The Canadian state has tried to cultivate an image and identity as an exception among settler colonial nations—a leader in both Indigenous reconciliation and multiculturalism domestically and a neutral peacemaker on the world stage.
There’s one obvious exception to this cultivated image. Canada has made an exception of Palestine in its self-proclaimed dedication to racial equity and global human rights, supporting Israel unconditionally despite its documented apartheid, arbitrary detention and torture (including of children), forced expulsions, illegal settlements, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous Palestinian people.
“Palestine is not the exception,” says legal scholar Dr. Noura Erakat. “The rule is the colonial framework.”
Canada has a longstanding failure to respond to Indigenous and racialized voices calling for the most basic humanitarian treatment of Palestinians. Dr. Rinaldo Walcott said in October that this “exposes the bankrupt situational morality of Canadian politics in a settler-colonial country that can only but support white settler politics elsewhere as the condition of its own existence.”
The moral litmus test of Palestinian solidarity reveals the hollowness of so-called progressive policies of diversity, equity and inclusion—and reconciliation. Rather than redressing injustice, these policies have become redirections that do little to disturb structural inequities and the dehumanization of Black, Indigenous and racialized people.
As we witness Israel make the last push towards the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Canada remains unwilling to recognize the settler colonial nature of this genocide. Recognizing that Canada’s complicity with Israel is a product of its own settler colonialism means that decolonization in Palestine is intrinsically linked to decolonization here on Turtle Island.
What does decolonization mean to Canadian policy makers?
“Settler colonialism is, first and foremost, defined by the elimination of the Indigenous peoples of the land and their replacement with settlers from elsewhere,” writes Muhannad Ayyash. To supplant Indigenous sovereignty with total settler rule, settler colonial states such as Canada, the United States, Australia and Israel—as well as the defeated settler colonial projects in South Africa and Algeria —use violent tactics such as forced assimilation, expulsion and genocide.
Decolonization in Canada requires accepting two truths—that settler colonialism is an ongoing reality and that decolonization means returning stolen land and a return to Indigenous sovereignty. But Canadian institutions continue to systematically obfuscate public understanding of Canada as a white supremacist settler colonial state, while actively suppressing Indigenous self-governance and land rights.
The formation of the Canadian state “from first contact to the present, constitutes genocide against Indigenous peoples,” according to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The British claim to these lands—from the 1496 Doctrine of Discovery, the 1670 Hudson’s Bay Company Royal Charter, and the 1867 British North America Act—required an erasure of Indigenous peoples and their relationship to the land and a recasting of that land as property and resource. British Columbia’s 1859 Land Proclamation granted the Crown authority over “all the lands in British Columbia,” which it referred to as “unoccupied.”
This erasure, and the supremacy of the Christian white settler population, are built into Canadian laws and policy. “The very fact that the Indian Act is very much in force today, 150 years after Confederation, is an indication of just how deeply this colonial ideology is embedded in the Canadian psyche, as well as into its legal framework,” says Arthur Manuel in The Reconciliation Manifesto.
As Indigenous Studies scholars Dr. Eve Tuck and Dr. K. Wayne Yang stress, “this violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation.”
Lynne Groulx, Native Women’s Association of Canada CEO, says,
“We know it’s difficult for some people to accept that genocide is not just a legacy of Canada’s colonial past, but an ongoing crime of massive proportions which continues to claim lives today. This inability to accept the reality is a barrier that blocks efforts to end the violence.”
Indigenous activism has forced the Canadian state to acknowledge some of its more recent atrocities. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was born out of a legal settlement with residential school survivors to make a public record of this component of Canada’s genocide against Indigenous peoples. The federal government, the RCMP, and Christian churches made formal apologies to the survivors, and in 2015 the government committed to the TRC’s 94 calls to action. In 2019, the Prime Minister accepted the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls’ (MMIWG) finding that the continuing murder and disappearance of Indigenous women and girls constitutes a genocide.
Canadian institutions and politicians are now adopting language and practices that acknowledge traditional stewardship of these lands. But these not only fall short, they mask the ways Canada actively upholds white settler supremacy. As the federal government was making its apologies, it simultaneously resisted the United Nations’ 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for 14 years. In the eight years since its commitment to the TRC’s calls to action, only 13 out of 94 have been fully addressed.
The Indian Act, the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the recurrent cases of unwanted sterilization of Indigenous women, the continued use of birth alerts and the child welfare system to break up Indigenous families, police brutality, the systemic lack of access to essentials such as housing, water, food and healthcare on reserves and the persistent criminalization and brutalization of land defenders in favour of the resource extraction industry. Canada’s commitment to reconciliation is hollow, and its opposition to decolonization is complete.
Settler colonialism is a crime against humanity that depends upon the complete dehumanization of Indigenous peoples. For Canada to cultivate its international image as a champion of peace and human rights—a point of pride for many Canadian settlers—while violently suppressing Indigenous peoples requires actively erasing its colonial past and present.
Social justice scholar Lucy El-Sharif outlines ways this effort to maintain settler fantasies of innocence is evident in the education of newcomers. The citizenship coursebook glosses over pre-colonial Indigenous sovereignty, mass murder, land theft, Indigenous resistance, breaking of treaties, apartheid, residential schools, sterilization and the 60s scoop—while presenting sanitized narratives of settler arrival to terra nullius, a Latin term which translates to “nobody’s land.”
