Geoff Russ: The Liberals are being consumed by the diaspora politics they nurtured

The Liberals are being engulfed by diaspora politics and the post-nationalist experiment they brought upon Canada.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the final votes in Montreal’s LaSalle-Émard-Verdun byelection were counted. They revealed that the Bloc Québécois candidate had eked out a narrow victory, wrenching a previously thought safe seat from their Liberal rivals.

If the Bloc poaching a safe Liberal seat was the biggest story of the night, then the second-biggest was the surge in the vote percentage for the NDP’s candidate Craig Sauvé. He garnered 8,262 votes, or 26.1 per cent of those cast, enough to be neck-and-neck with the Bloc and Liberal candidates.

Compare that to the NDP’s result this week to the 2021 general election, when the NDP attained less than 20 per cent in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, or in 2019, when the party received less than 17 per cent. Given the tiny margins of this byelection, there is no doubt the NDP picked up enough former Liberal votes for them to lose the seat.

What appears to have motivated so many voters to switch sides was Sauvé’s choice to campaign on a war more than 8,000 kilometres away. Sauvé famously — or infamously — plastered his pamphlets with Palestinian flags, as if he was running in Ramallah or Nablus. Whether he actually cares that deeply about Gaza is a mystery, but he was savvy enough to realize the power of the conflict as a wedge in Trudeau’s post-national Canada.

This is what happens when mainstream, distinctly Canadian identity is hollowed out: an extreme form of multiculturalist ideology called post-nationalism fills the void, allowing foreign issues and ancient ethnic or religious feuds to dominate politics.

It’s no coincidence that the ongoing Israel-Hamas war has inflamed a string of social unrest not seen in Canada for generations.

Sure, the 2011 Occupy protests went on for well over a year, but they never resulted in firebombings or shooting attacks on community centres. In 2021, when Canadian churches were being burned, likely in retaliation for abuses at residential schools, there were also never any serious campaigns of bomb threats.

For almost a year now, all of the above — or attempts at them — have been perpetrated against Jewish institutions, drastically reorienting the energy of the Canadian left towards a Middle Eastern conflict. This is a time of economic hardship and punishing unaffordability, yet a war in which Canada has no direct involvement seems to mean more to thousands, if not millions, of people here.

The Liberal government’s tepid approach to the Israeli government, which has included rebukes and the suspension of arms sales to the country, is not enough for the anti-Israel lobby and activist groups, who refuse to settle for anything less than “globalizing” the intifada.

When the anti-Israel crowd says “globalize the intifada,” what they want is for Canada to be a front in the war against Israel by non-military, though often violent, means. Few are questioning why the idea of using Canada as a proxy front is so normalized, even as they unnaturally impact our politics.

Diaspora politics can clearly thrive under a post-nationalist government, with unforeseen consequences.

Trudeau’s Liberals are being torn apart in a manner not dissimilar to that of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, which was unravelled in 1968 by Democratic Party infighting over the war in Vietnam. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, anti-war demonstrators effectively overwhelmed the party, driving wedges between the traditional factions and pushing many of them towards the Republicans, helping to reshape American politics for a generation. Canada is not conducting any military operations in Gaza, nor does its voice currently hold much weight in the world of international affairs, but it cannot escape the clutches of post-nationalism and diaspora politics.

Even John Ibbitson recently observed in the Globe and Mail that what is left of the Liberal Party is being further frayed by internal tensions over the war in Gaza, with more than 50 staffers — mostly of Arab and Muslim origin — refusing to help in the LaSalle-Émard-Verdun byelection.

Lebanese-Canadian restaurant chain owner Mohamad Fakih, a once a stalwart supporter of Trudeau’s Liberals, called upon others to abandon the prime minister earlier this month, accusing him of letting down “his most loyal base.”

The LaSalle-Émard-Verdun byelection was one of two held on Monday night. The other was in the Winnipeg riding of Elmwood-Transcona, which the NDP retained with 48.1 per cent of the vote, almost identical to their winning shares in the 2021 and 2019 general elections. Only in Montreal, where the NDP did not run a Canadians-first campaign, did the party make any real gains.

Perhaps if Trudeau had not eschewed any mainstream Canadian character or identity in the name of idealistic post-nationalism, his former voters in Montreal would have been less inspired to support a candidate in the name of a foreign conflict.

Post-nationalism has proven to be a hangover from the turn-of-the-millennium dream that all nations and peoples could peacefully assimilate into a democratic, liberal world. Canada’s multicultural model is being severely tested by a world that modern technology has connected like never before, making it nearly impossible for newcomers to have an ideological fresh start when they arrive.

Gaza is not Canada, and it is a bad sign when Gazan affairs can determine domestic Canadian politics, as they did on Tuesday morning. This should not be the ideological “hotel of the world,” and Trudeau ought to now realize why the post-national experiment needs to end.

National Post