It’s always an honour to speak in the House—particularly on a day and an issue like today.

Before I go too far, I’d like to mention that I would like to share my time with the member from Scarborough Southwest.

I listened very intently. I respect this place; I respect the people in it. I would like to welcome the people in the galleries, particularly the gentleman who survived the Holocaust.

I listened very intently to the Solicitor General. He said that sometimes we bump into history, and that’s true. As I was sitting and listening, I was thinking, “I’m a farm boy from northern Ontario. What am I doing speaking in a place like this about tragedies that are happening in the Middle East?”

The one thing I would like to say from the top is that Hamas is a terrorist organization. It terrorized the people of Israel, and it terrorizes the people of Palestine.

The way that I got into politics—I relate everything to personal experiences. I’m not Jewish. A non-Jew could never understand the persecution of the Jewish people—but I’d like to relay something that happened to me as a small child that was the closest I could ever come. Many people have heard me talk about my father, but I’ve never told this. My father was in Holland in World War II. This isn’t about my father. He never talked about World War II. Many people who have gone through calamities don’t talk about what they’ve gone through. My dad had a very difficult personality. He was God to me. I followed him everywhere. We were at a cattle auction, and the man next to him was Jewish; I didn’t know that at the time. I was about 10 or 11. He was wearing long sleeves. My dad was talking to him. I was a kid, just watching the cows go through the ring. But he lifted up his sleeve, and my dad started crying. He was also a survivor. I’d never seen my dad cry before. I looked at my dad’s face, and I was incredibly confused. I looked at the other man’s face—I can’t describe the look on his face. I still remember it. I remembered it on October 7. It was a look of horror and resolve—someone who had been to hell and survived and was never going to let that happen again. I think that is as close as I can come to having any knowledge of what Jewish people face, have faced through history, have faced through time. The look on that survivor’s face—it wasn’t the same look of sorrow and pain as my father’s; it was a look of horror and resolve to never let it happen again to his people.

It is hard to be angelic in times like that—I appreciated the words from the Solicitor General.

My dad never talked about what happened that day. I came home and asked my mom about it, and she told me about World War II, about the Holocaust. It wasn’t something that was discussed in our house. The only thing that my dad ever said—and there’s no Dutch translation here, so I’m not going to say it in Dutch—was, “The Jews will never back up. They can’t back up.” I think that is where we are today.

That’s a face I can’t get out of my head. But there are other faces I can’t get out of my head.

Before I continue, I’d like to just say that the one incredible thing about being in this House and being in this province and being in this country is that we can actually talk about tough issues that cause wars in other places.

My son-in-law is Lebanese. He has a different view of what’s happening in the Middle East. He was at my place at Thanksgiving, and we watched it—he was as horrified about the terrorist attacks as I was. If he was standing here, he would also say that Hamas is a terrorist organization.

I went to Lebanon two summers ago. My grandson was christened in a Greek Orthodox church in Lebanon. I saw Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and I looked in those people’s faces as well, and in their faces, I saw hopelessness—complete, utter hopelessness. At least from what I saw, all they want is what we all want: to raise our families in peace. I thought about that as I was watching on TV—as everyone else was watching on TV.

We have, in the Middle East, people who have gone through the horror of having to defend their right to exist and feeling they have to do so at all costs. And perhaps—I think they’re all on the same side. I think everyone, in my humble opinion—and it truly is a humble opinion, because I am the last person you want to listen to as knowing anything, really, about what’s truly going on in the Middle East. But the vast majority of people want to live in peace. It’s not an easy situation. Hamas is a terrorist organization. It did acts of terror. The Palestinian people are also suffering for those acts of terror, and that was expressed by the government’s side; I respect that.

It’s such a complicated place—the birthplace of many faiths and a bastion for the Jewish people, but there are many people who live there.

And it is incumbent on all of us who live in a democracy, who have the ability to agree to disagree, to make sure that we actually try to lessen the temperature and try to come to resolutions. It’s not easy. It’s not going to happen this morning. But we all need to realize that our words have impact on people who are dying on all sides—dying isn’t a side.

I’d like to turn the floor over to the member from Scarborough Southwest.

I’d like to thank you very much for your attention.

And thank you for being here.