Ontario leaders should focus on home
Listening to the leaders of Ontario’s three major parties, you would think the world awaited their pronouncements on both provincial and planetary affairs.
A checklist of global hot spots targeted recently by our local leaders (past and present) ranges across the Middle East, South Asia and the Far East: Premier Kathleen Wynne has visited China twice (a third trip may be in the offing); then India to hobnob with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in February; and a tête-à-tête in Jerusalem with Israeli PM Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu this month.
From Modi to Bibi in the blink of a photo op, our subsovereign premier’s global vision is matched only by her parochial ambitions as she burnishes her credentials with ethnic groups back home.
Not to be outdone, Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown took his 16th trip to India last January so that he, too, could boast of face time with Modi. NDP Leader Andrea Horwath stays closer to home, but wades deeper into world affairs, courting controversy while cultivating local voters. This month, she rendered her historical verdict on Sri Lanka’s three decades of civil strife (pitting a Sinhalese-dominated military against the terrorist Tamil Tigers):
“Standing together with Tamil Canadians today remembering loved ones killed during the genocide in Sri Lanka,” she tweeted.
Who knew that Horwath felt so confident about determining the difference between alleged war crimes overseas versus a systematic campaign of genocide to eradicate the Tamil people from that island nation?
While Horwath styles herself an authority on Sri Lanka’s tortured history, former PC leader Tim Hudak lays claim to Israeli affairs. On the same week that Wynne was visiting the Holy Land with a delegation of business entrepreneurs, Hudak issued a challenge in the legislature: Would MPPs from all parties support his private member’s bill, the Standing Up Against Anti-Semitism in Ontario Act?
His target was the controversial BDS movement that has attempted for more than a decade to organize a boycott, divestment and sanctions strategy against Israel for its partial occupation of Palestinian territory. Hudak called for a boycott of the boycotters — requiring the Ontario government and provincially funded or controlled entities to stop doing business with anyone refusing to do business with Israel.
Despite its superficial appeal — fight fire with fire — the world is more complicated than his proposed legislation lets on. A majority of NDP and Liberal MPPs voted down his bill, arguing that govern- ments must still abide by the Charter of Rights and respect free speech.
(That said, it was quite a spectacle to hear BDS activists outside the legislature who routinely try to ban Israeli academics suddenly invoking free speech arguments to suit their conflicted cause.) The problem with the BDS targeting of Israel over the occupation is that it ignores the complexities of a bungled peace process for which both sides share blame, and seems suspiciously oblivious to abuses in other countries, not least the mayhem in neighbouring Syria. BDS is a blunt tool, prone to attracting bigots to a bandwagon that too easily strays off course into an anti-Israeli free-for-all.
Similarly, the anti-BDS counter- measures Hudak proposed are too blunt an instrument in the provincial context.
But there’s a broader point here for provincial politicians who purport to be experts on world affairs. For all their ambitions and pretensions to play armchair experts on Israeli-Palestinian affairs or Sinhalese-Tamil conflicts, that’s not in their job description. They’re not federal parliamentarians tasked with foreign affairs. Our MPPs have enormous power to redress wrong and do good at home, by dealing with Ontario’s own problems. The ones they were elected to focus on. Starting next week, my regular weekend column will move from Sundays to a new Saturday slot (in addition to Tuesdays and Thursdays). See you then.