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Full Canadian Jewish Record story here.

July 14, 2020 – By STEVE ARNOLD

A new campaign to change the name of Swastika Trail in the township of Puslinch, Ont. will seek to defeat local councillors in the next election who don’t support the effort.

Veteran political operative and anti-hate activist Warren Kinsella has joined the campaign by Township residents who have been trying for years to get the name changed.

This time, however, the gloves are off, Kinsella warned in an interview.

“We are saying to the politicians, ‘if any of you continue to defend this, we will run campaigns to defeat you in the next election. We will make sure that everybody knows you were indifferent to this hateful name being attached to this street,’” Kinsella said.

“It’s not a threat, it’s a promise,” he added. “If you guys are going to let lthis foul, disgusting name continue to be associated with this street, then we’re going to make sure people know you didn’t do anything about it when you could have.”

Kinsella, a Toronto lawyer, former Liberal Party strategist, founder of the anti-hate group Standing Against Misogyny and Prejudice (STAMP) and head of the Daisy Group consulting firm, joined the latest anti-Swastika Trail campaign at the request of long-time resident, Randy Guzar.

STAMP’s past efforts include helping to bring criminal convictions against the publisher and editor of Your Ward News, a free Toronto newspaper that promoted hatred against Jews and women.

Guzar has lived on Swastika Trail for more than 20 years and has seen at least four previous efforts to get the name changed.

The street was named in the 1920s when the swastika was still widely considered an ancient good luck symbol. The private road, owned by a numbered company, is in a mostly rural corner of Puslinch Township, south of Guelph in Wellington County. About 35 families live on the street.

Swastika Trail

The most recent effort to get the name changed started in April 2017 and ended in June 2018, when an Ontario court refused to review a council decision not to change the name.

Guzar and others went to court to challenge how the matter was handled by the council, which had asked the local cottagers association to decide whether to change the name. The association voted 25-20 to keep it, and Puslinch council vote 4-1 against changing it.

The court’s three judge panel, which found that the council had acted correctly, ruled: “There is no doubt that to many people in Canada in the 21st century, the swastika is an abhorrent symbol, reminiscent of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis during World War Two. While council’s decision…likely does not accord with the beliefs of many Canadians…there is no basis for finding that council’s decisions were unlawful.”

Since then, however, three of the five township councillors, including the mayor, have changed. More importantly, both Kinsella and Guzar argue there have been major changes in public attitudes about racism and hatred.

At the same time, there has been a spike in incidents of antisemitism around the world – the centuries old hatred that found its fullest modern expression under the Swastika flag of Nazi Germany.

“What has happened is that the murder of (George) Floyd) and the whole the Black Lives Matter movement has really awoken people to the importance of tolerance issues generally,” Kinsella said.

Warren Kinsella

“For the Jewish community, given the massive outbreak in antisemitism and vandalism, this is the least this community can do. We’re not asking them to give us money. We’re not asking them to do anything other than be decent human beings and remove this name.

“There’s no time in human history when I’ve seen a greater popular response to racism and bigotry than there is right now,” he added. “What has happened this spring, in the middle of a pandemic, is extraordinary and that tells us we’re on the right side, that people are with us and we just have to make them aware of what is happening.”

Guzar argues that while the swastika may be an ancient symbol, it is too closely linked to Nazi-era atrocities ever to be rehabilitated and “does not belong in a multicultural, diverse and tolerant Canada.”

“The swastika is the symbol of the most homicidal expression of hatred that ever existed. It is the literal embodiment of racism and anti-Semitism, homophobia and genocide,” he said. “This is a modern Canada and it’s time that this name be retired.”

Despite changes on council, Guzar said he doesn’t sense a change in attitude.

“From the very first when we started our effort to retire this street name we have had no support from the township and that’s the current flavor today,” he said. “I’m very disappointed in council’s indifference to this name and their use of tax dollars to defend it in court. We would expect our council to stand up and condemn hatred and change this street name.”

In an e-mail exchange Puslinch Mayor James Seeley “politely” refused to comment. Paul Wysznski, whose company owns the road, could not be reached for comment.

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Politics is like rock’n’roll: everything has been done before.

Take the Conservative Party, for example (please). Their leadership contest is ripping their party apart.

The Liberals did it first, however. Jean Chrétien won the Liberal leadership in 1990, and he won majority governments in 1993, 1997 and 2000, too. But Paul Martin and his cabal didn’t care.

