Selina Robinson’s new book is a tell-all about her exit from the BC NDP

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The sting of antisemitism that many Canadian Jews have been experiencing since Oct. 7, 2023, has led to this catastrophic comparison: This is what it must have felt like in 1930s Germany. This is a problematic parallel for many reasons. Chief among them is that in Nazi Germany, it was the government – and arms of government, including the police – leading and carrying out the antisemitism in the form of discriminatory laws and violence. Here, today, the threat is not coming from those in charge.

But what kind of support are they offering? Many in the Canadian Jewish community would say: not enough.

A reading of Truth Be Told, a new book by former B.C. cabinet minister Selina Robinson, will not offer much comfort in that regard. Ms. Robinson, who is Jewish, lost her seat in cabinet in February after an ugly comment made during a B’nai Brith webinar. Lamenting a lack of knowledge about Jewish history, she said that Israel had been founded on “a crappy piece of land with nothing on it.” She quickly corrected herself and afterward apologized multiple times, acknowledging her error, but it didn’t matter. There were, in fact, many people on that land – especially Arabs, who would certainly not call it “crappy,” but rather, home.

A few days later, Ms. Robinson lost her job as minister of post-secondary education. A month later, she quit the party’s caucus, alleging, in a damning open letter, that it had an antisemitism problem.

In her self-published book, Ms. Robinson gives her take on what went on behind the scenes, describing what she experienced as a betrayal by many of her NDP colleagues, especially Premier David Eby. When she texted him an apology for her webinar gaffe, he replied: “Happens to the best. Hang in there,” she discloses. A few days later, as the anger over what she said continued, he told her he could not “see a way forward.”

Truth Be Told, dedicated to the late former premier John Horgan, portrays Mr. Eby as being less concerned about doing the right thing and more focused on what Ms. Robinson describes as the mob demanding her resignation. This mob, she says, was after her long before she made those comments.

“I maintain that what happened is not because of what I said, but because of who I am. And this is not something I can change.”

I have gotten to know Ms. Robinson because of her advocacy for Holocaust education; she reached out to me to discuss the issue in the spring of 2023, and we have stayed in touch. She recently sent me an advance copy of her book, which goes on sale Dec. 18. She describes returning to the legislature and feeling abandoned by her colleagues, as protests raged outside her new, non-ministerial office. In this low period, she had an idea: to bring Jews and Muslims together for dialogues. Ms. Robinson pitched her project to the Premier’s then-chief of staff. Buoyed, she made calls to the Jewish and Muslim communities. Two weeks later, she writes, the Premier’s office declared it “too political.”

A month after she lost her cabinet position, after not hearing from Mr. Eby that whole time, she writes, he asked for a meeting. Maybe, she thought, he had reconsidered her dialogue project. Instead, she writes, he asked if she knew that her constituency executive was planning to write a letter to the party expressing discontent with her treatment. Mr. Eby asked for her thoughts about him reaching out to them, to encourage them not to write the letter, she says. Immediately after that meeting, she resigned.

There are other allegations – that Mr. Eby went months after her cancer diagnosis without asking her how she was doing; a dispute they had over hedge-trimming at UBC; a phone call where he hung up on her. But what rankles her is the lack of caring about the antisemitism she was experiencing. While she doesn’t think most of her former NDP colleagues are antisemitic, she writes, “I can be 100-per-cent certain, however, that I can count on one hand the number of my former colleagues who are anti-antisemitic.”

That is a chilling thing for any Canadian Jew to read. It should be a chilling thing for any Canadian, in fact. If someone so deeply involved with and beloved by a political party and government can feel this way, where does that leave the rest of us?

During an editorial board meeting at The Globe and Mail before the B.C. fall election, I asked Mr. Eby about Ms. Robinson. “I think it’s awful that Selina didn’t feel that she was able to stay in our caucus,” he said. “I reflect on that, what I could have done better, what I could have done differently.” He called her an important voice, said her loss was significant, and said he was committed to fighting hate “in all forms.”

I choose to take some comfort in that.