Four of the five candidates seeking to lead Canada’s New Democratic Party said Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and that they would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited Canada.
Tanille Johnston, Avi Lewis, Heather McPherson and Tony McQuail participated in a “Leadership Debate on Palestine” hosted by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East on Jan. 21 and moderated by Yara Shoufani, the organization’s president. The live-streamed debate was viewed by nearly 4,000 people, according to the group.
The candidates seek to replace Don Davies, a member of Parliament for Vancouver Kingsway since 2008. He was selected to be the interim NDP leader in 2025 until the party chooses a new leader at the Winnipeg Convention in March.
In a final lightning round of the debate, all four agreed that Israel is guilty of genocide, Canada should recognize the nakba (the Arab term for “catastrophe” referring to the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel) and Palestinians have a right of return.
They also agreed that Canada should sanction organizations that support Israeli settlements or the IDF, that they would arrest Netanyahu if he visited Canada and to replace the IHRA definition of antisemitism with “an alternative definition that does not conflate criticism of Zionism with antisemitism.”
Lewis, a journalist and co-creator of Al Jazeera’s “Fault Lines,” described himself as an “anti-Zionist Jewish person” seeking to “unlearn and unpack the Zionist myths that most Canadian Jews were brought up with.”
“Israel never had any intention of a real two-state solution,” Lewis said. “The Palestinian position was absolutely proven true, that the whole thing was a sham.”
He added that he “will continue to say that and to help people understand the political ideology of Zionism and how its current incarnation in the 21st century is linked inextricably to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine as an end game with the ethno-state, a Jewish state of Israel, as its rationale.”
McPherson, who has represented Edmonton Strathcona in the House of Commons since 2019, said she would commit to an arms embargo on Israel.
“We need to continue to push the government to make sure no military-grade goods are going to Israel to be used against innocent people,” she said.
Asked if she would ever support lifting such an embargo, Johnston said, “That’s a lot of significant relationships to rebuild before you’re thinking essentially about re-arming a country that does nothing but break international law and commit genocide.”
McQuail, a progressive farmer who was born in Pennsylvania, said Canada should also have an “arms embargo against the United States because they are no longer a state we can trust as a country,” comparing arming the United States to arming Nazi Germany.