They wanted Chrétien gone. So when Chrétien had a minor health scare, Martin’s minions hissed to compliant reporters that Chrétien was dying. When he didn’t die, they pounced on every misstep – and there weren’t many of those, frankly – and muttered darkly to compliant reporters.

When the sponsorship mess happened, Chrétien called in the cops. He cleaned house. His government was supported, as a result, by 60 per cent of Canadians.

Again, the Martinites didn’t care. Once Chrétien retired, they decided to hold an inquiry into sponsorships. One of them – now, amusingly, a “political analyst” for Bell Media – said: “This public inquiry is going to pin it all on them.”

Instead, Chrétien fired off a few golf balls into the epicentre of the inquiry and Martin’s PMO, collapsing both. The Liberal Party of Canada would thereafter spend a decade in the political wilderness – because Paul Martin and Co. called in the cops on their own political party.

Some 16 years later, Erin O’Toole has decided to do the same thing. A few days ago, the Conservative leadership candidate’s team made a formal complaint to the RCMP.

Alleging criminal conduct by Peter MacKay’s leadership campaign.

The allegation is that some factotums in MacKay’s operation got access to top-secret recordings of meetings in O’Toole’s operation. Super-duper secret stuff was purloined, it is alleged.

To regard this as a crime, of course, we would need to first believe that the O’Toole leadership campaign had ideas that were worth stealing. That is a big assumption, we know, but let’s assume they did and they do.

So, the RCMP, as they always do, confirmed they’d received the criminal complaint. As they always do, the Mounties said they were talking to some people about the allegations. And, as always, they haven’t said anything else, because the RCMP don’t like to be used as political pawns.

But let’s also assume, for a minute, that the Mounties actually charge members of MacKay’s inner circle. Does that mean the former Nova Scotia cabinet minister couldn’t still win the Tory leadership?

No. He could still win it, and he’d thereafter be pursuing a scorched-Earth campaign against all things O’Toole. And the beneficiary would be Justin Trudeau.

Or, let’s imagine that O’Toole’s gambit doesn’t work, and MacKay’s team are exonerated. The above scenario would be the same: a bloody purge of O’Toole and his gang by the victorious MacKay folks, and Justin Trudeau riding the resulting Conservative civil war to another majority victory.

Or, try to imagine that O’Toole somehow wins. (Hard, we know, but try.) MacKay and Co. will remain on the sidelines, for years, sabotaging everything O’Toole tries to do. Winner? Justin Trudeau.  

Take it from a veteran of the Chrétien-Martin leadership wars – whose nadir, as now, was one camp calling the other camp criminals – these things never end well. Back then, the main beneficiary was Stephen Harper. This time, whichever way it goes, it’ll be Justin Trudeau.

When the Martin guys did what they did, we Chrétien guys commenced hating their guts. Some of us still do. Deeply. That tends to be the reaction when someone falsely accuses you of a crime.

Anyway: if a crime has been committed, let the cops do their job. But don’t use the criminal law as a political club.

Erin O’Toole could have saved himself a lot of trouble by simply calling Jean Chrétien and asking for advice. I know what le petit gars would’ve said, too.

He would’ve said this: politicize your differences, Erin.

Don’t criminalize them.

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James Sears, the white supremacist “doctor,” is back. More here.

This material has been distributed in East Toronto. I’ve forwarded it to the police.

Stay tuned.

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Free political advice: always look both ways.

It’s a sunny, warm June day in 1990 in Calgary.  Along with Eleanor McMahon – one of Jean Chretien’s press assistants, and a future Ontario cabinet minister – I’m on the sidewalk outside the Delta Hotel on Fourth Avenue.  Eleanor and I are on our way somewhere, to prep for another successful Chretien leadership campaign event.  Eleanor behind me, I step off the sidewalk.

And I step into the path of a yellow Calgary cab, moving fast.  

Tires screeched.  Horns blared.  Eleanor screamed.

Later on, in a room at the Calgary General Hospital, Eleanor told me that I had flipped through the air “like a rag doll,” and landed, hard, on the pavement in front of the Delta.  “I thought you were going to die,” she said.

Later on, while recuperating at my parents’ Calgary home, Jean Chretien phoned.  “So, young man,” he said, “was Paul Martin driving that taxi?”

It hurt to laugh, but I laughed anyway.  The leadership vote was a day or so away, and we were going to win it, big time.  Some days before, before my appointment with the bumper of a taxi cab, I had asked Chretien advisor Eddie Goldenberg about “our second ballot strategy.”

Goldenberg laughed.  “We don’t have one,” he said.  “We’re going to win on the first ballot.”

