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Melissa: The Voice of Canada's Jews in Parliament

Writer's picture: Elyte StudiosElyte Studios

 

Meet Melissa.


A true force to be reckoned with in the ring of Canadian politics. A woman who has risen through the ranks quickly and has taken on the role and responsibility of restoring Canada to her former potential and global standing; she has also become the protector and warrior for Canada’s Jewish community.


Melissa has a unique perspective that not many people are granted access to. She is face to face with Canadian leadership daily and fights for all Canadians who are struggling in a Canada that many no longer recognize. She fights for the safety of Canadians in an increasingly crime-ridden environment where laws are not being enforced. She regularly stands up demanding answers from the government for the questions so many Canadians are asking.


Melissa was born in Canada to immigrant parents. Her father was an uncredentialed engineer that upon immigrating to Canada drove a cab in order to be able to send his wife to school, to be able to live in a nice neighbourhood, and to send his children to bilingual schools to give them every opportunity. Melissa is the direct result of the Canada that was – where people could rise “from the front seat of a taxi to the front row of Parliament in one generation.”


Like all of us, Melissa watched in shock and horror as the updates flooded her screens in the wake of October 7th. As the the clock struck midnight and the calendar turned to October 7th in Canada, Israelis began experiencing the worst massacre in their history, and the Jewish community watched as the worst massacre against Jewish people since the Holocaust unfolded.


“I hope the Rabbi isn’t reading this,” she joked. “I was at a Sukkot dinner, it was the last night. We were hanging out in the neighbourhood, at a friend of mine’s sukkah. It was late, we hadn’t yet gotten up from the table. It so happened that I was in Israel for Passover with family a few months earlier, and had the rocket alerts app turned on in my phone because there was rocket fire during our visit. My phone was in my pocket because the hosts were more observant. All of a sudden, and at the same time, a few people’s phones started beeping with the same alerts. It could have been an amber alert, so I excused myself to go check my phone in private. And then I saw the sheer volume of rockets and knew that this was something unusual.”


Because of her political role, Melissa took screenshots from the rocket alerts app and sent them to her team members, letting them know that something was unfolding on the ground in Israel – it was still too early to know what – but that they should assemble a morning crew in Ottawa. As a public servant there is an obligation to inform others of what is going on.


When she went to bed that night, she knew this was different than the usual rocket alerts in Israel. But she could never have prepared herself for the scenes she saw when she awoke.  “I was glued to the TV, I don’t understand what happened, how it happened, how it was allowed to happen. Over the next few days it became very clear what happened, and it was on October 9th that we had our first gathering as a community in Toronto with ten or fifteen thousand people.”


It was then that Melissa took to the stage as the voice of the community that raised her. “I warned the community to pay attention to who would stand with us in the long term, and who was there to play politics and pay lip service. The narrative as to what happened changed quickly. It wasn’t my place to go join a foreign army; that’s not who I work for. I have a job; I’ve been instilled with a level of trust and confidence by a large community in my riding. My job is to ensure that the Jewish community in Canada remains protected.”


The government of Canada in the year since October 7th has been off side. Melissa has been working tirelessly to try to make them to the right thing. “It’s been hard.”


Watching the government of Canada’s response to the massacre was disheartening and disappointing to Canadian Jews, as well as to allies of the community. In Melissa’s words it was “unsurprising.”


“Even though it’s unsurprising, everyone has hope that somebody would do the right thing. But when [Trudeau] has constantly done the wrong thing year after year on issue after issue, then you have no faith that he’s going to suddenly wake up in the morning and do the right thing. In fact, it’s worse than that, because he plays both sides of the issue, and everybody’s eyes are open to it now. He picked a side. It’s the wrong side of history. I think history won’t be kind to him on this one.”


Melissa visited Israel in the wake of October 7th to represent Canada, even if the government wouldn’t. She visited in November, a month after the carnage, a time when the country was still putting itself back together. “It was a pretty shocking trip. It was very raw. Israel was very empty. It didn’t feel like an Israel that I’d ever been to. It was all hands on deck for helping with this effort, in any way we knew how, as those in the diaspora that cared about a homeland for the Jewish people.”


“It was shocking because it felt for the first time that something shifted in the Israel-Canada relationship.  The relationship between Canada and Israel is something that needs a lot of care going forward.”


A positive takeaway for Melissa amidst all of the suffering and pain on this trip was the way that Israelis of all walks of life we able to override their preconceptions and stereotypes and band together to save their country, however they could. “You saw millennials who were always laughed at for their Tel Aviv brunches with avocado toasts and their dogs stepping up to do anything they could. Gen Z’s with their TikTok dances became the soldiers who went to battle, Ultra Orthodox (Haredi) men were barbequing for soldiers. When push comes to shove and there is a threat against the future and viability of a Jewish state, everybody steps up in ways that we couldn’t imagine. It makes you feel the need to play whatever small role you can in the fight for the continuation of Jewish sovereignty”


“I am in awe of those who did and who continue to do the heavy lifting for a country that I don’t call my own as a residence, but I call my own as a Jewish person.” 


