WINNIPEG — A private member’s resolution denouncing Israeli Apartheid Week that was tabled in the Manitoba legislature last week didn’t come to a vote when the NDP government blocked it, calling the move “unhelpful.”
PC Opposition Leader Hugh HcFadyen [Rhonda Spivak photo]
The resolution, introduced by Progressive Conservative MLA Heather Stefanson on behalf of the PC caucus and PC Opposition Leader Hugh HcFadyen, called on the legislature “to denounce Israeli Apartheid Week as divisive, promoting intolerance and undermining a balanced debate of the Israeli-Palestinian question.”
The rules of the Manitoba legislature state that a private member’s bill doesn’t automatically come to a vote, and the PC caucus asked the Speaker to grant leave for a vote, which required the agreement of the NDP government.
The government refused to grant leave and later ran out the clock on the resolution by speaking about it until noon. Despite Stefanson’s request, the government also refused to extend the clock on the resolution past noon and allow it to come to a recorded vote.
“By speaking out the resolution, the NDP killed it,” McFadyen said in an interview afterward.
In the legislature, Gord Mackintosh, minister of family services and consumer affairs, said that while applying the term “apartheid” to Israel was “profoundly unhelpful” and “unwelcome speech” it was speech “likely protected” by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“The resolution asks the government to take a formal role in ‘denunciating’ the speech of certain Manitobans,” Mackintosh said. “The resolution is speaking outside, then, of the existing civil and criminal laws and the Human Rights Code of Manitoba.”
He rejected the notion that it is the “new function for provincial governments of the day in Canada to formally denounce and chill unwelcome speech… I am then at risk of being their next target.”
Referring to Mackintosh’s comments, McFadyen said, “If proponents [of IAW] can make a statement advocating it, then why can’t we as a House be able to make a statement condemning it?… Had the resolution been voted on and passed, it would not have had binding legislative effect on a university. It would not have prevented anyone’s free speech. But it would have sent a powerful declaratory message about what we as a legislature think about the event. It would have been our statement.”
David Chomiak, minister of innovation, energy and mines, said in the legislature that he didn’t agree to granting leave for the resolution to be voted on because he didn’t want to give the IAW event credibility.
After saying that the “A-word” [apartheid] does “not apply to Israel in any shape or form,” Chomiak said IAW in Manitoba was “a non-event,” and that by “voting on this… we give a platform for those who failed.”
McFadyen, however, told The CJN that “it’s not as if we are talking about two eccentrics on a street corner” who are putting on IAW. He said IAW is an organized event by those with a “clear agenda to undermine the right of Israel to exist as a state.”
Stefanson noted that a “similar motion in Ontario was supported by politicians of all political stripes.
Jon Gerrard, leader of the Liberal party in Manitoba and its only MLA, supported the resolution.
McFadyen said his party and the NDP were in negotiations for a “couple of weeks” trying to agree on wording for a resolution.
Premier Greg Selinger was absent from the legislature when the resolution was debated.
Brian Letour, IAW spokesperson in Manitoba, told The CJN that “we sent about 150 petitions to the government against Stefanson’s resolution.”
