Skip to main content

What happened to the pledge?

To the 20 (re-elected) Liberal MPs who signed the Vote Palestine platform. 


You signed the Vote Palestine platform.  

The time to fulfill your pledge is now. 

Gaza is facing mass starvation. This isn’t food scarcity. This is intentional blockage of food as a tool of genocide.

Canada’s joint statement with 25 other nations called on all the parties to “uphold the obligations of international humanitarian law.” 

But Israel has been flagrantly violating multiple obligations of international law almost daily since October 8, 2023 and certain on every day since Canada’s statement was released.

There is no need to wait, to give Israel the benefit of the doubt to do the right thing. 

“We are prepared to take further action”, the statement reads. So do it. 

  • Canada must immediately impose a true arms embargo on Israel – a two-way arms embargo – and it must actually put it into force and close all loopholes. 
  • Canada must immediately levy sanctions on Israel. 
  • Canada must end free trade with Israel. 

You signed a pledge. In fact, you agreed to more than this, but at this moment these three actions are the most crucial in the face of the deepening disaster Israel is committing every moment on Gaza.

Canadians are behind you. You are in a crowd of your own colleagues. (They are not all included in this message for fear it would be rejected by your servers.)

People are starving by the thousands. You have the power to do something about it.

“Someday everyone will have always been against this” but you need to have the courage to be against it now with more than empty words.

We memorialize the Holodomor but here we are literally watching people starve before our own eyes because no one in the world has the guts to stand up to a (tiny) belligerent, genocidal state trying to eradicate people it finds inconvenient. There is no moral authority. International law is meaningless if the entire international community refuses to enforce it. Stop waiting for someone else to move first. Act. Now.

Comments

kar0ling said…
He was silent for a while post-pledge and post-election, but Nate Erksine-Smith is speaking up now.
https://www.uncommons.ca/p/my-letter-to-minister-anand-re-israels

Popular posts from this blog

Living stones in the holy land

I met Jesus in Israel-Palestine a few years ago. I found him not in the rocky, desert ground he trod, nor in the ancient stones of the towns and cities he visited; not in the subterranean grotto in the Church of the Nativity, nor in the mammoth Church of the Holy Sepulchre, encompassing the traditional site of his death and resurrection. No, I met him in the lives of Palestinians who incarnate his spirit, in humble, passionate people who are convinced that love is the only way. I met Jesus in people who spoke like this: “We need to be soaked in the love of Christ. Love is not a hug and a kiss. Love is to seek the life of the other that the cost of one’s own.” --Labib Madanat, coordinator of the Palestinian and Israeli Bible Societies “Love is not an opportunity to overlook justice. Love is an opportunity to pursue justice…. [But] we want to resist any form of evil with the heart and mind of Jesus Christ.… There is no love without justice. And there is no true justice without lov...

Electioneering again

Climate anxiety has entered the lexicon. For the last few years, it’s been talked about more and more in news articles, science discussions and even in spiritual care contexts. I shrugged it off as overly sensitive people, but the shoe has dropped for me now too. Extreme weather or one sort another everywhere all at once for the past few years has brought home what I always acknowledged intellectually but didn’t really synthesized emotionally: climate change is actually coming and it will be bad. I feel so angry and impotent in the face of these massive systems working against my small efforts to reduce waste and burn less carbon. So I went to the climate forum for this provincial election. It felt really important just to be in the room to declare “this subject matters!” The room had a remarkable number of grey hairs in it. This brought up terribly mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, good of them to continue to care about these issues, even as they can anticipate it won’t ...

Stand up for Canadian Health Care (such as it is)

Canadian health care is far from perfect — it has never achieved all Tommy Douglas dreamed for it: from tip to toe (teeth are still missing, as are a lot of drugs) — but unleashing unfettered two-tier is the opposite of fixing it.  So I joined with the Canadian Medical Association in pleading for the Canadian government to grow a spine and stop unhinged Smith's attempt to violate our own rules within her province.  As someone on Bluesky observed, if Stephen Harper tried to do this, we'd be at the gate with pitchforks. Where is the outrage. Daddy Warbucks Carney’s latest just-barely satisfactory performance in trade negotiations should not blind us to his failure to prevent this from happening.  The letter to the health minister, CC my MP and the shadow ministers: The Canadian Medical Association says the Canadian government must stand up for Albertans and all Canadians to ensure Alberta's new legislation doesn’t create a new normal of health care haves and have-no...