Phoebe Maltz Bovy hosts The Jewish Angle for The CJN Podcasts—with new episodes each Tuesday.
One thing about immigration is that you can have whichever status or identity where you are, and then you move and it’s gone. I never thought of myself as a low-information voter because, wonk though I’m not, I tend to know what’s up. But once I became eligible to vote in Canada, I realized I had a lot of catching up to do.
My confidence when it comes to Canadian politics is still not what it is regarding the United States of America. Some of this is about my greater familiarity with the country where I was born and have spent most of my life. Some of it is also that thanks to American hegemony, you could ask someone Sentinelese about the electoral college and they’d be able to give an informed response.
I passed my Canadian citizenship test, and I read the news, I consult explainers. But I’m still learning new things when it comes to technicalities of how the government gets formed, or what strategic voting entails, or whether that is what you’re even meant to be doing.
I was feeling like a fool and then I read this, on the Wikipedia page about “Elections in Canada,” that “The Canadian population generally misunderstands the electoral system, with most citizens believing they vote to directly elect the prime minister…”
So very possibly nobody knows what’s going on, apart from a particularly confident-looking raccoon outside my window. Those little hands would be able to fill out a ballot, I have no doubt.
But I’d like to think I know enough to vote without apologizing and will share a bit of my thought process in doing so.
I’m a political moderate by Canadian standards, or a Democrat by American ones. I strongly oppose gutting basic social services, and have witnessed what happens when subsidized daycare comes and goes. I have firsthand comparison of universal healthcare and its absence, and see the lack-thereof version as disastrous and unethical.
I am not a leftist activist, neither in disposition nor overall end goals. I did not move from the U.S. to Canada for highfalutin political reasons—I moved here in 2015 and am your basic trailing spouse—but I sure find it politically preferable here. Now that I am a Canadian citizen as well, and have a say in things, I vote for keeping Canada separate from the States and distinct from it. And now that knowledge, science, and all of this is under attack below the border, it seems that much more important to preserve and encourage it here.
I do my best not to transpose American politics onto Canadian. The problem is the tendency of Canadian politicians to do this transposing themselves. I don’t want to insert Trump into every thought, but we have this inescapable counterfactual so close by, offering in-your-face evidence of what you get when you vote for right-wing populism because you want the cost of living to go down. How’s that worked out, then?
But also? I am not one of those anti-American American expat types. I was never one for going to great pains when travelling to convince people I was not a tourist or a study-abroad student or what have you. And I think one thing America has had going for it is a unique (if not infinite) resistance to antisemitism, particularly left antisemitism. A repeated experience in my 20s or so was meeting people from outside the States and learning just what they thought of Jews, of Israel, of euphemistic Zionists. Again, it’s not that I never met Americans with such views, but… less? It just felt less entrenched, at least in the early 2000s, at least until such things globalized after Oct. 7. I also remember riding public transit in Paris (my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in French) and sitting under graffiti wishing Jews ill. And it wasn’t just graffiti.
I now live in a Toronto neighbourhood where the yards and storefronts with signage about freeing Palestine are now paired with NDP placards. It is my sense that whatever our overlap in criticisms of how Israel has handled this war, my commitment to the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state is quite possibly greater than that of your typical NDP supporter. Maybe?
But more importantly, it is at the end of the day my sense that Canada is not the deciding factor in how Israel, Hamas, or indeed any entity outside of Canada makes its decisions, so my preference is for a party not associated with a single-minded focus on that issue. It is my preference, as a Canadian or American Jew, to be excluded from the narrative wherever possible. Something general about wanting peace and two states is good enough for me, but also I’m under no illusion that the federal government of Canada is in charge of any of that, at least not until the U.S. fully implodes. Its significance is more as a gesture to Canadians who have a personal stake in the conflict.
Canada’s Conservatives court Jewish voters in bid to break Liberal grip on key cities https://t.co/E2gljVorcJ
— POLITICO (@politico) April 26, 2025
Yes, a crapton of antisemitism happened in Canada under the Liberals. This—along with other unrelated factors—has nudged hashtag-not-all Canadian Jews to favour Conservatives, even if they hadn’t previously. But the uptick in domestic antisemitism can only be pinned on the Liberals if you assume that Justin Trudeau was somehow to blame when Jews were targeted worldwide after Oct. 7. That, and (relative) inaction might be preferable to action.
I have observed how it’s going in my home country, where a Trump-led ‘fight against antisemitism’ is just serving to put Jews further into the spotlight and to blur the distinctions between American Jews and the government of Israel. Trump defunds American universities in the dubious name of helping Jews? Pierre Poilievre is right there behind him, suggesting the same for Canada.
So too with ‘anti-woke’ more generally. I’m often classified as heterodox, I signed the Harper’s Letter in 2020, a few years after I wrote a book that was critical of call-out culture. But my reason for these criticisms is not that I want anti-progressive extremists to take over. It’s that I think left illiberalism paves the way for the still-worse version from the right.
Maybe I’m being too vibes-based, but even if the Conservative platform appealed to me more than it does, I’d have trouble voting for anything with a whiff of Trump-lite.
Ultimately, I’m not looking for politicians whose voices are loudest in the fight against antisemitism for whichever cynical reasons, but rather in ones who uphold human rights for all, an “all” that includes Jews.
When presented with the choice between antizionism and the new philosemitism, I had to go with the neither for me, thanks. Which suggested the options were either the Liberals or the Animal Protection Party of Canada, whose existence I only learned of when I was handed a ballot, and to whose cause I was almost swayed when a particularly adorable poodle was keeping its voter-owner company. Almost, but I stood, as they say, Canada Strong.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X.
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