Just 24 hours into Canada’s federal election campaign, The CJN put Jewish issues on the agenda.
On the morning of Mar. 24, in a hotel near the Toronto airport, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre met with about 40 journalists from significant diaspora communities as part of a media roundtable reserved for “ethnic” news outlets—one of the first media opportunities since the federal election was called over the weekend. Poilievre fielded questions from outlets publishing in Mandarin, Punjabi, Ukrainian, Arabic and Vietnamese—and The Canadian Jewish News was there, too.
While the focus was on Poilievre’s general platform—including why he would be better to handle Canada’s trade war with the U.S. than newly elected Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney—he also explained how he plans to tackle hate crimes against Canada’s Jewish community and address the Liberals’ recently announced $100 million in aid for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Hear what he has to say, on today’s episode of The CJN Daily with host Ellin Bessner.
Transcript
Transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors.
Pierre Poilievre: Hi there, everybody. Good to see you all. Thank you for having us.
Ellin Bessner: That was Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre entering a conference room at the Toronto Airport Marriott Hotel via the back door nearest the kitchen, along with his wife Anaida and the couple’s two toddlers. The kids made a very brief appearance, then they were taken away while their parents sat down for a media availability with about 40 local journalists. With the election announcement on Sunday, you might have expected the Tory leader would be spending Monday, the first full day of the campaign, getting in some face time with the country’s largest news organizations. However, this election, Poilievre’s team has broken with tradition and vetoed mainstream journalists from traveling with him on his official campaign plane and bus as he crisscrosses the country until voting day, April 28. Instead, he was here speaking to reporters representing the diverse ethnic media landscape in Greater Toronto, possibly fertile ground for Conservative messaging. His communications team has actually been arranging what the party calls roundtables for ethnic media for a while now. I’d never attended one until now, but this one seemed important as it came right after Poilievre kicked off his campaign in Brampton, Mississauga, and Etobicoke, areas that are considered swing ridings, heavily multicultural with large South Asian and Asian immigrant communities, where, although the Liberals now hold all the seats, in the recent Ontario provincial election, voters sent Progressive Conservatives back to office. Poilievre spent the majority of this news conference outlining his national pledges to cut income tax by 15% for middle-income Canadians to make buying a new home more affordable, to axe the carbon tax, to unleash pipelines and natural gas production, and to explain why he was the better choice than Mark Carney to take on Donald Trump’s tariffs with Canada.
Pierre Poilievre: The lost Liberal decade of weak, out-of-touch leadership. Trump is walking all over the Liberals. Weak leadership, out-of-touch leadership, high taxes, blocking resources has made Canada weak and vulnerable against Trump. What we need now is strong leadership, someone who’s going to put our country first.
Ellin Bessner: I had a whole list of questions prepared, of particular interest to the Jewish community in the wake of October 7th. But when I arrived, I discovered they’re limiting each journalist to one question and no follow-ups. I was fourth on the list when they passed the microphone to me.
Hello, I’m Ellin Besner from the Canadian Jewish News. Nice to meet you. Good to see you. Hello, thank you.
I’m Ellin Besner and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Wednesday, March 26, 2025. Welcome to the CJN Daily, a podcast of the Canadian Jewish News, and made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
For 17 months, we’ve been trying to get a one-on-one with both former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and with Pierre Poilievre, to no avail. We’ve now asked the new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, for an interview. Nevertheless, as we’ve reported, both Poilievre and Trudeau have spoken before to the Jewish community. In Trudeau’s last address before he stepped down in March, he called himself a Zionist and acknowledged his government did not succeed in making it safe for Canadian Jews. However, Canada’s relationship with Israel has changed under his regime, with blocking arms exports to Israel and Trudeau’s pledge to enforce UN arrest warrants against Israel’s Prime Minister for war crimes, plus pouring millions into aid for Palestinians, including over $75 million in funding for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinians linked to the Hamas attack on Israel. Canada also gave millions to the Red Cross, which didn’t visit the hostages even once while they were in captivity.
