Independent MLA Dominic Cardy Stands Up for Israel & Canadian Jews

It’s not often you’ll get clear declarative statements from a politician backed by a realpolitik perspective within a moral framework. Obfuscation, caveats, pandering, flip-flopping, and the art of saying many things consisting of nothing at all have become all too prevalent. Therefore, it was my great pleasure to converse with Dominic Cardy, who unapologetically defended his actions and worldview without reservation.

Mr. Cardy is an Independent Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) in New Brunswick. He was elected to office in 2014 to serve the district of Fredericton West-Hanwell as a member of the provincial New Democratic Party (NDP). However, in 2017, he left the party, citing internal divisions as the reason. Thereafter, Mr. Cardy won the same riding, running as a Tory. Again, political differences led to his resignation from his ministerial role and subsequent expulsion from the party. Now Mr. Cardy is the interim leader of the newly-founded Canadian Future Party.

ARREST:

Mr. Cardy recently made headlines for being arrested for counter-protesting at a pro-Palestine rally. He described the events as follows – “On the day in question, my wife just arrived in Toronto, where we were going to be for the long weekend…  I had a quick nap before we were going to head out for a nice evening, and I heard the chant ‘from the river to the sea’ outside of my hotel! I woke up, heard this and said, ‘I’m not putting up with this, not in the biggest city in my country’,” repeating emphatically “NOT IN MY COUNTRY!”

Upset over what he heard, Mr. Cardy went outside, found the protest, and began to hold his own one-person counter-protest. As he made his way toward the centre of the crowd, Mr. Cardy shouted his own rallying cry, “Free Palestine from Hamas”. He said he chose this phrase because “you’d have to be pretty far gone down the terrorism rabbit hole to disagree that Hamas is bad for Palestine.”

Mr. Cardy reached the centre of the protest and recounted how there were “Hamas-adjacent folks” chanting antisemitic slogans, wearing keffiyehs, and stomping on an Israeli flag they had apparently seized from a young Jewish woman. “The usual,” he lamented.

After some time repeating his chant, the police approached and told Mr. Cardy that he was “disturbing the peace” and asked him to leave the protest.

Mr. Cardy refused the police’s initial request to leave and continued to refuse all subsequent demands until he was eventually removed. He then refused to commit to not returning to the protest nor to not acting similarly at future protests. He was then arrested.

The treatment of Mr. Cardy by the police highlights a growing issue with two-tier policing in Canada. The protesters were left unmolested by authorities while Mr. Cardy was quickly told to leave or face arrest.

CIVIL DISORDER:

Mr. Cardy agrees that there is a discrepancy in treatment by police, and calls for consistent action by the authorities to clamp down on civil disorder. He stood up against the First Nations blockades of railroads and the trucker convoy to Ottawa and the subsequent protests in Canada’s capital, just as he now stands against Palestinian extremists.

Mr. Cardy believes that there is a growing problem with societal complacency nowadays, saying, “We have become so comfortable that we’ve grown naive to the real threat of civil disorder and the risks from extremist groups of all stripes.”

Moreover, Mr. Cardy thinks that when the police are perceived by extremist groups to be providing them with special protection against the general public, there can be two bad outcomes. First, “those extremists start to think that people actually support them because they see the police acting to protect them, keeping people away who are counter-protesting their events.” Second, “the rest of the Canadian public starts to see the police as being partial and making decisions about which group versus another is worthy of support.”

Referring to his own solo counter-protest, he said, “Certainly the folks who were in the centre of the protest last week saw one guy saying ‘free Palestine from Hamas’ being arrested, and hundreds of people chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ without consequence.” I interjected, “That’s basically a dog whistle for genocide, right?” “Exactly,” Mr. Cardy responded, “and to have the police appear to take sides undermines the principle of equality before the law that our system is based on.”

COMMUNITY POLICING:

The strategy of Community Policing is partly to blame for the rise in street tensions, according to Mr. Cardy. The aim of the community policing movement was for the police to try to de-escalate, contain, and resolve problems by developing partnerships with local communities through growing relationships and facilitating dialogue. This approach, however, has had many issues, predominantly the accusation of politicizing policing.

Mr. Cardy notes that community policing “works fine for the sort of things that happen after a hockey match when people’s emotions are high. It works fine even for local-level gang issues, but it doesn’t work for politics.”

He continued, arguing that it is important not to deny Canadians the right to participate in counter-protests and challenge the hate-filled messages of extremists. “Whether they’re yelling ‘Sieg Heil’, or ‘death to Arabs’, or the horrifying antisemitic nonsense we’ve heard from so many of these Hamas supporters, all of those statements deserve to be pushed back against by Canadians.” Mr. Cardy lamented that “If the police take that step of isolating the extremists from regular Canadians, it starts to create the impression that the extremists have the upper hand.”

Mr. Cardy worries that the police won’t crack down and worries about the results, saying, “Until that happens, we’re going to see the extremists growing and growing the same way they have online. We’re going to see that translate onto our streets.”

Despite his criticisms of the pro-Palestinian protests, rallies, and encampments that have popped up across Canada since the war started in October, Mr. Cardy isn’t calling for them to be shut down wholesale. “I’m not even saying to arrest those people. I’m saying let those who stand for our Jewish brothers and sisters stand face-to-face with those extremists and say, ‘No, not in our name, not in our streets, not in our country.’ ”

Moreover, Mr Cardy agrees that there is all sorts of room for legitimate criticism of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying, “I would happily join with a lot of those criticisms.” However he emphatically reiterated that there is “no reason, no excuse under our law to allow for hatred to be expressed on our streets without consequence.”

