there is footage of corpses of Israelis being desecrated by Palestinians, on the back of a truck.

The Hamas video footage – some now online – also shows non-Hamas Palestinians loot and vandalize the homes and bodies of Jews.

Multiple videos document Palestinian citizens flooding into Israeli, following Hamas. At Kibbutz Be’eri, near the border with Gaza, video footage – mainly taken from home security cameras – shows dozens of Palestinian citizens following ten truckloads of Hamas killers into the kibbutz.

Some Palestinians came by car, and some on foot and on bicycles. Some are armed. Some are children. They can then be seen stealing agricultural equipment, televisions, motorbikes and more.

Not every Palestinian is Hamas. That’s true. But it’s also true that – on that terrible day – many, many Palestinians were supporting Hamas.

Before that day, too. Before, and as everyone has seen by now, Hamas had tunnels snaking seemingly everywhere in Gaza – tunnels with armored doors concealed in Palestinian hospitals, schools and even children’s bedrooms. With, one can only assume, the knowledge and approval of Palestinian citizens.

That’s not all. One of the reasons why Hamas mass murder on October 7 was so effective and efficient was because Palestinian civilians – Palestinians who had been working alongside Israelis in those kibbutzim farms – had told Hamas how to disable the Israeli security and communications systems. They had told them who to kill first, and where victims could be found. Palestinian civilians did that.

Now, it goes without saying that some Israeli citizens are not blameless, either. Innocent Palestinians have been targeted for violence by far-Right Israeli settlers in the West Bank. That is in evidence, too, and it is indisputable. The wrongdoers must be brought to justice.

But Hamas did not act alone on October 7. It did not act alone before or after that date, either. Palestinians – ordinary citizens – aided and abetted Hamas.

The best way to conclude, here, is to quote an extraordinary book written a few years ago by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

“It is a grave error to refuse to believe that people could slaughter whole populations—especially populations that are by any objective evaluation not threatening—out of conviction. Why persist in the belief that ‘ordinary’ people could not possibly sanction, let alone partake in wholesale human slaughter? The historical record, from ancient times to the present, amply testifies to the ease with which people can extinguish the lives of others, and even take joy in their deaths.”

Ordinary German did.

Ordinary Palestinians, too.

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Picking the big winner of 2023 is easy. It’s Pierre Poilievre.

At year’s end, the fledgling Conservative leader is a winner not simply because he is leading in the polls. At various times, Erin O’Toole and Andrew Scheer – along with the likes of Robert Stanfield and Kim Campbell – all led in the polls, too.

Polling leads come and go. They’re transitory. Illusions.

What matters most is the polls that show why one is losing, not winning. And then making the the necessary changes to yourself.

Back when he was posing for selfies with the anti-vax convoy types who had occupied Ottawa – back when when he was enthusing about cryptocurrencies, playing footsie with anti-abortion forces, and raging about conspiracies at the World Economic Forum – Poilievre was behind in the polls. That’s when, and why, he was losing.

To Justin Trudeau, no less. To the worst Prime Minister in generations.

And then Poilievre, and/or some of the smart people around him, took a long and hard look at his vulnerabilities. And they made changes.

He stopped fulminating about vaccinations. He went silent on bitcoin and the WEF. He stopped talking about the stuff that had been holding him back, in effect.

And then he started talking about the things Canadians really cared about. How to make the rent or pay mortgage. How to deal with a utility bill. How to put bread on the table.

He ditched the glasses and the prep school ties, which had made him look like an angry physics lab nerd. He started working out. He was seen laughing and smiling more, in front of the cameras. He shared the spotlight with his lovely immigrant wife.

And – voila – things started to change. Around May or so, Polievre started to move ahead in the polls, and he hasn’t looked back.

He is who he is, however. Flashes of the old, angry Pierre Poilievre still occasionally reveal themselves. The same pollsters who say Poilievre is way ahead say that people find him arrogant and insincere, too.

He lets reporters get under his skin – reporters who ask dumb questions, because it is our job to ask dumb questions – and lashes out. It makes him look like a bully. Someone who enjoys punching down.