Just three days before the newly minted Liberal Prime Minister called the election, Mark Carney’s Minister for Global Affairs, Mélanie Joly’s office, quietly announced Canada was donating about $100 million in funding to the Palestinians. One-third will go to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, whose leader recently promised US President Trump that they will stop paying terrorist families’ salaries when they kill Israelis.
However, the department will not tell us where the rest of the $60 million is going. Under the Harper government, Canada slashed funding for UNRWA, and the US government halted it a year ago, under the Biden administration.
I was sitting to Poilievre’s left, the first journalist on that side of the rectangular table. He explained that he’d recently undergone eye surgery, so he didn’t wear glasses anymore. He couldn’t have missed seeing the silver Israeli hostage dog tag I was wearing. I asked for his take on the recent funding announcement for the Palestinians.
Pierre Poilievre: So we will defund UNRWA, period. There will be no taxpayer money for UNRWA. UNRWA was involved in the attacks of October 7th. They have Hamas activists inside the organization. I think it’s outrageous that during the last Liberal decade, they funded. They used your tax dollars to fund an organization that was backing the most brutal terrorist attack in modern memory. We will defund dictatorships. We will direct foreign aid away from governments altogether towards real NGOs that don’t engage in terrorism but provide relief to people in distress and in need. So you can expect us to eliminate all taxpayer-funded support for terrorist organizations abroad.
Ellin Bessner: Even though I was only allowed to ask one question and I’d planned to ask a follow-up about what he would do to help Canada’s Jewish community be safer, Poilievre didn’t need any prompting. After he talked about UNRWA, he kept going and I sat there signaling with my hands for Yes! please continue!
Pierre Poilievre: And also we will be fighting antisemitism at home. We will lock up the antisemitic rioters. We will deport from Canada anyone who is here on a visa that breaks the law or commits a crime, and we will provide more support to places of worship for security to protect against firebombings and other violence. That’s the overall approach we take.
It’s terrible that after a decade of the Liberals we have this rampant divisiveness. We never had this before. Before the lost Liberal decade, people came from all around the world, different religions and backgrounds, and they didn’t fight with each other here on our streets. They might have disagreed about a foreign conflict, they might have argued about it in a coffee shop, but they didn’t firebomb each other. They didn’t rampage through the streets and attack businesses based on ethnicity. That wasn’t something we had in Canada. I want to get back to the Canadian promise where we’re all Canadians, where we’re all united. Thank you.
Ellin Bessner: This past week we’ve reported several stories about suspects charged with hate-motivated crimes against Jews in Toronto, and in Winnipeg, and in Brantford, and places in Quebec advocating genocide, terrorist activity, and more. We learned that at least one of the accused has been released on bail. Poilievre slammed what he called the Liberals’ “catch-and-release” bail laws which he said will be toast if he’s elected.
Pierre Poilievre: Well, after the lost Liberal decade of soft on crime, hug-a-thug, catch-and-release, we have crime raging out of control. We saw a young lady in a hijab attacked. It was yesterday or today. The person was out again on bail after having done a previous violent offence. It’s the same story over and over again of rampant offenders who have been arrested 70, 80, 90 times before and released again and again and again. This is C-75, the Liberal law that requires judges grant bail at, quote, the earliest opportunity under the least restrictive conditions. Those are the words in the law: earliest opportunity, least restrictive conditions. That’s why they arrest the offender. The offender then is released before the paperwork is even done on the arrest.
I know a police officer here in the Greater Toronto Area who told me criminals now don’t even mind getting caught. They even confess to their crimes when they get into the car because they know there will be no punishment. He told me there was one guy who used to be very good at hiding his firearms, his illegal guns. He’d bury them off site and he’d go through all these hoops to avoid getting caught. Now he just keeps them at his house. He asked the guy while he was driving him in after one of the most recent arrests, why aren’t you working harder to avoid being caught? The fellow said, because there’s no consequence. It’s not even worth trying to avoid getting caught because that’s more work than just getting bail and going back out to do the crime over again.
So I’m going to repeal the Liberal catch and release law, C-75. I will repeal house arrest, C-5. I will repeal C-83 that allows Paul Bernardo and other mass murderers out of prison, out of maximum security and into medium security. I will repeal the entire soft-on-crime agenda of the Liberal Party of the last 10 years. Giving them a fourth term in power will only unleash more crime. Instead, we need a new Conservative government to put law-abiding Canadians first for a change.