And we did, we did.  Sitting in the Chretien campaign box in Calgary’s Olympic Saddledome with my Dad – surrounded by Chretien loyalists like Keith Davey, Sheila Finestone, Sergio Marchi, Beryl Gaffney, Lawrence MacAulay, Shirley Maheu, Dennis Mills and many, many others – we got the results of the first ballot on June 23, 1990.

Chretien had won the Liberal Party leadership with almost 60 per cent of the delegated vote.  His nearest rival, Paul Martin, took only 25 per cent.  The also-rans – Shela Copps, Tom Wappel and John Nunziata – secured only 15 per cent of the vote put together.

I struggled to my feet using my crutches, overjoyed.  I had been volunteering for Chretien for many months, writing speeches, overseeing his campaign correspondence, assisting in low-level strategy.  Now that the leadership campaign was over, I would return to my legal practice.

Chretien had other plans.  Back in Ottawa, reaching me again on the phone, he told me he wanted me to work for him.  I was shocked.  I never wanted a job, I told him.  I was always planning to return to my litigation practice.

“You can be a lawyer anytime, young man,” the newly-minted Liberal leader said.  “I’m offering a chance to work for me and have some fun.”

So I took him up on his offer, as his Special Assistant, but it wasn’t a lot of fun at the start.  We ran headlong into the Meech Lake Accord, the Oka crisis, and Martin-friendly Liberal MPs quitting caucus to join the nascent Bloc Quebecois.

Chretien would experience a health scare, staff churn, and caucus rumblings, and – later – the Persian Gulf crisis.  Other Opposition leaders may experience a honeymoon in the wake of their win.  But we didn’t.

“You’ve made a big mistake throwing away your legal career to work for Chretien,” some legal and political friends would tell me.  “He’ll never be Prime Minister.”

Well, as I would later delight in telling those Chretien critics, he did okay, didn’t he?

Forty years of never losing an election.  Wrestling the deficit and debt to the ground.  Defeating a burgeoning separatist movement in a nail-biter.  Keeping Canada out of the ill-considered Iraq conflict.  And, along the way, doing what no other leader had done: winning three back-to-back majority governments.

He was – and always will be, to me – the best Prime Minister.  Since he retired in 2003, I’ve seen it many times when I’ve walked on the street with him, in Vancouver or Toronto or Ottawa: Canadians mostly love Jean Chretien.  “Come back,” they say to him, asking for selfies.  “You’d win!”

And he would, he would.  His successors, as Chretienites like to say, always make him look good.

Oh, and as I walked with him on one of those streets one sunny day, Chretien laughed and pointed at me.

“Look both ways this time, young man!”

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More reasons why, seen in Licia Corbella’s important column today, found here.

My post on Raworth, which you should also read, is here.

In January 2018, an Alberta woman said on Twitter that 10 years earlier, while working at the Alberta legislature — when Hehr was an MLA for the opposition Alberta Liberals between the years of 2008 and 2015 — he called her “yummy” while in an elevator together.She said he made similar remarks or tried to brush up against her in later encounters.The feeding frenzy on Twitter by many thousands of people was swift and near-unanimous. The next day he resigned from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet as sport and disabilities minister.

The Prime Minister’s Office commissioned an independent investigation, which found the woman’s claims were legitimate, but details of the review were kept under wraps by the PMO due to privacy concerns — even though the accuser wanted them made public.

Hehr said then and maintains today that he doesn’t recall meeting the woman at the legislature or calling her or anyone else “yummy” — ever...

It’s vital to point out that Hehr has zero feeling in his hands or forearms. He relies on his shoulder muscles to move his arms and can’t fully control where his arms end up. Indeed, Hehr has received third-degree burns to his hands from a hot cup of coffee offered to him by a well-meaning person — feeling nothing as layers of skin peeled away, requiring medical treatment.

At the age of 21, on Oct. 3, 1991, Hehr, a bystander, was shot in a drive-by shooting in Calgary. The resulting spinal cord injury rendered him a quadriplegic, with no feeling below his breastbone.

In Hehr’s Facebook post, which has received more than 2,500 likes, 610 overwhelmingly positive comments and 346 shares, he writes that what he went through came into “sharp focus” on April 30 “when the woman who accused me of sexual harassment in 2018 apologized for making libellous statements about Canadian public figure Warren Kinsella.” She made false claims, was forced to retract her statements, apologize and pay his legal bills. “Kinsella wrote an article that provided some context for all of this …. Here’s how he closed it: ‘ … to Kent Hehr, wherever you are: I now wonder whether you deserved better. I wonder that a lot.’”

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