Belleville, Ontario, is the Friendly City.  That’s Belleville’s official motto.

Belleville has about 55,000 citizens.  It’s got a Kellogg’s plant, and a Proctor and Gamble plant.  It’s got some beautiful views on the Bay of Quinte, on the Northern shore of Lake Ontario.  It’s got a few Starbucks. It’s got a mall where a Sephora just opened.  It’s got some nice old buildings downtown.

And, lately, it’s got a reputation for having one of the very worst drug problems in Canada.

Yes, yes: every city in Canada, big and small, has a drug problem these days.  But a few days ago, in a 24-hour period on that Tuesday, two dozen people overdosed on a street that is within the shadow of Belleville’s City Hall.  Nine of them needed hospitalization.

The situation was so bad, every available ambulance in the surrounding area was needed.  Dozens of cops, paramedics and even firefighters were called in.  And, mid-afternoon on that grim day, police issued an extraordinary warning, the kind you see the federal government issuing about travel to war-torn countries: stay away.

“The Belleville Police Service is advising the public to exercise caution and avoid unnecessary travel to the downtown core area following reports of a significant number of overdoses on Tuesday afternoon,” the statement read. “[There is a] need for increased vigilance and awareness in the affected areas.”

And, with that, the Friendly City became the scary city, right across Canada.  It made headlines everywhere. Things got worse, too: on Thursday, with overdoses continuing to happen on and along Bridge Street, Belleville declared an actual state of emergency.

A state of emergency is what you do when things have gotten very, very bad.  The province of Ontario says a state of emergency should be declared to “prevent, reduce or mitigate a danger of major proportions that could result in serious harm to persons.”

Serious harm to people: that’s what Belleville was facing. Serious harm to its citizens, who live right beside the United Church where the overdoses happened – and serious harm to the addicted and homeless people who gather there every morning for a continental breakfast and, on Sundays, a dinner.  “Serious harm.”

The harm comes from not having a roof over your head, of course.  The harm comes from huddling on col sidewalks with nowhere to go.  The harm comes from the drugs.

Addicts in Belleville will gather together to share in a batch someone’s scored.  They’ll keep some naloxone nearby, in case the opioid – always fentanyl, these days – is off.  But, lately, other stuff is being added to the mix: gamma-Hydroxybutyrate, GHB, a “date rape” drug.  And xylazine – tranq, or trans dope – has been showing up, too.  And naloxone doesn’t really work on tranq or GHB.  So, people overdose.  Badly.

Neil Ellis is the smart and plain-spoken mayor of Belleville.  He’s been around: a couple terms as an MP in Ottawa, and he was a junior minister for a while.  And he’s fed up.

After the state of emergency was declared, Ellis got a call from the Prime Minister.  He got calls with some provincial ministers.  But action? Help? Not much of that.

On Tuesday afternoon, Ellis was back in front of a posse of microphones to give a bit of a State of the Union address.  He wasn’t happy.  And with good reason.

Ellis had asked Ottawa and Queen’s Park on help getting two things: a detox facility, and a hub where people can go and be safe.  That’s it.  A lot smaller price tag than an ArriveCan app that doesn’t work.

Said Ellis: “Very little progress has been made in moving forward on the crisis we are facing.  There was no support for either [the detox facility or the hub].  I was told we need to formulate a mental health and addiction strategy.”

Ellis was looking pretty mad, now.  “I’m not in any way disrespecting the efforts of our provincial partners…but it would be dishonest to say we were satisfied or in agreement.” The province was essentially offering a fraction of the amount needed – and not for a detox facility or a hub.

The cabinet minister who represents the area is Todd Smith, the minister of energy.  He’s regarded as a good guy.  Effective.

Smith has “finally shown an interest” and “may be able to move the dial,” Ellis said. Then the mayor wrapped up with this: “Our city, our unhoused, our residents and businesses have endured a terrible set of circumstances.  It has thrust us into national headlines.”

