On Monday evening, Canada’s Parliament overwhelmingly passed the New Democratic Party’s Palestine motion by 204 votes to 117.
Almost all Liberal MPs, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, joined the NDP, the Bloc Québécois, and the Greens to support the motion. The entire Conservative Caucus opposed it, along with three Liberal MPs who broke ranks: Ben Carr, Anthony Housefather, and Marco Mendicino.
The motion represents a big step forward for the Palestine solidarity movement and a dramatic shift of the terrain for Palestinian liberation.
It is essential to see this outcome for what it is: a real and significant victory. As activists, we need to understand the fight in strategic terms, not simply moral ones, and measure our success based on consistent criteria that help us build bigger, stronger, and more effective movements.
Origins of NDP motion
But before we discuss what makes this motion a success, let’s quickly examine its origins.
The NDP’s Opposition Day motion on Palestine was initially scheduled for debate on Friday, March 1. The day before, on Thursday, February 29, the NDP notified a few allies that the vote would happen the next day. It’s unclear whether the NDP had more notice than that about the timing of their motion.
In any case, there was no plan and no time for an external campaign to generate support for the motion.
That all changed when former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney died on February 29, which caused the debate to be postponed to Monday, March 18–over two weeks later. This accident of history inadvertently opened up a campaign period during which Palestine solidarity activists and groups began to build public support for the NDP motion.
Crucially, a series of online and email campaigns rapidly emerged during that time–Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, Neighbours for Palestine, National Council of Canadian Muslims, Ceasefire Now, and others –which urged their memberships and the wider public to tell their MPs to support the NDP motion. In 17 days, well over 100,000 emails were sent to MPs in all parties. Activists also collected thousands of paper petitions and made thousands of phone calls to MPs’ constituency and Parliament Hill offices.
This unexpected and last-minute campaign was possible because of the organizing that proceeded it, and brought the pressure of the Palestine solidarity movement deeper into the realm of electoral politics, where it was beginning to have a more visible impact.
Shifting terrain
The most significant consequence of this concerted effort was to shift the political terrain beneath our feet – as we were organizing on it. The original NDP motion was primarily a symbolic initiative intended to expose Liberal (and Conservative) support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. But what started as an electoral gesture with no hope of passing was suddenly pushing almost a third of the Liberal Caucus to support it – raising the possibility that it could actually pass.
It was only in the days leading up to the vote that this possibility became more real, with senior Liberals approaching the NDP to negotiate a motion that their party would support, an attempt to hide the deepening split inside the Liberal Caucus.
As the terrain continued to shift, the NDP’s tactic to discredit other political parties became a more momentous opportunity to push a G7 country onto the world stage by formally adopting a motion that takes up most of the key demands from the last five months of organizing.
It is no surprise that the Liberals insisted on amendments that removed the stronger language in the original motion, repeated Zionist talking points, and removed the unilateral recognition of the State of Palestine, among other unfavourable changes.
But let’s look at what ended up in the final version, even after the Liberal amendments. The motion committed Parliament to take these concrete steps:
- Call for an immediate ceasefire
- Allow urgent humanitarian aid to Gaza
- End the transfer and further authorization of arms exports to Israel
- Expand Palestinians’ access to the temporary foreign visa program
- Recognize the role and place of the International Criminal Court
- Ban all illegal settlers from Canada
- End the pause on UNRWA funding
The motion’s success is less about the difference between the original and amended versions and more about the extent to which the final version reflected the demands the movement has raised for the last five months: ceasefire now, immediate humanitarian aid to Gaza, an arms embargo, and more. Although the motion is non-binding, as all opposition motions are, it nevertheless massively raises expectations on Parliament and will be seen as the formal position of the Canadian government.
When we contrast how difficult it was to express some of these demands publicly, in the early days after October 7, against the NDP motion that included most of them five months later, the dramatic shift of the political terrain becomes more apparent. At the end of 2023, Trudeau was too fearful to utter “ceasefire” in front of a TV camera. On Monday, virtually his whole caucus voted for it.
Palestinian statehood
The demand to recognize the State of Palestine – within the framework of the Oslo Accords’ vision of a two-state solution – has not been a central demand of the Palestine solidarity movement for the last five months. Indeed, there was widespread criticism of the way this demand was expressed when the content of the original motion first appeared. However, the NDP included it in response to requests from some sections of the Palestinian community leadership.
For many activists in the Palestine solidarity movement, and among Palestinians themselves, the more popular vision for statehood is a single, democratic secular state with full and equal rights for all its inhabitants – which is where this slogan comes from: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” This vision also includes the Right of Return for all Palestinians and their descendants.
