It was William Shakespeare who wrote the warning to Julius Caesar in a play to “beware the ides of March,” alluding to an assassination attempt that was looming for Rome’s dictator at the midway point of that month.
The same words could have been used for Ontario’s New Democratic Party, who, on the ides of March earlier this year, thought they’d struck gold in the world of provincial politics.
With former leader Andrea Horwath gone to become the mayor of Hamilton, voters in Hamilton Centre overwhelmingly chose Sarah Jama as their new member of the legislature in a March 16 byelection.
Jama seemed right out of the NDP’s central casting department. She was a disability rights activist who needed a wheelchair to get around, having been born with cerebral palsy. She was of Somali descent, adding another female person of colour to the proceedings at Queen’s Park, where the MPPs are still disproportionately white and male. And she wasn’t yet 30 years old, thereby bringing some youthful vigour to the scene as well.
But ever since, Jama has had a hard time understanding the unwritten rules of party politics, the first of which is that provincial politics is a team sport. You can’t say whatever you want, whenever you want, because it may well be that the brain trust of the party that helped get you elected has a different message they want to promote.
So, during the byelection campaign, while the NDP was extolling their new MPP’s street cred on disability issues, Jama herself was being forced to defend comments she’d made calling Israel “an apartheid state.” She also tweeted: “You can’t defend the occupation and care about disability justice. Israel is disabling and killing entire families.”
Jama later apologized for the comments, thereby saving her candidacy, and when she won last March with more than half the votes, the controversy seemed to abate.
Until now.
When Hamas launched its sneak attack on Israel, murdering more than 1,200 citizens and taking another 150 hostage, Jama couldn’t resist commenting. She issued a tweet at a moment that might have called for some acknowledgment of the single worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust. But instead, she said this: “I’m reflecting on my role as a politician who is participating in this settler colonial system, and I ask that all politicians do the same.”
Other prominent New Democrats (Toronto’s Mayor, and both the federal and provincial party leaders) somehow sensed that the moment called for a strong, unequivocal statement that targeting women, children, and seniors for slaughter was morally repugnant. But Jama couldn’t do it. She couldn’t be a team player. And so, she thrust her party back into an unwanted debate over a war half a world away.
Let’s acknowledge a couple of things about Jama. First, she is married to a Palestinian and therefore genuinely feels the hurt of that community all the time. Second, she’s been a rookie politician for less than a year and still isn’t yet 30 years old — two things that suggest she hasn’t quite got the experience or maturity of her new job figured out yet.
If there’s someone at Queen’s Park to sympathize with in this mess, it’s Jama’s leader Marit Stiles. Stiles inherited Jama as a candidate and had no part in selecting her. She’s put her official opposition caucus through antisemitism training courses, well aware that the perception is that the NDP favours the Palestinian side of the Middle East debate. Heck, even Jewish NDP supporters favour the Palestinian side. But Stiles has been determined to create an Ontario NDP where even pro-Israeli Jews can feel comfortable, and all those efforts suffered a major setback with Jama’s freelancing.
What’s worse, I’m told virtually every member of the NDP caucus took a considerable amount of flak from the public over Jama’s statements. One even came close to quitting the caucus but so far has been talked off the ledge by senior party officials, according to a well-connected source. Asked to comment on that, the NDP declined.
Ironically, this should be a great time to be a New Democrat at Queen’s Park. You’re the official opposition. The Liberals are still six weeks away from picking their new leader, so to a certain extent, you have a monopoly on the microphone when it comes to excoriating the Ford government for its Greenbelt and Ontario Place sins/shortcomings.
And yet, Jama’s refusal to be a team player — regardless of how passionately she feels about the war — is infuriating her fellow caucus members and playing right into the government’s hands. Cabinet ministers are no doubt not so secretly delighted to have good cause to call for the MPP’s ouster, thereby changing the subject from their own malfeasance.
Yes, Jama received another dressing down from party elders and, yes, she apologized yet again for her remarkably insensitive tweets. But at some point, New Democrats, who are in the midst of creating the conditions for their best shot at winning an election in three decades, are going to ask themselves: how many more of these screw-ups are we supposed to put up with, before we take some much more serious action?
Good question.
Steve Paikin is a member of the TVO bargaining unit of the Canadian Media Guild that is on strike. He is writing a weekly column for The Trillium during the labour dispute.