“It’s time for the province to step up,” he said, but now he wasn’t just talking about Belleville, the Friendly City. “Take responsibility, and act, on the crisis that is in front of every community.”

Will Ottawa and the province, and frankly all of the provinces, do so?

Belleville – like most other cities in Canada – can’t wait much longer.

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Over the weekend in London’s Camden Town, someone defaced a statue of Amy Winehouse.

The statue was unveiled in 2014, and is found at the edge of the Camden Market. It’s not far from where the Ramones played their first British show in 1976, or where the Clash recorded their first album, or the legendary Electric Ballroom – still going – where everyone from the Stones to Bowie to Sid Vicious played.

Winehouse was a soul and R and B singer, mainly, but she loved all of those other bands, so it made sense to have the statue in Camden Town. It depicts her with her signature beehive hairdo. And, so small you can easily miss it, a Star of David around her neck.

Not many people know Winehouse was a Jew, but she was. She was born into a Jewish family in North London in 1983, and attended synagogue maybe once a year. When she was little, she went to a Jewish Sunday school for a while.

And, so, over the weekend, someone defaced her statue. They glued a Palestinian flag to it, covering up the Star of David.

In the big scheme of things, a statue being defaced isn’t life-changing. A statue can be repaired – Winehouse’s has, already – and, most of the time, the person it depicts isn’t around anymore to notice.

But it upsets people, just the same, in a way that is hard for them to put into words. Online, some tried. “How low can some people go?” someone asked, and the Daily Mail noticed. “This is utterly disgraceful,” someone else wrote. “So sad to see this.”

The same reaction followed the defacing of Terry Fox’s statue in Ottawa, during the Ottawa occupation. Some “freedom convoy” types wedged a “Mandate Freedom” sign under his arm, and strapped an inverted Canadian flag to his front. People were angry about that, too.

It takes a deeply execrable person to deface a statue of a young man who raised money to fight cancer, or a young woman who simply had a lovely voice. It takes someone who is completely untethered from decency and reality.

But there’s a qualitative difference between those two acts of vandalism. In the case of Terry Fox, it was done to make a political statement. In the case of Amy Winehouse, it was done to make an anti-Semitic statement. To erase a Jew’s identity, even one who was beloved. To express hatred.

Where does that hate come from? What motivates it?

Acts of intimidation and violence against living Jews have become almost commonplace, these days. Firebombing of synagogues, and elementary schools shot up, in Montreal; community centres set ablaze or vandalized in Fredericton and Montreal; firebombing and targeting of Jewish restaurants and delis in Toronto; homes shot up or spray-painted in Winnipeg and small-town Ontario; even a hospital where all can go, which Jews sometimes support with donations, attacked by a mob.

Attacks like that, as noted, are attacks on living Jews. They’re like October 7, on a lesser scale. But to go after a Jew who is dead – like Amy Winehouse sadly is, her body finally giving out in 2011 – who does that? Who?

In her wonderful but unsettling recent bestseller, People Love Dead Jews, published before October 7, novelist Dara Horn tries to answer that question: that is, killing a living Jew – as Hamas and Gazans assuredly did on October 7, 2023 – is one thing. To erase them, to cancel their actual existence.

But to possess a hatred that is so virulent, so bottomless, that an anti-Semite is moved to lash out at a Jew who has been dead for more than a decade? That’s a more complete variant of hatred.

In her book, Horn recounts how Anne Frank’s diary has sold 30 million copies, and how the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam hosts over a million visitors every year.

But when a young Jew employed at Anne Frank House tried to wear his yarmulke to work? His employers told him to hide it under a ball cap. It took four months for the museum to reverse its decision. Writes Horn: “Four months seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.”

There are many hatreds. There are hatreds based upon skin color, or belief, or gender or sexual orientation, or political ideology.

Hatred for Jews is the worst one, perhaps – because it now extends to hatred of all Jews, whether living or dead.

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The horsemen of the apocalypse: everyone has their own.

