Selina Robinson: Premier Eby repeatedly assured me he would have my back. That lasted four days.

This is an excerpt from Selina Robinson’s memoir, Truth Be Told, which will be self-published on Nov. 21.

Published Oct 12, 2024  •  5 minute read

Former minister Selina Robinson says she was fired from the B.C. NDP cabinet over remarks that Israel was founded on "a crappy piece of land." Photo by DARRYL DYCK /THE CANADIAN PRESS

This is an excerpt from Selina Robinson’s memoir, Truth Be Told, which will be self-published on Nov. 21.

I was a Cabinet minister in B.C.’s New Democratic Party government earlier this year when I made an impolitic remark about the quality of the land on which Israel was founded.

These careless words — although true — set off a firestorm that had little to do with the content or context of my words and everything to do with who I am.

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I am a Jewish woman who believes fervently in my people’s right to national self-determination. That was too much for a determined mob of extremist activists — many of whom are within the NDP’s own tent.

When the firestorm erupted, Premier David Eby repeatedly assured me he would have my back. That lasted four days. After unrelenting pressure, Eby folded, and fired me.

The terror attacks against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, started a war that continues today. But it also sparked an unprecedented eruption of antisemitism in Canada.

My firing was the headline-making moment in my own saga since that dark day. But it was merely the culmination of a months-long and deeply traumatizing period during which I struggled as a progressive, Jewish woman in a party and government that remained silent — or even hostile — while Jewish Canadians were attacked.

There were people right here in B.C. who actually celebrating the mass murder, rapes, beheadings, immolations and kidnappings of Jews. Indeed, my condemnation of one of the most egregious examples added fuel to the inferno of hatred targeting me.

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In the days immediately after Oct. 7, several of my caucus colleagues urged a statement of solidarity with Palestinians. This was before the Israeli military had launched any response and so there was no plausible deniability that this was about Israeli actions.

They could not even pause for a moment, out of basic human respect, to feel the pain of Jews in their community — or even in their caucus.

The message I received clearly from these colleagues was that the Israeli victims got what they deserved.

As I tried to act as a liaison between the government and the grieving Jewish community, the premier urged our caucus not to comment on the conflict. But he missed an important point.

There are two conflicts. There is the war in the Middle East, and there is a second, far closer conflict, in which Jews are being targeted right here in Canada. David Eby does not seem to recognize the crucial difference between these conflicts — and as a result, he has missed an opportunity to stand with an ethnocultural community that is under siege.

Moreover, the premier’s gag order did not stop members of the NDP caucus from speaking out against Israel, including one former colleague who stood in the legislature and launched a broadside against Israel while omitting any mention of the mass murder of 1,200 Israelis.

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Then a group of Muslim clerics issued a warning that, unless I was fired, NDP candidates and elected officials would be prevented from entering Muslim spaces — a significant threat that would certainly have had an impact in the election that takes place Oct. 19.

I understood immediately the pressure this put on the premier. The ultimatum from the religious leaders, as well as the unrelenting howls from a mob of left-leaning activists who forced the cancellation of an NDP fundraising event and screamed for my firing outside a caucus meeting, put Eby in a difficult spot.

I knew, as the premier probably did, that his response to this would likely be his most serious test as leader so far.

He had extremists inside his own party calling for my firing, and a group of religious figures outside the party threatening his re-election if he didn’t fire me. It would have been an act of inspiring leadership to stand up to these forces.

In the end, Eby, of course, did fire me. Rather than stand with his Jewish cabinet minister and the Jewish community in a moment of profound antisemitism, he caved.

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Even then, he refused to own his actions. He attempted to recast my firing as a resignation. He also tried to deflect blame for my sacking by throwing my fate to a caucus meeting — a conversation that took place about me, without me.

In our parliamentary tradition, this is perhaps an unprecedented act of deflection over the future of a minister who, as any first-year civics student understands, serves at the pleasure of the head of government.

Perhaps the premier thought if he could not be solely blamed for my dismissal, that his standing with Jewish voters would not be harmed.

Instead, my reading of my community is that, overwhelmingly, Jewish voters took very personally the way the premier treated me. This was not about the career of a single individual or some sloppy words I uttered. This was perceived by many Jewish British Columbians as a politically motivated, unprincipled act by a politician who opted for expediency over standing with a minority community experiencing their worst crisis in generations.

Eventually, I was so isolated and alienated from my (then) colleagues that I felt forced to leave the NDP caucus.

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But that is not an entirely accurate assessment of what happened.

I want to be clear.

I did not leave my caucus — or my premier, or my party. They left me. They abandoned me and, by extension, they abandoned the Jewish people who are suffering. Above all, they abandoned the transcendent values I thought we shared — values of tolerance, coexistence, multiculturalism, anti-racism and inclusion.

In most cases, it was not the overt, explicit words or deeds of my former colleagues that hurt most — although there were many, many of those. It was the absolute, unrelenting silence of the vast majority of elected officials in the NDP and government who we should have been able to trust to be exemplars of our collective values.

Their silence still echoes as loudly in my ears as the chanting mobs calling for my firing and for the destruction of my ancestral homeland and my people.

That silence rings in my ears, as it does for many progressive Jewish British Columbians as we struggle over how to mark our ballots on Oct. 19.

Selina Robinson was the NDP MLA for Coquitlam-Maillardville from 2013 until she left caucus to sit as an independent in March. She served as Cabinet minister in three portfolios: municipal affairs and housing, finance and post-secondary education.

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