The Canadian lawyer Michael Hollander, who volunteers for the campaign of Neil Oberman, the Conservative candidate for Mount Royal in Montreal, raised eyebrows earlier this month when he said that the Liberal candidate, Anthony Housefather, who has represented the riding for 10 years, appeared to have the stomach for some funding for terror.
Mount Royal is home to a large Jewish community, and Oberman and Housefather, who are the frontrunners per recent polls, are Jewish, as is Hollander.
Hollander alleges that Housefather discussed some $70 million that Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, sent to Gaza before elections. “We’ll make sure as little of it as possible goes to terrorists,” Housefather said at a town hall-style meeting of the Association of Jewish Doctors of Quebec in Montreal, according to Hollander.
“Warning to the community: Do not accept this kind of thinking. It will lead us to ruin,” Hollander wrote on social media. “Reject it. Reject the Liberal Party.”
“For everyone’s information, Anthony had his speech recorded by his own team. He knows that these were his words and his message, and if he has a problem with it, he has my cell phone number so he can call me to discuss what he said anytime,” Hollander added.
Housefather told JNS that the quotes Hollander attributed to him on social media from the event were taken “out of context.” The Jewish parliamentarian also told JNS that he never said that “we’ll make sure as little of it as possible goes to terrorists,” as Hollander alleged.
In Hollander’s post, which remains live on social media, he put Housefather’s alleged remarks in quotation marks and said it was “what I heard from Anthony Housefather.”
The statement did not appear in part or in full in a recording of the event that Housefather’s staff provided to JNS.
Hollander told JNS that he was not quoting Housefather directly. “I’m saying the quote is a paraphrase,” he said. “I’m saying that was his message.” He also told JNS that he didn’t mean to write that the Canadian prime minister had already sent about $70 million to Gaza but that Carney had pledged to do so.
Housefather told JNS that he was not asked for a statement from Hollander or anyone else in response to the alleged quotes.
“If we did give a statement, it would be that the quote is false,” the parliamentarian told JNS. “No one contacted us in any way.”
Housefather told JNS that Canada’s pledge to aid Gaza, which is reported to be about $21 million for “recovery and governance support in the West Bank” and $31 million for health care, food and shelter for Palestinians, amounts to some $14 per Gazan.
Canada spends about $11.5 billion annually in foreign aid, “and the amount going here is nowhere near our biggest spends,” Housefather told JNS.
“We just need to make sure that the aid fulfills its intended purpose and goes to the civilians in Gaza. That’s the real thing,” he said. “There are tons of procedural safeguards. I really think that the community isn’t quite aware of how difficult it is to qualify to receive monies in foreign aid and to qualify as an organization.”
“Especially in a region like this, there’s added diligence,” he said.
Hollander told JNS that he “has a lot of respect” for Housefather and is not “trying to perpetuate a conflict.”
“Just his views are, you know, currently not compatible with the views of a large portion of his constituents,” he told JNS.
Hollander said that he has a duty, under Jewish law, “to at least inform people, so they can know what they’re doing before they make decisions that might compromise their security down the line.”
When Canadians go to the ballot box on April 28 to decide on their next prime minister, it will be “the most consequential election, maybe not in Canadian history but for Jews,” Hollander told JNS.
Melissa Lantsman, the deputy leader of the Conservative Party, shared the alleged quote from Housefather on social media. “What an insane thing to say,” she wrote. “It shouldn’t be difficult to stop sending Canadian tax dollars to terrorists.” (At press time, the post had nearly 100,000 views.)
JNS informed Lantsman, who is Jewish, that the quote attributed to Housefather was a paraphrase.
“It shouldn’t be that difficult to never fund terrorism with tax dollars or call out a government that has,” she told JNS, “instead of voting with it at every opportunity.”
“Anthony Housefather has done neither of these things,” she said.