In the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, there are four.  The horsemen aren’t explicitly named, but they are believed to be Death, Famine, War and Conquest – usually the Anti-Christ.  It varies.

In Anno Domini 2024, this writer’s are as follows: the fall of Ukraine, the collapse of support for the Jewish state, the rise of fascism, and the re-election of Donald Trump.  And, for the purposes of this opinion column, all are connected.  As in the Scriptures, so too in 2024: these Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride together.

Trump first, because he is the “horseman” who represents a real and present danger. His recent call for Russia to militarily attack any nation which has fallen short on its NATO contribution – which would include Canada, including in the Harper years – is madness. As this newspaper has editorialized, what Trump said is “irrational and dangerous.” He is a bully, as the paper declared, and his statement is “reprehensible.”

The fall of Ukraine is the next horseman, because that prophecy is edging nearer, too.

Vladimir Putin’s Satanic siege of Ukraine started two years ago next week.  Many expected Ukraine to be defeated in the first weekend.  Because of the extraordinary valor and military acumen of the Ukrainian people, it did not – to Putin’s surprise.  So, his Nazi-like blitzkrieg having failed, the Russian potentate settled upon another strategy: biding his time, and letting Donald Trump and the MAGA Republican Party do his bidding.

Time is Ukraine’s enemy.  Russia has always had more armaments and soldiers, and more resources.  So Putin elected to wait, and grind down Ukraine’s defences.

He has been greatly assisted in this strategy by Trump and the MAGA cult.  By refusing multiple attempts to provide military aid to Ukraine, House Republicans are essentially acting as Putin’s water boys.  As Republican stalwart George F. Will put it in the Washington Post:

“Substantial numbers of insubstantial congressional Republicans are contemplating an ignoble act whose imprudence exceeds even its pettiness. These Republicans could, by denying Ukraine the material means of resistance, hand Russian President Vladimir Putin a victory that might be just the beginning of Putin’s war for the restoration of ‘Greater Russia’.”

Ukraine is not some faraway outpost in the former Soviet Union.  It is a central part of Europe.  If Trump and his Republicans permit Ukraine to be defeated, as Will and many others attest, other Soviet bloc European nations will follow.

That’s just Trump, some might say: in Canada, Conservatives support Ukraine.  But do they? The Tories have now voted twice against a trade deal sought by Ukraine.  And, a February poll by the Angus Reid Institute found that – like the GOP – nearly half of their partisans say Canada is “doing too much” to support Ukraine. The isolationism of conservatives is an ominous trend.

In the case of Israel, the circumstances are different from Ukraine.  Israel, the only democracy in a sea of Middle Eastern despotism, seems to be winning its just and proper war against Hamas.  And, in the main, Canadian Conservatives (but not as many American conservatives) are offering the Jewish state unequivocal support – with the Liberals waffling, and the New Democrats beyond redemption.

But Hamas is not Israel’s only enemy.  There are legions of others who will take the place of Hamas – Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Quds Force, Islamic Jihad, and (of course) Syria and Iran.

Israel has always had those enemies, one might say, and one would be right.  But there is a new adversary, one that is arguably more lethal than all the others: the shocking and global rise of fascistic anti-Semitism.  Jew hatred is everywhere, these days – seen in trade unions, academia, classrooms, pulpits, legislatures and in the streets.

This new anti-Semitism is organized and well-funded – and brazen.  After the horrors of October 7, it was reasonable to expect that the world would sympathize with the victim.  But the reverse has happened.  The beast of fascistic Jew hatred is surging globally, in every democracy.  And that, more than Hezbollah or the Houthis or the others, represents a greater long-term threat to Israel.

Trump, as with Ukraine, has again been a destructive force.  Just days after the horrors of October 7 became known, Trump called Hezbollah “very smart” and kicked Israel when it was down, saying it “was not prepared.” His Republicans, meanwhile, are in disarray and last week failed to pass a support package for Israel, despite having the majority in the House of Representatives.

