Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party of Canada withdrew the candidacy of a politician in this month’s federal election after a video surfaced of him praising Hamas and Hezbollah, the National Post reported.
Rodrigo Alonso Loyola Salas, who had been the Liberal Party’s candidate in the Edmonton Gateway riding ahead of the April 28 election, “is no longer our candidate,” Liberal campaign spokesperson Isabella Orozco-Madison told the newspaper in an email published on Thursday.
She was replying to a request for comment by the campaign on the video from 2009 showing Salas saying: “Hezbollah and Hamas really are trying to stand up for their people and that needs to be recognized. These are movements for national liberation, not terrorists.”
Loyola was a rapper at the time with a group called People’s Poets, the Post noted.
He now intends to run as an independent in another constituency, he said.
“I did not think that an intro at a hip-hop segment 16 years later would get me ‘cancelled’ after close to a decade of serving as an elected representative at the legislative assembly of Alberta, but here we are,” Loyola said in a statement on Friday, according to the Edmonton Journal.
“I will continue as an independent in the original riding I intended to run, Edmonton Southeast. I am lucky to have communities that [stand] with me, and together we stand for what is just and principled,” the statement read.
Many Jews in Canada and beyond have expresses disappointment at Trudeau’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel and later by additional Iranian proxies. Trudeau has called for a ceasefire and an end to Israeli counterattacks even as Hezbollah and Hamas were firing rockets into Israeli population centers.
In parallel, expressions of antisemitism exploded in Canada, a development that some critics said was due on the lack of response by authorities to the targeting of Jews in connection with the circumstances surrounding Israel.
