Dismissed from Office

Canadian-Jewish politician Selina Robinson releases her memoir, 'Truth be Told'

Consolidating political power is a tricky business and it requires all sorts of tools. Digging up history and using it for today’s purposes is one of the more time tested approaches and it was hard to not think of China’s Cultural Revolution when reading Selina Robinson’s recently released book ‘Truth be Told’. Mao reaffirmed his hold on China after an intense debate emerged in the early 1960s about a historical play called ‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’. It described the fate of a Ming Dynasty minister who was forced out after standing up on his principles which in his case were related to land confiscations. Selina Robinson also was a minister, in British Columbia, Canada, for the centre-left New Democratic Party and she was dismissed when her opponents used and interpreted her comments about Israel’s history during a Zoom call. They also had to do with ‘land’.

A ‘crappy piece of land’ to be precise. Because that was what Israel was in the pre-state British Mandate years (1917-1948) according to Robinson and in saying that she basically recycled established mainstream historical facts. Few people would have blinked at using this fairly uncontroversial description. But it was all her enemies needed to force her out and conclude a campaign that had been building up ever since October 7th, 2023. You see, not only is Robinson Jewish, she also is an ardent supporter of Israel and as minister acted as the British Columbia’s government liaison with the local Jewish community. Her comments, allegedly negating the Arab community and its efforts to cultivate and manage Mandate Palestine, offended many across the province, notably the Muslim community. They were seen as ‘insensitive’ and ‘racist’ and when your name is entered into those columns, life becomes a lot more difficult fast.

The New Democratic Party had been out of office for sixteen years following poor fiscal and economic management in the late 1990s. Yet in 2017 they were able to stage a comeback under premier John Horgan, an old school social-democrat who was smart enough to steer the party to the political centre and deliver sane economic policies. Selina was elected and part of the team, she held three subsequent ministerial positions, the most important one being finance where she managed to produce fiscal surpluses after the challenging COVID period. Now the party also strongly advocates for minority rights and equality which in a province as diverse as British Columbia was not an unimportant part of its platform. But in doing so it based itself often on now popular theories around ‘oppression’ and ‘victimhood’ which somehow manage to separate and rank minorities such that some groups drop to the bottom as they are perceived to oppress other groups.

Actually there is only one group that can count on this treatment. British Columbia’s Jews were forced to pay the price for the October 7th attack on Israel which as we are being told by some apparently was all about violating and ‘genociding’ the Gaza population. And Selina found herself right in the middle of that storm, you can argue that her fate in a party marinated in racial rhetoric was pretty much sealed on that gruesome day. And not just because of her views or opinions. By late 2023 the party had a new leader and premier, David Eby, a man who needed to take the party into a provincial 2024 election and could ill afford to lose certain voting blocks, like for instance the sizeable Muslim vote.

Robinson makes it very clear in her book how antisemitic mobs, or any politically motivated groups, get instigated by a small group of radicals. Not that she was intimidated by that phenomenon really, it’s politics after all. What the real concern here is not so much those loud radicals, but that the many that are in a position to speak up and counter them stay quiet. The silent majority paves the way for extreme political thoughts to gain currency and even get results. And in Selina’s case that was her dismissal from office, the noisy instigators got what they wanted. The New Democratic Party’s cabinet and parliamentary caucus folded and few were willing to stand up for their embattled colleague or any of the party’s principles. On the contrary, not long after October 7th when Selina asked in an e-mail to all of her parliamentary colleagues to attend a vigil for the victims in downtown Vancouver it stayed painfully quiet. Only a few managed to respond and two hit the ‘reply all’ button much later and raised Islamophobia as the key issue that somehow had emerged after the Hamas attack on Israel. The moral inversion was breathtaking.

‘Truth be Told’ really reads like what a more modern, polished and sanitized political campaign looks like when we transpose China’s Cultural Revolution into a western democracy. No violence, no shaming or screaming, but rather ignoring, isolating and finally dismissing the target. The dynamics are the same and you can sense the anguish Selina Robinson experienced as her party dropped her and forced her to resign, it was quite a betrayal. She was given the same task by premier David Eby for her transgressions as victims in 1960s China often got: ‘doing deep work’. It was never clear what that meant, even Robinson was at a loss, but when she started calling community leaders who were allegedly offended by her comments, many weren’t worried by them at all or hadn’t even heard of them. It left Robinson in amazement, but she proudly ends the book by saying that writing it actually was what constituted that ‘deep work’.

And Eby and his party? Last October they won the provincial election albeit marginally, losing seats and holding on to a small majority following a surge in votes for the province’s newly emerging Conservative Party. One has to wonder what the outcome of the election would have been if Selina’s book had come out prior to this election as it paints a not so flattering portrait of Eby as party leader.

Antisemitism is and remains one of the most odious phenomena in any society because we know all too well where it can take us. The singling out of Jews and their lives is worrisome enough in itself and more crucially it is a harbinger of more to come. More violent political rhetoric, more divisiveness and the targeting of other minority groups: if we can get away by singling out the Jews, we can do the same to any other group. We have seen it before. And while it seems that the left has now co-opted it as part of its program of anti-Israel rhetoric, we should also be aware that antisemitism equally resides on the fringes of the political right.

Selina’s memoir is a must-read to understand how this age-old and ugly dynamic is once more infesting our political and social environments. We all have a role to play to counter it. Go read it.

Notes: I wrote about the affair when it happened in February 2024. You can read it here.

Photos: The art work on the cover of Selina’s book is from Kathleen Tennant and is entitled “Torn Fragments Of Life”. Kathleen created this to channel her emotions after the execution of hostages Hersch Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat and Almog Sarusi at the end of August last year.

And: meeting the author at the book launch at Temple Sholom in Vancouver on December 18, 2024.