The rise of Trump and anti-Semitism, the fall in support of Ukraine and the Jewish state: all represent profound threats to democracy and decency. And these four horsemen are no mere Biblical myth.

They are real.

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This week, a mob attacked a hospital.

Not because they support Palestine.  They did it because they hate Jews.

Mount Sinai Hospital, on University Avenue in Toronto, isn’t “Jewish,” of course, any more than it is Protestant or Catholic or Muslim.  This writer’s sons were all born there, delivered by a former medic in the IDF who hummed along to John Cougar Mellencamp songs.

Nobody asked us about our religion while we were there. But Mount Sinai is indeed an important symbol for the 1.4 per cent of the Canadian population who are Jews.  Which is why the haters descended on the place on Monday night, to promote hatred.

Like snakes, spewing venom.

Mount Sinai was created 102 years ago, when some Jewish women started fundraising for a hospital – because, among other things, no other Toronto hospital would allow Jews to practice medicine.  Along with the lives regularly bettered or saved there, Mount Sinai delivers 7,000 babies every year.

You’ve likely heard about the attack on Mount Sinai Hospital because it woke up quite a few politicians from their extended slumber.  Many of them had been asleep, or the political equivalent, during previous attacks on Jewish symbols in this country.

But Mount Sinai woke them up.  Was it the mob screaming for “intifada” – a terror campaign? Was it the masked “pro-Palestinian” types climbing scaffolding affixed to the hospital’s front, waving flags, blocking peoples’ access? You know: people who were there to be admitted as patients.  The people there to get help in the Emergency Department.  The people there for cancer treatment.  Or to just have a baby.

Was it that? Who knows.  Whatever it was, the politicians woke up.  The Prime Minister, for once, called it “anti-Semitism,” and didn’t feel the need to tuck “islamophobia” into the subclause that followed.

Ontario’s Premier, who has been consistently more vocal than most, called the attack on the hospital “indecent,” because it was.  Toronto’s mayor, who previously advocated for a ceasefire – even when the anti-Israel mob was terrorizing her New Year’s family skate party – also said it was anti-Semitic.  Fine.

So, where were the police?  Good question.

There are no shortage of laws available to charge the thugs who attacked Mount Sinai Hospital this week.  There is, apparently, a shortage of police.

Reportedly, there were only two (2) on hand to deal with a parade of hundreds of thugs who were easily observed several blocks away, for many minutes, banging drums and chanting “initifada.”  Police headquarters is 850 metres away, a four-minute walk.  But the Toronto Police Service could only muster two (2) officers to deal with law-breaking on a mass scale.

And, rest assured: it was all illegal.  A new law, which Premier Ford emphasized on Tuesday, is seen in Bill C-3, and is specifically designed to protect hospitals and the people who work in them.  The Bill seeks to prevent precisely the sort of hatefest that took place on University Avenue on Monday night.  If indicted, those who violate the new law can face ten years in prison.

But that is not the only law available to police and prosecutors for the siege of Mt. Sinai.  Here are some others, with the relevant sections of the Criminal Code, for officers to tuck into their wallets for future reference:

•blocking or obstructing a highway (Section 423(1)(g))
•intimidation (Section 423(1))
•causing a disturbance (Section 175)
•common nuisance (Section 180)
•interfering with transportation facilities (Section 248)
•breach of the peace or imminent breach (Section 31)
•riots (Sections 32, 33, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69)
•unlawful assembly (Section 63)
•mischief (Section 430)

It goes without saying that it is crime to simply attempt or conspire to do any of those things.  And, that’s not all: if one of the thugs was wearing a mask while committing an offence – and masks were in widespread use Monday night – section 65(2) of the Criminal Code makes that an offence, as well.  And can also, if indicted, result in a decade behind bars.

So, lots of laws are available to prevent another attack on Mount Sinai Hospital, or any other hospital.  Or any place or person, really.

We have the laws.  In this country, we have many, many laws we can use.

What we don’t have, increasingly, is the guts to use them.

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