The NDP Palestine Motion as an exercise in theatrics, horse-dealing, and procedural bullshit.
Oh boy howdy, do we love procedural bullshit.
It truly wouldn’t be the Canadian House of Commons without carefully-orchestrated theatrics, intense negotiations behind-the-scenes until the very last minute, and of course, niche procedural rules to delay everything into infinity. Would we have it any other way?
In my previous column piece, I wrote about the core demands that pro-Palestinian advocates should be pushing for in the context of the then-upcoming NDP motion to recognize the State of Palestine.
Thankfully, while the Liberal amendments watered down immediate recognition, the majority of the motion remained largely intact, including the parts most material to the daily survival of the Palestinian people.
Of course, these Liberal amendments to the motion did not simply apparate out of thin air; there were long, intensive negotiations and the moment the Deputy Speaker received the finalized amendments on the floor of the House was likely only a few minutes after the Trudeau cabinet agreed to those motions in their deliberations.
Yet the spirited debate between members of the House, including between Liberal MPs and other Liberal MPs, could have given the public impression that no such negotiations were a possibility. Indeed, there was a significant possibility that negotiations would have failed, and the Liberal caucus fractured far more than their almost-unanimous support of the amended motion.
When it comes to Parliamentary proceedings, I always to explain it with an analogy to professional wrestling. Just like wrestling has a pre-written storyline and a fierce commitment to preserve the illusion of real conflict (known as “kayfabe”), so too does the House of Commons have a pre-orchestrated rhythm and patter.
In Canada, the House leaders of each party decide exactly how much speaking time each member of their party will receive. If someone appears on the House’s Order Paper to ask a question during debate, or to propose a private member’s bill, it is because their House leader has decided to put them there.
Typically, the central party will direct MPs as to what they should say during their allotted speaking time. The implied threat is that if they go off-script, like the wrestler who ignores the pre-written storyline, they will lose their speaking privileges in the House, and fade into the backbench.
In wrestling terminology, a wrestler who goes against what’s been written for them is said to have “gone into business for themselves,” and by the end of last night’s vote on the NDP motion, multiple Liberal MPs had certainly broken with the script in such fashion.
In the late afternoon, after procedural business concluded and once Liberal MPs had begun their own speaking time to debate the NDP motion, a recognizable pattern emerged in who was placed on the speaking order by the Liberal House leadership. This pattern made it clear that the Liberal Party was attempting to bridge a bitter caucus divide.
The first speaker, Parliamentary Secretary Julie Dabrusin of Toronto—Danforth, read a speech both neutral in content as well as neutral in tone, going at length to explain how there are valid reasons to vote either for or against the motion and how “diversity should be our strength” in the House.
Howver, immediately following Julie Dabrusin in the Liberal speaking order were Salma Zahid of Scarborough—Centre, to speak emphatically in favour of the motion, and then Parliamentary Secretary Anthony Housefather of Mount Royal to speak just as emphatically against the motion.
Before debate was concluded, Chandra Arya of Nepean came up on the Liberal section of the speaking order to advocate for the motion, and assumedly if debate had not been delayed past the end of the day’s schedule, someone of the opposite position would have came next in the order.
This swinging pendulum is not the typical fashion in which the Liberal party allocates speaking time on the floor of the House. It is, however, the typical fashion in which party leadership attempts to appease an ideologically divided caucus. If the amendment negotiations had failed, the clear goal of such a speaking arrangement would be to maintain the illusion that the Liberal Party is a friendly “big tent” with a wide range of acceptable views.
Liberals, by our own nature, are frequently afraid of public disagreement with other members of the Liberal Party (although that has never seemed to stop me). Negotiations with the NDP to amend the motion likely started because Liberal leadership was terrified of such a massive public disagreement on such a controversial issue.
In turn, the NDP agreed to amend to motion likely because they perceived a larger benefit to having a watered-down version passed overwhelmingly, over the original motion being passed at best on a slim margin. Alternatively, the Liberals conceded something on upcoming legislation in exchange for the NDP not putting them between a rock and a hard place in the public eye, and the NDP accepted the trade.
It is testament to the rushed nature of those negotiations, and how quickly they went from being agreed upon to being printed on paper and put in the Deputy Speaker’s hands, that no French translation was immediately provided, to the anger of the Bloc Québécois. Thankfully, that insult to French Canadians was promptly rectified.
While the attempts by Conservative MPs to have the amendment ruled out-of-order were summarily dismissed by the ruling of the Deputy Speaker, that kind of procedural legalism is always to be expected in the House. What was not to be expected was for both Anthony Housefather as well as Marco Mendicino of Eglinton-Lawrence to join in on those points-of-order.
Assuredly, Anthony Housefather rising in the House to try and kibosh a motion now endorsed and sponsored by the Liberal cabinet was not part of his script, nor was it part of Marco Mendicino’s. As wrestlers would put it, Anthony and Marco both “went into business for themselves” at the expense of their own Party.
While Ben Carr joined them in voting against the amended motion, he did so quietly without trying to block the amendment entirely, and without casting aspersions on the Liberal Party because of his disagreement with a non-binding motion. From my discussions with Liberal MPs involved in the negotiations with the NDP, there were four goals for the amendments:
Write something a majority of the Liberal caucus can vote to support
Write something that Prime Minister Trudeau can vote to support
Write something that won’t make the Centre for Israeli and Jewish Affairs angry
Write something that will satisfy the National Council of Canadian Muslims
I believe that, with the positive response from groups like the NCCM, three of those four goals were accomplished, and the material demands for assisting refugees, sanctioning extremist settlers, and suspending arms trade will save lives.
CIJA will never support any motion that criticizes a single thing Israel has done, and neither will the MPs they support. But in terms of the Jewish Liberal MPs who voted on yesterday’s motion, a majority voted in favour, not against. So perhaps it is time for CIJA to stop pretending they are the monolith of Jewish perspective; there are clearly many Jews in our Parliament who would now disagree.