At its heart is the recognition that Palestinians themselves, and not foreign governments, will decide the terms on which their new state will be founded and exist.
However, this is not the vision that inspired the motion’s original statehood demand. Similarly, the amendment endorsed a commitment to pursue recognition through a negotiated process, but still within the two-state solution framework.
Regardless of the nature of the statehood provision, in either the original or amended version, this demand has been largely absent from the movements’ work in the last five months. For example, most trade union resolutions do not mention it. For clarity, the call for a “free Palestine” is not the same as endorsing one particular version of statehood.
Its exclusion from the version passed in Parliament should not detract from the monumental achievement that most of the movement’s key demands remained a part of the motion–from a ceasefire to UNRWA funding, to humanitarian aid, to an arms embargo, and so on.
Other successes
Beyond the content retained in the motion, it represents a number of other significant steps forward.
First, the way we talk about Palestine – and, crucially, who’s talking about it – has changed dramatically. Issues that were once taboo or off limits are now in the mainstream and discussed widely in the media and in the House of Commons – and increasingly on our terms. We still have a lot of work to do on this front, but the elevation of Palestine to a central concern in federal politics will help build the ongoing fight against workplace reprisals and the defence of civil liberties.
Second, the Zionist lobby utterly failed to stop the vote or defeat it, showing the rapid erosion of its influence and power over the last five months. Despite its intense lobbying efforts in advance of the vote, it could barely muster any visible sign of public support for its position, beyond a few public statements with small lists of signatories.
A successful vote was crucial to demonstrate this weakness and to prove that the lobby can be beaten. As a result of the last five months of organizing, MPs that were once afraid of the lobby became more afraid of the movements. Our job now is to take advantage of this shift in the balance of forces – and extend it.
Liberal opportunism
By contrast, had the motion been defeated, it would have been widely understood as a victory for Zionists and for the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre. Opportunists in the Liberal Party would have seized on the moral authority of Parliament to lead a retreat on even the modest steps it had been forced to take in sanctioning Israel. The Liberals who publicly criticized their own party and called for a ceasefire would have been more isolated, and the movement would have felt less confidence to fight – here and around the world–as news spread that Canada opposed even a non-binding motion to stop the current genocide.
Third, the pro-Palestine sections of the NDP and the Liberals have now been strengthened instead of being isolated. Those MPs in both parties who have faced resistance for even raising this issue, never mind taking a clear stance on it, will now have wind in their sails. How their colleagues approach this issue will increasingly be shaped by the terms of debate set by the movements, not by Zionists or the media.
Fourth, large institutional organizations, especially in the labour movement and among faith communities, will now feel more confident campaigning on Palestine and actively building support for our demands. Even more importantly, those principled leaders–such as Independent MPP Sarah Jama and CUPE Ontario President Fred Hahn–will be further vindicated for the clear positions they took in early October. As a result, the positive impact will be felt on the political terrain in Ontario as well.
Growing the movement
This creates a massive opening for connecting with layers of people among those organizations’ memberships, and pulling them deeper into the solidarity movement. Likewise, it’s an opening to consolidate the support of new layers of activists who have been part of organizing efforts in the last five months. If they feel confident that their work made a difference–that it helped shift the Canadian state–then we’ll win them for the long haul.
Finally, there will be the perception among the wider working class that Israel lost this vote and that momentum is with the Palestinians. This is perhaps our most important site of struggle: the consciousness of ordinary working people on the question of Palestine and their confidence to take action about it.
That both working-class consciousness and confidence have the potential to grow dramatically as a result of this vote represents an unprecedented opportunity to deepen and expand our movement and build momentum on what we achieved on Monday. Already, there are signs this is happening, as people interpret the result on their own, and generalize its success–including in movements outside Canada and around the world.
However, none of this will happen automatically, just as there was nothing automatic about the NDP putting forward a motion in the first place or a movement emerging to fight for the best possible version of it. Parliamentary motions are merely the formal expression of the months and years of organizing that came before it. Motions are not ends in themselves; they are means.
Likewise, the wins in the motion won’t happen automatically–we urgently need to continue organizing to ensure the motion is implemented and expanded. But we now have another tool to advance our demands and raise new ones.
Lessons
One urgent lesson in the wake of this victory is to realize how much more powerful and influential the NDP could be if it more deliberately and systematically planned and coordinated with the movements that build capacity for these demands in the first place.
