Good morning.
Wendy Cox in Vancouver this morning.
Calls for politicians to resign over missteps large and small are routine. Politicians actually resigning or being booted from their posts as a result of missteps are rare.
So the swiftness with which Selina Robinson resigned as B.C.’s minister of post-secondary education this week over comments she made while lamenting the lack of knowledge among young people about the Holocaust was noteworthy.
“They have no connection to how it started, they don’t understand it was a crappy piece of land with nothing on it – there were several hundred thousand people, but other than that it didn’t produce an economy, it couldn’t grow things, it didn’t have anything on it,” she said.
Robinson apologized on the weekend, but by Monday, more than a dozen British Columbia mosques and Islamic associations issued a joint statement saying that no NDP MLA or candidate for the coming provincial election would be welcome until Premier David Eby fired Robinson. Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh called her comments “offensive and irresponsible.”
Early Monday, Robinson apologized again, promising to take anti-Islamophobia training but within hours, it was clear that action would not assuage her critics.
The B.C. NDP caucus met in Surrey with angry protesters outside demanding Robinson be fired. Soon after, with local police officers standing watch, Eby told reporters: “We need to address the harm that was caused.” Robinson was out of cabinet, a decision he said was made jointly. Robinson was not at the news conference. She said in a later statement she would not run in the next election.
By Tuesday afternoon, police were at her constituency office, which had been defaced by protesters calling her racist.
Generally, political leaders resist calls for resignations and those who do get the boot typically have a longer runway than Robinson got. Some of them have had a soft landing.
Last September, Ontario’s housing minister Steve Clark resigned from cabinet over the process to take land out of the protected Greenbelt for housing development. The province’s Integrity Commissioner found he violated ethics laws. Premier Doug Ford backed Clark, until he didn’t, after the controversy had played out for weeks.
Also last September, House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota was forced to resign after a Ukrainian Second World War veteran was invited to the visitors’ gallery where he was applauded by MPs gathered for a session of Parliament for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Then news broke the veteran had been a combatant from a Nazi unit. Rota said he didn’t know. After four days of embarrassment, he had to go.
In February, 2022, Kaycee Madu was shuffled out of Alberta’s justice minister post to become minister of labour after a retired Court of Queen’s Bench judge concluded in a report that Madu tried to interfere in the administration of justice over a traffic ticket. Madu then served as Danielle Smith’s deputy premier before he was defeated in last year’s provincial election.
Last spring, Alberta’s then-ethics commissioner concluded Smith interfered in the justice system in a way that is a “threat to democracy.” Marguerite Trussler concluded Smith tried to influence the Minister of Justice in a way that would benefit a street preacher charged for his role at the border blockade near Coutts, Alta., in early 2022. Smith went on to win the provincial election.
Last summer, First Nations leaders in British Columbia called on Children’s Minister Mitzi Dean to resign after a horrific case involving torture, starvation and other abuse that culminated in the beating death of an 11-year-old boy. The boy had been reunited with his troubled family despite multiple warnings of neglect and abuse, a three-year-old B.C. government internal review found. The boy died just months after he was returned to their care. Dean was demoted to a minister of state in a cabinet shuffle last month.
In November, Victoria city councillor Susan Kim apologized for an open letter she signed that criticized Jagmeet Singh who, the letter stated, “repeated the unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence.” Kim asked for her name to be removed from the letter, but she did not resign.
Ontario NDP MPP Sarah Jama also signed that letter. Jama had earlier been removed from the Ontario NDP caucus after weeks of controversy in part over a statement on social media on Oct. 10, three days after the Hamas attack, which called Israel an “apartheid” state and demanded a ceasefire. She now sits as an Independent MLA.
It’s an election year in British Columbia and Eby no doubt wanted a swift end to a controversy involving the painfully divisive Israel-Hamas war. He’s not likely to get it: By Tuesday, angry Jewish groups were pointing to gaffes made by Eby’s own office and promising they would “remember this day the next time you ask for our trust and support.”
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.
Wendy Cox