Palestine Motion Amendment: Stately Compromise or Compromised State?

Monday, the House of Commons spent the day debating a lengthy NDP opposition day motion to call on the government to “officially recognize the State of Palestine”. Barely 20 minutes before the vote was scheduled, Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon proposed an amendment changing this controversial part of the bottom line of the original motion to call on the government to: “work with international partners to actively pursue the goal of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, including towards the establishment of the State of Palestine as part of a negotiated two-state solution”, along with wording changes to nearly every other clause.

The amendment was so last minute that no French language translation was provided to the House, and no time was afforded to debate the new wording. What ensued was over an hour of procedural debate over whether the motion could even be moved.

But what happened? And why does it matter?

The war won’t end until Hamas returns all the hostages they hold, and Hamas won’t do that as long as the world keeps taking their side in the conflict. Forcing the war to continue, forcing civilian deaths, serves their purposes. Israel won’t stop their incursions into Palestinian territory through settlements until forced to do so, either, keeping the population generally radicalised enough to support Hamas. In reality, neither side of the conflict will be fully satisfied until the other ceases to exist. Israel must exist; history has proven the need for a sanctuary Jewish state. But it does not flow that Palestine cannot also exist, nor does it permit territorial expansion through war or colonisation. A genuine two-state solution is both completely unachievable and absolutely necessary.

Motions like this one from the NDP, and the Conservative opposition day motion on condemning BDS when I first came to office 8 years ago, are not designed or intended to address nor solve the unfolding crisis in the Middle East. They don’t provide a path to a two-state solution, nor any other alternative. They don’t get us any closer to peace. They don’t do anything to bring the sides together. They don’t offer solutions, leadership, guidance, or resources. They are primarily intended to expose divisions within the Liberal caucus, and they are very good at this. That they may cause collateral damage in our communities and our foreign relations is irrelevant to those that move them.

The motion, as originally drafted, offered stiff and insincere recognition of the threats Israel faces while essentially elevating Hamas to the level of being a legitimate democratic government for Palestine. But with a public sentiment strongly against Israel in the current conflict, caused in large part by the ruthless use of civilians as human shields in Gaza, it is a position that many Canadians agree with.

More to the point, it divided Liberal caucus members, many of whom would have voted for the motion as written, in spite of its flaws, for fear of being seen as too pro-Israel. As a tool to cleave Liberals, it was effective.

With the vote approaching, it would have become clear to the Liberal House leadership team that the motion was going to pass, and that negotiating a compromise would be necessary to avoid the international embarrassment of Canada’s Parliament changing long established foreign policy through an unbalanced motion proposed by the country’s tertiary opposition party.

This clearly led to frenzied last-minute negotiations with the NDP to amend the motion to something relatively neutral and generally palatable so that when it passed, wider embarrassment could be avoided. The amendment proposed by the government through MacKinnon changed the tone of the original motion to a reasonably neutral and balanced, quintessentially Canadian, position.

It softened the wording, leaving only occasional artefacts of the original bias, such as the final line in the preamble: “Palestinians and Israelis both deserve to live in peace, with full enjoyment of their human rights and democratic freedoms,” which, while true, is also worded in a way as to suggest that Palestinians already live with democratic freedoms, which is objectively false. There hasn’t even been the pretence of an election since 2006. Such a suggestion though is important, as it frames the war as being between two democracies.

The amendment was tabled just moments before the vote was scheduled. Procedurally, an opposition day motion can only be amended with the consent of the person who moved it. Being the result of backroom negotiations, Heather McPherson, in whose name it had been proposed, readily accepted.

Normally, the vote would have taken place the following day, but by happenstance, there had been an agreement to hold the vote no matter what Monday night as part of a wider agreement made weeks earlier to adjust the House of Commons schedule to accommodate the events surrounding the death of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and nobody was going to throw that agreement under the airbus.

When the Deputy Speaker sought the unanimous consent of the House to defer the vote and override the agreement, he could not get it, and his hands were tied. In spite of calls from both Liberal and Conservative MPs who opposed the motion to rule the amendment out of order on the spurious argument that it was out of the scope of the original motion, Chris d'Entremont ruled that it was in fact in order after conferring with the clerks at the Table. While it is a matter of debate whether the Deputy Speaker ruled correctly, he was well within his authority to do so.

After that, the amendment went to a vote and passed, and the motion, as amended, did as well.

The result? A watered-down motion that was more difficult to oppose, less offensive to more elements of the country’s Jewish community and clearer about the problems posed by both antagonists in the war passed, preventing a less balanced motion from causing a substantial change in Canada’s foreign policy in an inappropriately shallow way motivated by partisanship from doing so.

At the end of the day, faced with a motion that was likely to pass regardless, Parliament found a way to come as close as possible to the right answer, which is exactly what they are supposed to do.