If the NDP motion had been debated on March 1, as originally planned, it would not have had the same impact as it did after nearly three weeks of campaigning for it. Even if the outcome was to split the Liberal Caucus (an original goal of the motion), its effect would have been muted without the public’s attention squarely focused on the vote.
It was the work of the movements in building support for the motion that shifted the terrain rapidly and dramatically, and that made possible an outcome that no one seriously contemplated when the motion was first proposed: actually getting it passed.
To its credit, the NDP launched its own email tool on the Saturday before the vote, delivering over 25,000 emails to Trudeau and urging him to support the NDP motion, but this kind of initiative could have been more effective if it had appeared at the moment the motion was announced, instead of days before the vote.
In the end, just 25 NDP MPs, with the support of the movements behind them, managed to drag 153 Liberal MPs, including the Cabinet, across a finish line they never ever wanted to cross–even with the Liberal amendments. This is remarkable, given that the NDP is the second smallest party in Parliament and the Liberals are the governing party with deep ties to Israel and the Zionist lobby.
Of course, the Liberal amendments have provoked a deep sense of anger and frustration among layers of people who are fuelled by a sincere desire to see Palestinians win their long-overdue liberation. But we also have an obligation to soberly assess the political terrain and proceed on tactical grounds that most effectively position the movements to keep fighting.
The sudden possibility of success
In this circumstance, the most compelling question about the motion is this: What the outcome should have been?
In the hours before the vote, the choice had become: either advance the original motion and see it defeated, or advance the amended version (despite its flaws) and secure some significant wins that, just days before, we didn’t think were possible.
As noted earlier, the original motion had no hope of passing. The 45 to 50 Liberal MPs who had indicated they would vote for it (or were considering it), combined with the 59 votes represented by the NDP, Bloc, and Green Caucuses, still wasn’t enough to counter the Conservative Caucus, never mind the rest of Parliament.
So proceeding with the original vote would have guaranteed the motion’s defeat, even if there was value in splitting the Liberal Caucus over all the demands it raised. But a much bigger prize emerged in the course of campaigning for the vote–the possibility of winning formal support for many or most of the movement’s key demands over the last five months.
G7 state
The successful passage of the motion now means that Canada, a G7 state, has gone further than any other to formally recognize the demands of the Palestine solidarity movement–even if we still have to fight to make them do it. But that this happened in Parliament should not be underestimated. And the credit goes to the movements for imposing it, not the Liberals for voting for it.
Already, it is creating pressure on other G7 states, including the US, to move in the same direction. And it is likely creating a political crisis in Israel, which will now have Canada on its mind when it sends a delegation to meet Biden in the White House in the coming days.
The international coverage, for example, of Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly’s comments the morning after the vote–that the arms embargo is real–will have ripple effects worldwide. Of course, our movement still has to make the Liberals follow through, but this new ground we’ve won will make it easier to advance other demands.
Next steps
We should also consider the vote’s impact on movements raising similar demands in other countries. This vote shows what’s possible–something we didn’t think we might win at this stage of the struggle. We should also consider the impact on the struggle in Palestine itself, where Palestinian trade unionists have long been calling for an arms embargo, and in the broader Arab working class across the region which is seeking international solidarity.
In the grander scheme of things, a single motion is just one step along a much longer journey–it was never meant to be an all-encompassing solution, and this victory should not be seen in that light, either. But this step is nevertheless a big one, getting us closer to the movement’s long-standing goals.
Finally, as we engage in the battle of interpretation about what this vote represents, we must also keep in mind the balance of forces in this particular struggle and in broader fights, and seize every opportunity to change it to our advantage. Urgently, this means nailing Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives for their total and enthusiastic support of Israel’s war on Gaza and for the racist, anti-Palestinian, and Islamophobic rhetoric they use to express it.
For example, an immediate goal of our movement should be to generalize widely that the entire Conservative Caucus voted against the NDP motion (this is an excellent way to do that), and campaigned ahead of time to derail it. We need to hold them to account and, as Liberal support crumbles on the road to the 2025 federal election, do everything we can to close the path to the Conservatives as a viable alternative.
The next few days will be a critical moment for the movements, as we try to make sense of the motion, identify the new openings for our movement, and then build on them to take the entire struggle forward. This win is far from perfect, and doesn’t go the distance we’d like it to go. Like most movement wins, it is only partial.
But we need to see what’s significant about it, and seize on the openings that now exist–which only became possible because of months of organizing and mobilizing in our workplaces, our communities, and the streets. Rather than retreat from all that, we need to deepen, expand, and move the struggle to an entirely new level.
Our movement deserves nothing less. So do the people of Palestine.
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