The Canadian population at large, let alone the Jewish community, has been watching in horror as terror and crime have overtaken the once orderly and neighbourly nature of our country. We have seen terror supporting mobs take over streets, malls, public infrastructure as the police stand by, not enforcing the laws that are in place to prevent scenes like the ones we’ve seen. “We have an enforcement problem, insofar as that we don’t have enforcement. We have universities seeking injunctions for what is obviously trespassing, we have police seeking those same injunctions, wanting the courts to make the determinations on what to do. It’s complete chaos.”


“Beyond this, we have seen crime rates rise all over the country; violent crime, gang related crime, car theft, and more. This is all in the criminal code, but there has been a complete lack of consequences being imposed on the criminals.” When crime goes unpunished, in any capacity, it leads to an rise in crimes with increasing violence, while criminals act with impunity. The rallies and encampments we have seen are merely a microcosm of what has been happening in Canada at large.


University presidents in Canada have been brought to testify in the House of Commons, as we saw their American counterparts testify in the senate. “They said all the right things, and I think they’ve abdicated their leadership in making sure that everyone in the university community feels safe on campus. I think it’s been a monumental failure. Universities have effectively been held hostage and the administration has been placating the demands of largely external agitators. That should tell you everything that you need to know about these institutions, the kinds of places they are, and who they welcome.”


“Canada especially has seen a steep rise in antisemitism. It is present in the public education sector starting as early as in middle school and has taken root in institutions of higher education. Looking to the future to correct this epic failure is going to require a massive amount of change. “It comes from the very top of our country, and if we had one clear position from the beginning then these things wouldn’t have escalated to the point where they are now. We have some big problems with institutionalized antisemitism in a way that we haven’t seen before in Canada. It’s in our unions, our school boards, our universities, and came in under the guise of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, which has inverted anything that makes sense. It’s inverted the oppressor and the oppressed, it’s inverted historical wrongs, it is a system that functions in accordance of what you look like and doesn’t account for merit and pluralism; something that this country was founded on and excelled in.”


Melissa will never turn her back on Canada. “I’m never not going to say that Canada is not the best country in the world. I think it’s the best country in the world. I think I won the birth lottery by my parents choosing this country, giving them every opportunity to get ahead, which in effect gave me every opportunity to get ahead. We can never erase that, and we must bring that back.”


Canada is full of smart people, natural resources, and potential. “When I think of Canada, I think of squandered potential rather than a country that has some middling weak power. I think we have so much to offer the world, and with the right person at the helm, we can unlock that potential.

Canada as of late has been a country that has lost its hope. Canada has become a place that has seen its once peaceful communities be divided based on race, religion, place of origin, beliefs. “We’re not polarized, the government has polarized us. We have had leadership that drives division.” Canada is a place that needs to turn around, for the sake of all Canadians, so it can return to a place of safety and security.


“I think we have weak leadership in this country. One that lacks moral clarity and has turned its back on an ally and a community within Canada, one that apologizes for Canadian values. The good news is that it wasn’t like this before this Prime Minister [Trudeau] and it won’t be like this under a new Prime Minister.”


The Jewish community in Canada faced its own unique set of challenges both pre and post October 7th.

“We have an incredibly tight knit community, one that takes care of each other.”  For the majority of Canadians, the number one issue they face daily is the cost-of-living crisis, and the security crisis at large.


The Jewish community was plagued with this as well, of course, but it also was facing a rising tide of antisemitism. “We’ve never seen antisemitism so out of control. I didn’t think that I would be part of the only party in the country that wanted to do more to protect the Jewish community. I thought everybody would rally around and condemn the firebombing of synagogues, and gunshots at schools. These things should be condemned, no ifs, ands or buts. We should be doing everything possible to root out terrorists from our country, to make sure that we have security and infrastructure funding for our institutions. But there are people that show up to the press conferences, say the right things, and go back to their offices to do nothing – at every level of government.”


“My advocacy had to change because we had to have a voice. I happened to be in that spot. I’m not any more special than anybody else. I’m doing what anybody in my position would do, standing up for a community that feels terrified. I’m lucky enough to have been a part of this community my entire life. We also have many people outside of our community who are also standing up. We have Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party, who is unwavering in his position. We have an entire caucus of which they don’t need to do this. We have allies in the Persian community and the Hindu community and our Christian communities all over the place, and we have a growing sentiment in Canada of ordinary people that looks at what is happening and thinks that ‘this is not okay.’”


What is happening in Canada is embarrassing on a global scale, as we watch radical Islamism take hold as it goes unchallenged. “I speak to friends and family members who are in Israel, or those who go back and forth, those who have kids in the army and are fighting for our survival, and they are asking us, as Canadians, if we are ok. We (Canadians) have stopped asking them – the ones in a war. They see the scenes on social media and on the news and are worried about us!”


“It’s a thing you hear now, it’s constant.” Not only from members of the Jewish community, but Canadians at large with the resources are looking to leave Canada. There are many who don’t have the resources to do so and are stuck in Canada with the hopes that things are going to improve.


“I have said this before, it wasn’t like this before this Prime Minister, and it won’t be like this after him. We will have a renewed relationship with a longstanding ally. We will be a strong and thriving Jewish community here, in Canada. We have seen our community step up in ways that we had not seen before.  We will see order restored. I hope that everybody does a little bit more tomorrow than they did yesterday, and a little bit more the day after that than they did two weeks ago. With that kind of resolve, freedom, democracy, and the rule of law will prevail. It has in this country, it always will.”


To learn more, please visit: https://melissalantsmanmp.ca/

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