Ellin Bessner: Nobody else but me asked about Canada-Israel, or Canadian Jewish issues, although one reporter at the other end of the conference table prefaced her question by saying, “It just broke my heart that you will defund UNRWA.” Poilievre did, however, circle back to issues of who Canada lets into our country. When he talked about what he would do to quell foreign interference in Canadian democracy, including targeting the banned terror group the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), whose founder, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, launched Al-Quds Day protests against Israel 46 years ago, which are now taking place this week across Canada.
Pierre Poilievre: Thank you, very good question. You’re right. After the lost Liberal decade Canada has become a playground to foreign interference by hostile regimes. And frankly, it is time to end that. By electing the Liberals to a fourth term in power, it will only get worse. The first thing we need to do is bring in the foreign agent registry. It’s already passed into law, but they haven’t yet implemented it. So we don’t have a public registry of all the foreign agents that are paid by hostile regimes to interfere in our politics. They’re able to operate with impunity throughout our country. I want to bring that in as soon as possible.
We’re also going to expel the 700, as many as possible of the 700 Iranian IRGC agents that are supporting terrorism and provoking hostility against Jews and Persians on Canadian soil. And we’re going to stand up on the world stage to condemn the interference that we have seen from governments around the world. It’s unacceptable that foreign governments interfere in our country. We need a new government that will put Canada first for a change and protect our people against this. Thank you.
Ellin Bessner: Another issue of concern to some Canadians is the current government’s efforts to accept thousands of refugees from Gaza. While Poilievre didn’t specifically mention Gazans as an immigration concern, he promised that if elected, he’ll weed out false refugee claims, crack down on abuse and fraud in the international student program, and curb the temporary foreign workers program.
Now, after October 7th, many Jewish voters that I’ve heard from swore they were going to be single-issue voters. They couldn’t wait for an election to get rid of Justin Trudeau and the Liberals and vote for Conservatives because of their avowed support for Israel and the Jewish people. (Even though we have to say three members of his party met with a far-right German politician who is anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim.) But now with the Trump tariffs and America’s economic war on Canada on the front pages and Mark Carney in office, polls show the Liberals made a surprising comeback. Poilievre said that despite his lack of business experience, which Carney has in spades, Poilievre’s political experience trumps Carney.
Pierre Poilievre: Well, let’s talk about experience and what kind of experience. Here’s my experience. For the last five years, I’ve been right about every major economic question. I was right that the carbon tax would harm our people. Mark Carney was wrong; he said the carbon tax should go even higher. I was right that we needed to build pipelines. Mark Carney was wrong when he proposed blocking those pipelines. I was right that all that money printing that they did four years ago was going to cause inflation. Mark Carney was wrong; he said we’d have deflation and said we should print even more money. I’ve been fighting for people, for bringing back the Canadian promise for working-class people in Parliament for 20 years. What kind of experience does Mr. Carney have in the private sector? I’ll tell you. He moved his headquarters out of Canada to the US. He moved investments to tax havens to avoid paying taxes in Canada. He ripped off his company’s insurance arm and ripped off coal miners who were dying of black lung so that they could profit by denying them their insurance claims. That’s experience, all right. It’s exactly the worst kind of experience. I don’t have experience ripping off workers. I don’t have experience shipping jobs out of Canada. I have experience fighting for this country and putting Canada first. And that’s exactly the experience we need as we take our country forward.
Ellin Bessner: And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like for this episode of The CJN Daily, made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation. Who are you supporting now that the tariffs and Canada’s future are on the line? Write to me at [email protected] and let me know.
Show Notes
What we talked about:
- Why the families of the Oct. 7 victims are suing the Canadian government for funding UNWRA, as is the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, in The CJN.
- How Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre spent the spring of 2024 courting Canada’s Jewish community, on The CJN Daily.
- In 2023, Canada committed $100 million over four years in funding for UNWRA, in The CJN.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
- Music: Dov Beck-Levine
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