He’s stubborn, too. He voted against a trade deal with Ukraine – which Volodymyr Zelenskyy personally wanted and travelled here to get – supposedly because it contain provisions calling for a carbon tax.

When Ukraine already has a carbon tax. When he, you know, seemed to forget that leading Canada doesn’t entitle you to lead Ukraine at the same time.

And he still occasionally uses a rhetorical sledgehammer to kill a housefly. Insisting that Canada is “broken,” when it isn’t. Our politics are broken. Not the people.

Those exceptions notwithstanding, credit where credit is due: unlike Justin Trudeau – who is genetically incapable of accepting responsibility for his own mistakes and making changes to himself – Pierre Poilievre isn’t exactly who he was a couple years ago.

He’s changed. Not every aspect of his being, no. But he’s changed enough to dramatically improve his standing in the polls.

Justin Trudeau has helped, of course. (And we will be dealing with Trudeau in a separate column about the big political loser of 2023.)

But Pierre Poilievre truly seems to have learned from his mistakes.

And, given the sad state of our national politics these days, that’s about all we can ask for.

Happy new year.

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It’s that time of year – when columnists make predictions about the year ahead.

The ones found below were written before this writer, and this newspaper, were targeted by an army of trolls – and some we considered friends – accusing us of anti-Semitism. Us, arguably the most pro-Israel newspaper on the continent. Friendly fire does not begin to describe it. It left a sour taste.

I may come back to the Israel-Gaza subject, but I am taking a break from it on social media for the next while. In the meantime, here are ten predictions about Israel, Gaza and the Middle East.

1. Benjamin Netanyahu is toast. He was in trouble before October 7. He’s in more trouble now, for failing to prevent October 7. He promised to keep Israel secure. He didn’t deliver.

2. Netanyahu still faces three corruption prosecutions, which he has so far been unsuccessful in getting dismissed. Unlike Donald Trump – who is just one or two indictments away from winning the Republican presidential nomination – Netanyahu has not been helped by the prosecutions.

3. Netanyahu has also been revealed – by a huge, multi-part New York Times investigation- to have known Qatar was funding Hamas, to the tune of millions. He didn’t just do nothing about it – he encouraged it. In Israel, that too is unlikely to be forgiven anytime soon.

4. Israel cannot run post-war Gaza and doesn’t want to. Neither does the US or any of the surrounding Arab states. That leaves just one candidate for the job – the (corrupt, inefficient) Palestinian Authority. As imperfect as they are, no one else can be found to do the job.

5. Thousands of Gazans worked in Israel before October 7. After October 7, that’s unlikely to ever happen again. Some of them, it is clear, gave Hamas intel on Israeli military, communications and civilian weaknesses – and that’ll never be forgiven. So they’ll need massive foreign aid for infrastructure and to survive, because they’re not going to be working in Israel (or any neighboring Arab country) anytime soon.

6. Hamas will be destroyed, much in the way that ISIS was. But there’ll be some new monster to take their place, soon enough. Islamic terror organizations come and go. But their hatred for Israel and the West never seems to go away. We need to stop believing that it will, and prepare accordingly.

7. Western politics is going to swing dramatically to the Right. It’s already started. “Pro-Palestine” extremism will fuel anti-immigrant sentiment – and result in some limits being placed on some liberties. Few will object, initially.

8. Universities and colleges – the publicly-funded ones, at least – will pay a steep price for permitting anti-Semitism and violence to flourish on their campuses. It’ll take a decade or more to fix. It has become an institutional problem, and is deep-rooted.

9. There has been a yawning demographic divide – generational, racial – on Israel/Gaza. Social consensus has seemingly fractured, and former allies now seem to deeply hate each other. We ignore that divide at our peril.

10. A military solution cannot be imposed on Israelis and Gazans. There are millions of them, and they all live side-by-side. Once Hamas is eliminated – and it must be – the people of Israel and Gaza must find a way to live in peace. Themselves. No one else can do it for them.

Those predictions aren’t particularly sunny, but neither is the post-October 7 world in which we all now live.

Here’s hoping that peace – and an elimination of terror – awaits Israel and Gazans in the new year.

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