I am typically the first reader and editor of this blog. In that role, I have been having what diplomats euphemistically call “a lively exchange of views” with my husband, Sandford Borins, regarding his series of posts analyzing Jewish Canadian voting patterns, strategic choices, and issues of concern in the recent Canadian federal election. While I value the posts’ data-driven, sociologically oriented frame, I have argued strenuously that it misses an important dimension of the topic. In the spirit of intellectual openness, Sandford has loaned me this space. Or he may simply be tired of hearing the same argument at the dinner table most evenings.

(I also objected strongly to the posts’ frequent use of the shorthand phrase “the Jewish vote” which comes shadowed by some of the oldest antisemitic tropes: dual loyalties, fifth columns, and secret cabals. That is a subject for a separate discussion.)

Like many pollsters and pundits, Sandford assumed that the widely documented resurgence of antisemitism within Canadian public discourse, the waves of hate crimes targeting Jewish businesses, neighborhoods, and community institutions, and the Trudeau government’s unwillingness to do more than rehearse the same tired sound bites in response would be a major election issue for Jewish Canadian voters.

 My argument is not with this self-evident premise. It is with the way in which Sandford’s posts, like so much of the media coverage of the election campaign, narrow cast this issue: not the assumption that Jewish Canadian voters would care deeply about the epidemic of hatred confronting them daily, but that only Jewish Canadian voters would or should, that it is a “special interest” issue, and that the threat it poses is limited to the small percentage of Canadians who are its immediate, and very explicit, target.

Over the past 18 months, synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jewish community buildings have been vandalized, defaced with graffiti, burned, and shot at in major Canadian cities. Residential neighborhoods identified as predominantly Jewish have been the site of recurring obstructive “political” demonstrations designed to intimidate and harass. Anti-Jewish rhetoric has been normalized, indeed valorized, as “free speech,” “political opinion,” and “political protest” by our national public broadcaster, public sector unions, public school boards, university administrators and faculty, and elected office holders at every level of government, including federal MPs. The Trudeau government’s response offered little more than anodyne double-speak, an increasingly formulaic reiteration that “hate has no place in Canada” when one very specific form of hate had so clearly taken up residence.

All political parties count votes. But the Trudeau government’s carefully generalized responses, its consistent masking of anti-Jewish prejudice as generic “hate” to avoid offending those who would make every Canadian Jew responsible for events half a world away, was more than electoral calculus. It was an abandonment of a fundamental principle of our (small l) liberal democratic polity: that all citizens merit the same protections, the same guarantees of safety and dignity, the same freedom from harassment and intimidation, no matter how large – or small – a swath of potential votes they represent and regardless of their religious, cultural, or geopolitical affiliations.

This is what framed the election for me, though the resignation of Trudeau and the eruption of Trump into our domestic politics certainly complicated my thinking and my choices. As a Jewish Canadian voter, I took my hyphenated identity to the polling station with me. But I did so knowing that false equivalences, motivated “contextualizing” that functions to enable and excuse, unfailing “both side-ism” in the face of violent and explicit Jew hatred are not just acts of moral and political cowardice. They are an abrogation of the Canadian democratic contract. And that is not a “special interest” issue.

There’s a particularly painful irony in reflecting on the first Trudeau election campaign in 2015, with its promise that “a better Canada is always possible.” I was one of the many voters who embraced both the modesty and the aspiration the mantra captured. We knew – we know – Canada is not perfect, but we believe in the promise of what it stands for and what it can be. When hatred and division literally overrun our streets, schools, public institutions, and public discourse, when one group of Canadians is being targeted in ways that would not be tolerated against any other, there has never been a more urgent time for all Canadians to fight for a better Canada.