John Ivison: Union finally does the right thing after a whole lot of wrong

The news that the national board of the Canadian Public Employees Union has called on its vice-president, Fred Hahn, to step down, after posting an antisemitic video, feels like a tipping point.

The union said in a release that it has lost confidence in Hahn, who is also president of its political wing, CUPE Ontario, for posting a digitally manipulated video that showed a Jewish Olympic athlete leaping off a diving board and turning into a bomb.

Hahn has claimed he has “never celebrated violence,” even though he wrote “resistance brings progress.”

His apparent ouster is a case of CUPE doing the right thing only after they have tried everything else. The union has backed Hahn to the hilt in the human rights complaint launched by 70 Jewish union members who say they have been “scared, silenced, discriminated, threatened and harassed” by CUPE’s reaction to the October 7 assault on Israel by Hamas.

A day after the attack, at a time when Jews around the world were emotionally shattered, Hahn praised “the power of resistance” on social media. Two weeks later, he apologized — as he has done in the case of the video — but in both cases, expediency, rather than conviction, seem to have been the motivation.

CUPE not only supported Hahn, it claimed the union was merely engaging in a disagreement over politics, putting it beyond the jurisdiction of the Ontario human rights code. Nowhere did it explain why a public sector union is so obsessed with Israel’s destruction, far less why it is comfortable with discriminating against a minority of its own members. The admission that Hahn was in the wrong may prove costly — the complainants are seeking $500,000 in damages.

More broadly, CUPE’s statement has the sense of a moment in time when the illiberal progressives who have dominated the public square for the last decade have been forced to acknowledge that they have steered so far in the opposite direction from the prevailing public mood that their position is no longer tenable.

It is a typically understated Canadian milestone — neither as brash as Bud Light’s fall from its perch as America’s top-selling beer after partnering with a transgender influencer, nor as weighty as the British response to an expert pediatric report that reviewed the treatment of transgender children and found that the majority should not manage gender-related distress with puberty-blockers or surgery.

But, in common with both those examples, Hahn’s disavowal by his own employer suggests the tide has well and truly turned.

Like the Liberal party’s decision not to take in the Ottawa Capital Pride parade after its organizers pledged support for Palestine and accused critics of “pink-washing” the war in Gaza, it seems to be an acknowledgment that the median voter is mad as hell and is not going to take it anymore.

The illiberal left has been unabashed about its intention to impose equality and “justice” for those deemed to be oppressed identity groups. Individual rights have been trampled and opponents bullied and cancelled. Rather than setting fair conditions and allowing outcomes to unfold through competition, playing fields have been tilted to favour particular groups.

American economist Milton Friedman once said that the society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. He has been proven prophetic (again).

Ideological zealots in government, media and civil society have imposed an agenda that has divided Western democracies into antagonistic tribes.

Business has quietly moved away from embracing this censorious, self-anointed vision. Diversity, equity and inclusion promises have not been kept and companies have publicly acknowledged that appearing to be “woke” is not good business.

Disney chief Bob Iger said that thrusting progressive social messages down the throats of moviegoers was bad box office. “We have to entertain first,” he said.

It’s proven to be bad politics too. As I pointed out here, the Trudeau government’s hubris that it alone had the blueprint to deliver sexual, racial, social and environmental justice is in large measure why it is now 20 points behind in the polls, trailing the Conservatives in every region, in every age group, with both men and women and on every major issue except climate change. Simply put, they left the median voter behind, convinced that they knew best.

Whether it was the Manson murders, the stabbing at the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont or the day they started selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, the ‘60s ended.

Arguably, October 7 put the nail in the coffin in the era of the illiberal left’s tyranny. Progressives justified the murder of the innocents because privileged “white” Jews could not be seen as victims. But it exposed the contradictions inherent in identifying “the oppressed” and preferred outcomes.

The Guardian’s Gaby Hinsliff argues that “woke” hasn’t peaked or run its course; rather, it has entered the mainstream and its goals are now those of the establishment.

But Western liberalism has long embraced incremental change and justice for all, regardless of sex, class or race.

This recent phenomenon was something else, decrying debate or common-sense reform. It granted people like the keffiyeh-clad Hahn a literal bullhorn to tell demonstrators: “We will live to see the end of apartheid Israel” and to claim the University of Toronto had no right to eject protests from private property on the basis that the UofT campus is “stolen land.”

I admit a degree of sober satisfaction at his downfall.

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