Ben Carr is running for the Liberal Party in Winnipeg South Centre. Image courtesy Ben Carr/Facebook.

Running in an election for the Communist Party of Canada is a great way to have a lot of surreal experiences quickly. For the most part, people are happy to talk to us and highly receptive to our ideas, however they choose to vote; and given the present state of things, I expect this receptiveness to grow. It’s the strong resistances that fascinate me, where hardcore anti-communists will simultaneously scoff at our supposed irrelevance and shake their fist at our presumed advance. I’ve heard versions of this contradictory dismissal on more than a few doorsteps, but I was surprised to see such kettle logic in the pages of the Globe and Mail, straight from the mouth of an incumbent MP for the Liberal Party of Canada.

To help make sense of things, I’ll start with a brief chronology of events during this quick election as concerns my riding, Winnipeg South Centre. On April 1, Winnipeg’s Asper Jewish Community Campus hosted an event called “Triggered, The Tour: From Combat to Campus,” featuring two Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers who participated firsthand in the siege on Gaza. Naturally, there were protests outside of this provocatively titled event, which gave voice to veterans of a current war that is regarded by most international observers as a well-evidenced genocide. Of course the protesters did not choose this location, but the next day, Ben Carr, Liberal MP for Winnipeg South Centre, rushed to the event’s defence on social media, calling for “bubble legislation” to protect religiously affiliated facilities from protest. “If one wants to make a political statement or protest public policy, I support, always, the right to do it,” Carr wrote, “but never in front of religiously affiliated spaces.”

Carr himself has previously attempted to interfere with Palestinian speakers at the University of Winnipeg, and recently voted against a ceasefire and arms embargo in the House of Commons—so his own record on this issue is........

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