By Yves Engler

The Mayor of Mississauga’s defense of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms bucks an authoritarian slide. Zionist forces are seeking a return to a time when anti-war voices were violently suppressed.

Recently, a genocide lobbyist stirred up a storm over a planned vigil in Mississauga to commemorate “resistance leaders” “fighting for Palestinian freedom”. The poster for the Canadian Defenders 4 Human Rights event had an image of deceased Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

Genocide lobbyists demanded Toronto’s most populous suburb suppress the planned rally. In response to the pressure, Mayor Carolyn Parrish said she wouldn’t shutter Charter-protected speech. Parrish added, “I just want to point out, and I’m not being facetious, Nelson Mandela was declared a terrorist by the United States of America until the year 2008. Your terrorist and somebody else’s terrorist may be two different things.”

Those promoting Benjamin Netanyahu’s holocaust in Gaza lost it. How dare Parrish compare the Hamas leader to Nelson Mandela? But Mandla Mandela, Nelson’s grandson and sitting member of South Africa’s legislature, has made similar comparisons.

Canadian media often described Mandela as a terrorist. In 2001 Conservative MP Rob Anders called the then-South African President a “communist and a terrorist” and heckled him in the House of Commons. Anders repeated the “terrorist” claim upon Mandela’s 2013 death.

Unlike Mississauga’s mayor, politicians and police across the country are increasingly seeking to suppress those opposing Canada’s assistance to genocide. Ten days ago the Ottawa police violently arrested four protesters during a walking tour of arms production facilities.

They followed that repression with a series of arbitrary arrests this weekend. Ottawa family physician Xipeng Ge labeled “the police brutality and repression” on Sunday as “a display of fascist violence.”

In a more egregious example of state overreach, the Vancouver Police Department’s Emergency Response Team raided the home of long-time anti-apartheid activist Charlotte Kates. On November 14 heavily armed officers showed up at 9 am with an armored vehicle and fired flashbangs as part of entering her east Vancouver house.

“I saw what looked like a tank with guys in tactical gear outside aiming a tear gas gun at the house”, a neighbor told Global News. “I feel scared, just because I don’t know what is going on.”

Kates was arrested in the raid and subsequently released. No charges were even laid in this instance of police overreach.

Kates is the international coordinator of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which the Canadian government recently designated a terror entity despite no one even claiming they’ve been involved in violence. A Canadian BDS Coalition statement correctly asserted, “The Trudeau Government Breaches the Constitution in Placing the Samidoun Prisoners Network on the Terrorist List.”

The 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrines the principle of habeas corpus yet the terror list subverts a group’s ability to defend itself legally.

The Canadian BDS Coalition statement notes, “By virtue of the terrorist listing, an organization or even an individual’s assets can be frozen; any use of property owned or controlled by the listed organization becomes a crime. Moreover, there is the ‘black-balling’ of the organization, and anyone accused of being associated with it can be accused of being a ‘terrorist,’ regardless of their personal actions, without ever laying criminal charges or proving guilt in court.”

In a National Post column headlined “Samidoun has been banned. Now, it’s time to stamp it out”. Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs representative Mark Freiman and Alliance of Canadians Combatting Antisemitism head Mark Sandler are now calling on the government to revoke the citizenship of Kates and her husband Khaled Barakat.

The suppression of anti-genocide protests fits a pattern of the Canadian state and imperialist forces cracking down on anti-war voices. At the beginning of World War I the federal government adopted the War Measures Act, which granted the state sweeping powers to imprison almost anyone considered a security threat.

Hundreds of pacifists and antiwar activists were arrested while the Industrial Workers of the World and a dozen other revolutionary organizations were banned. Labour organizer Ginger Goodwin was killed on Vancouver Island for opposing the war while in spring 1918 four opponents of conscription were killed by security forces in Québec City.

During WWII hundreds of dissidents and communists, including the president of the Canadian Seamen’s Union and Mayor of Montréal, were interned under the War Measures Act. Dozens of organizations and publications were also banned and like WWI official censorship was imposed.

During the Korean war Canadian Peace Congress chairman James Endicott was bitterly denounced with external minister Lester Pearson calling his college friend a “red stooge” and “bait on the end of a Red hook.” Pearson even called for individuals to destroy the Peace Congress from the inside.

Government attacks spurred media and public hostility. A number of venues refused to rent their space to the Peace Congress and Endicott’s Toronto home was firebombed during a large Peace Congress meeting.

Whether one agrees with everything Samidoun or Charlotte Kates has to say about Israel, the government criminalizing a Palestinian prisoner solidarity network and the police targeting its coordinator should be troubling. It reflects a regression to a far more repressive time. And it’s being pushed by supporters of a foreign government. All those who believe in our Charter of Rights and Freedom should be concerned.

 – Yves Engler is the author of Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid and a number of other books. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle. Visit his website: yvesengler.com.