Duncan Dee: Radical Liberal MP Jenica Atwin abandons Fredericton’s Jews

“What is going on in Fredericton?”

That was the legitimate question posed last week on “The CJN Daily,” a podcast by Canadian Jewish News. Recent events suggest that what’s going on is something quite worrying in New Brunswick’s capital.

With just 60 families comprising around 150 people, Fredericton’s Jewish community is small. But over the past few months, this small community has found its way into the headlines after facing a number of troubling incidents that suggest the city is facing a serious problem with antisemitism.

New Brunswick’s Jewish community is more than 240 years old. David Gabels, the province’s first Jewish resident, arrived in Saint John with other Loyalists in 1783. Since that time, several Jewish New Brunswickers have made significant contributions, not only to the fabric of the province but to the world at large.

For example, Samuel Davis served on Saint John common council eventually becoming the city’s mayor. Erminie Cohen represented New Brunswick in the Senate from 1993 till 2001. Louis B. Mayer, who arrived in New Brunswick as a child in the 1890s, went on to study filmmaking in New York before he helped to found Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated film studios.

But times have not always been easy for New Brunswick’s Jews.

During the Second World War, at the request of British authorities, the Canadian government, rather than protect Jewish refugees fleeing Germany and Austria, sent them to Internment Camp B70 in Ripples, about 30 kilometers from Fredericton. More than 700 Jews were interned at the camp from 1940 to 1945. Today, the memory of this often-overlooked piece of New Brunswick’s history is kept alive by the New Brunswick Internment Camp Museum in Minto, and visitors can visit the original site of the camp approximately 15 km away.

More recently, Fredericton’s Jewish community has been facing its own set of challenges. The Sgoolai Israel synagogue was vandalized on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day in January. Then there was the assault of a 14-year-old Israeli Leo Hayes High School student, Shaked Tsurkan, which was captured on video last April.

Most recently, a rock was thrown through the window of a University of New Brunswick student’s home because it displayed an Israeli flag. All of these incidents have been very tough for the city’s Jewish community.

Unfortunately, the challenges do not end there.

At times like these, it should not be too much to expect leaders in the larger community to speak out and speak up – to unequivocally condemn antisemitic acts.

Leaders should express the city’s, the province’s, and the country’s solidarity with its Jewish communities. They should make our Jewish friends and neighbors feel safe in their own homes, and welcome – even celebrated – in the city where they live. While many leaders such as Premier Blaine Higgs, Liberal party Leader Susan Holt, Fredericton-area MLAs Dominic Cardy, David Coon and Kris Austin, and Mayor Kate Rogers have risen to the occasion, Fredericton’s own Member of Parliament, Jenica Atwin, continues to disappoint.

When a constituent wrote to take her to task for her meek Facebook response to the synagogue vandalism, Atwin responded nearly a month later with a form email, focused on criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza and “the atrocities in Palestine” rather than addressing concerns about antisemitism in her riding.

In fact, Atwin has chosen to make her stance on Israel a defining issue of her tenure in Parliament. First elected as a Green MP, Atwin left the party after a very public disagreement with its Jewish leader, Annamie Paul, over Israel.

Upon joining the Liberals, Atwin “adjusted” her position after members of her new party criticised her use of terms like “apartheid” in describing the world’s only Jewish state.

Despite this “adjustment,” however, Atwin persists in taking positions hostile to Israel. Brunswick News reports that Atwin is sponsoring a petition demanding “the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board divest from Israel and complicit companies,” making her hostility to Israel plain for all to see.

Atwin has sponsored two other petitions. One calls on the federal government to actually reduce the security vetting of applicants for Canadian temporary resident visas from Gaza – a territory controlled by Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by numerous governments, including Canada’s.

Another petition calls on provinces to include the Nakba, the Arabic term for “catastrophe” to describe the founding of the Israel in 1948, in public school curricula.

In her interview with Brunswick News, Atwin claimed her sponsoring these petitions was a mere function of her role as MP. Yet this is a moot point: In the same interview she makes clear she fully endorses their contents.

At a time of rising antisemitism across North America including in Fredericton, Atwin’s apparent fixation on one-sided condemnations of Israel is entirely inappropriate. With an election scheduled next year, the voters of Fredericton have a choice; they can either continue sending someone to Parliament whose political career is defined by her anti-Israel obsession, or they can send a different MP who is willing to speak up for and protect every single one of their constituents, including the members of their small Jewish community.

Duncan Dee is a former chief operating officer at Air Canada and a member of the panel appointed to review the Canada Transportation Act in 2016. A Brunswick News columnist, he resides in Grand-Barachois.