FOREIGN INTERFERENCE:

Mr. Cardy also worries that foreign interference in Canadian politics is fomenting some of these protests. He believes this is a fight that Canada is unfortunately late in recognizing. It is Mr. Cardy’s hope that his arrest will help draw some attention to the issue of foreign interference in Canada.

“We have to remember as well that this (protest) isn’t just happening in a vacuum. The same day that I was arrested, we saw the report that the Iranian government is helping to organize these protests,” Mr. Cardy informed me.

Iran isn’t the only foreign threat, though. Mr. Cardy added that political polarization is a tool being weaponized by China and Russia as well, and he doesn’t want Canada to become “a playground for the extremists…I think I know what Canada’s enemies internally and externally want. They want to create division. They want to create discord. They want to drive us apart,” he said.

Mr. Cardy aspires for us to go back to the principles of ‘Peace, Order, and Good Government’ that have been part of the Canadian Constitution since the Act of Union in 1840. He thinks it is ridiculous that we’ve got terrorism supporters on the streets in their hundreds flouting our laws and celebrating a terrorist organization. It is his hope that “Canadians start to recognize that we cannot let our streets be lost to extremists.”

Mr. Cardy urged those who felt similarly to him to “use our words, to speak peacefully, and to say ‘no’ to extremism.” He continued, “The battle these days isn’t between left and right. It’s between extremism and moderation.”

Canada must combat extremism not only at home but also internationally. Mr. Cardy advocated that “we’ve got to talk about the democratic wall that we build against the autocrats and dictators and their fellow travelers who are currently infesting our streets.”

ISRAEL:

Mr. Cardy expressed unequivocal support for Israel, saying, “I stand behind the State of Israel in its war with Hamas, who is the de facto government of the Palestinians.” He continued, “The atrocities of October 7th, and the countless other provocations against Israel, cannot go unanswered by Israel.”

Mr. Cardy explained his perspective on the war in Gaza and how he approaches conflict, saying, “I look at international relations through the following lens… I think that for me, this has always been a simple sort of decision matrix – I’m going to support whichever side in the conflict is the most democratic and is the most protective of individual and group rights.”

As a result, Mr. Cardy supports the State of Israel. However, that does not mean its government’s conduct in the conflict is beyond reproach. “When you compare Israel – a flawed democracy for sure – with a government led by someone who I think is loathsome, that doesn’t matter. Netanyahu was elected, and he operates within a legal framework, and when there are violations of the laws of war or the laws of Israel, there are mechanisms inside Israel that are used.”

On the other hand, Mr. Cardy described the government in Gaza as “a theocratic ultra-right-wing fascist structure that discriminates against people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds and murders LGBTQ people.” “So,” Mr. Cardy decisively stated, “there is absolutely no comparison for me between Israel and Hamas.”

In fact, Mr. Cardy said this was the reason he was chanting “free Palestine from Hamas” because of the organization’s horrific treatment of their own civilian population. He explained that the majority of Hamas victims have been Palestinian.

Mr. Cardy expressed hope that with the backing of the international community, Gaza can be rebuilt post-war. However, he conditions the reconstruction, saying it cannot happen under the current regime. “I am a hundred percent behind Israel’s efforts to remove Hamas. That has to be a precondition of building a democratic Palestinian state, which I continue to believe is the only ultimate solution that will work.”

Mr. Cardy went so far as to compare Hamas to the Nazis, arguing that, similar to World War II, they must be unconditionally removed from power. Importantly, he points out that the policy “wasn’t about being discriminatory against Germans. It was about recognizing that there are regimes that are illegitimate and fundamentally evil.” Mr. Cardy believes using such language is important, saying, “We need to go back to having some more conversations that use moral language, I think, to clarify issues in people’s minds.”

CANADA FUTURE PARTY:

As should have become clear throughout this article, Dominic Cardy is no political partisan, thumping a pro-Israel message due to political loyalties. Rather, he stands on principles that he proudly shares. It should, therefore, come as no shock that he has rejected the typical Canadian political triopoly of the NDP, Liberals, and Conservatives.

Instead, Mr. Cardy is a member of the Canadian Future Party. He described the party as “being born from a coalition of people who have mostly been activists as Liberals, Conservatives, or New Democrats, as well as some former cabinet ministers, but lots of people who’ve never been involved in politics.” Nevertheless, Mr. Cardy claims they aren’t partisan political actors, saying, “We go not left, not right, but forward.”

They came together out of a deep concern that Canadian politics is being driven by social media and nefarious foreign state actors, which they fear is shifting focus from important issues onto frivolous American ‘culture wars’. The Canadian Future Party rejects the idiocy of the hard left and the hard right. However, Mr. Cardy blames the current political establishment for “adding fuel to the fire”, pointing out that they are complacent about policing their own sides because “they don’t want to upset their base, left or right.”

Undaunted, Mr. Cardy, along with the Canadian Future Party, is confident that there is a large base of people who’d actually like to see our problems solved in Canada.

Mr. Cardy left me with a final message: “We’re going to solve problems within the moral context of a party that is strongly internationalist, pro-democratic, that believes that we should decouple from dictatorships.”