Colonial powers stand together against Indigenous sovereignty
Earlier this year, BC’s (now-former) post-secondary education minister Selina Robinson repeated these settler colonial tropes of empty lands and uncivilized peoples that have been used to justify genocide both in the building of the Israeli and Canadian states. She claimed Palestine was a “crappy piece of land with nothing on it” before 1948 and that “it didn’t produce an economy, it couldn’t grow things, it didn’t have anything on it.” This is, of course, false.
Robinson even went so far as to make an analogy between British Columbia and Israel, but failed to recognize the settler colonialism in both cases. She asked if First Nations were at war over land, “would we weigh in as regular people?” This comment normalizes Israeli and Canadian settlers simultaneously, and situates Indigenous lands in an abstract ‘elsewhere’ to occupied ones.
Canada’s continued support of fellow settler colonial state Israel reinforces its own position. Like Canada, Israel is a product of British colonialism’s designation of Palestine as terra nullius for the formation of an ethno-religious settler colonial state. Like Canada, Israeli territorial expansion requires the erasure of Palestinians and their relationship to the land—and a recasting of that land as property and a resource. Like Canada, this violence is not limited to the 1948 Nakba, but is reasserted each day of occupation. Like Canada, Indigenous resistance in Palestine is recast as criminal activity.
In the face of “one of the most horrific episodes of calculated cruelty in modern history,” in the words of Ussama Makdisi, Canada stands with Israel because these states’ white supremacist settler colonial projects align. Far from Palestine being the exception, Canada’s relationship to the rest of the world reflects its white settler coloniality.
Canada makes a show of its environmental pledges while contributing an outsized share of global emissions that disproportionately affect the Global South. Canada touts its open-door multiculturalism while its treatment of foreign workers is tantamount to slavery. Canada promotes human rights yet is home to 60 per cent of the world’s mining companies that violently exploit racialized labour with impunity. Canada positions itself as a leader on Indigenous reconciliation on the world stage all while arming the oppression of Indigenous people worldwide.
And in very recent history, Canada supported South African apartheid—repeatedly voting against UN resolutions condemning the racism of apartheid and refusing to sign the 1973 UN Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. South African apartheid police received training from the RCMP, Canada continued to sell weapons to the apartheid regime despite the UN arms embargo and opposed Black liberation efforts, including those of the African National Congress (ANC). While parliament finally introduced economic sanctions against South Africa in 1986, Canada continued to do business with the apartheid regime until its end.
“Canadian officials, like their counterparts in other Western countries, made increasingly strong statements against apartheid, but continued to support full economic and diplomatic relations with the white minority regime ... and denied meaningful support to South Africa’s Black population.”
Canada upheld an immoral position grounded in the dehumanization of Black people at the cost of thousands of lost lives and decades of oppression for Black South Africans. And the Canadian state has been concurrently supporting the apartheid regime of Israel whose crimes against humanity have been denounced (far before the most recent escalated aggression) by the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and Doctors Without Borders, among other human rights organizations, and by Palestinians themselves.
Nelson Mandela said of South African liberation, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” Now, as a liberated South Africa takes Israel to the International Court of Justice for the crime of genocide, it is time for Canada carve a different path forward.
What does progressive policy on Palestine look like?
A truly progressive path forward would be for Canada to end its complicity with Israel and support the decolonization of Palestine.
Canada can support a Palestinian-led path to sovereignty by answering Palestinians’ own calls for justice. These include, in the short term, an immediate and permanent ceasefire, the release of all imprisoned Palestinians, an end to the siege of Gaza, an end to the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, a return of stolen land and homes on illegal settlements, the right of return for Palestinians forced out of their homes and off their lands including in the global diaspora, full socio-economic equality for Palestinians and a right to self-determination, economic reparations, criminal prosecution for Israel’s war crimes and global accountability for complicity in this genocide, including Canada and Canadians’ own complicity.
At a minimum, Canada must vote in support of all UN efforts to bring such justice for Palestinians and cut all diplomatic ties and economic trade with Israel, including a permanent arms embargo. All public funds should be divested from companies that profit from the apartheid, displacement, and genocide of Palestinians.
At a local level, municipal and provincial policy makers need to show public support for Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and allies to protect them from further racist attacks and affirm their right to free speech and political protest. Provincial curricula need to include education on the recognition of colonialism, settler colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide in all forms, including within Canada’s own history and present state. Municipal and provincial public institutions, including post-secondary institutions, must divest from and cut ties with the apartheid regime.
Ultimately, Canadian policy and politicians should stop normalizing the occupation—because not denouncing it to the fullest is to be complicit.
Canada is not the model of progressive politics it purports to be but instead a model of entrenched settler colonialism—to which a state like Israel aspires.
Questioning the legitimacy of the Israeli state necessarily puts into question the legitimacy of the Canadian state. The answer for Canada and Canadian settlers is not to turn away from decolonization in Palestine, but to pursue a path to decolonization here. This means answering Indigenous calls for abolition, reparations, land back and sovereignty. To dehumanize is dehumanizing—decolonization is a path to liberation for everyone.
Thank you to the three anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this piece and to M. Muhannad Ayyash for reviewing an earlier version in November. Ayyash and Jeremy Wildeman’s 2023 book Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine is a valuable resource on this topic.
