Speaker, as we all know, this House is recognizing October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so I wanted to share with the House one of the most inspiring events that I had the privilege of attending this summer.

I met with a group of amazing women. They support each other and they inspire the world. Each one of these grandmothers, mothers, daughters, sisters and aunts have undergone, or are currently undergoing, treatment for breast cancer. They are also members of Breast Cancer Action Kingston, and they call themselves Chestmates because they are dragon boaters. They are a dragon boat team, a group of up to 25 members in a 25-foot-long boat paddling their hearts out. They train several times a week all summer long, competing in several dragon boat races against other breast cancer survivors.

It was humbling to watch these health-and-heart warriors propel themselves, showing their strength in unity, their positive spirit to continue to fight to survive and, most importantly, showing their love for each other as they paddled.

Cancer affects everyone. In all cases, cancer causes massive disruption to the individual and the entire family. But thankfully, today more frequently there are success stories, not tragedies.

I thank you, Mr. Speaker, and as the Chestmates say, paddles up.

Speaker, I wish to start by sharing the content of an email that I received from a former colleague of mine and a constituent. Her name is Robin. Robin is a professor at St. Lawrence College, working in classes for students with English as a second language. Robin and her family had taken a family trip to Israel for a wedding. They were scheduled to leave Israel on Saturday, October 7, but because of the brutal attacks by Hamas on the people of Israel, they didn’t get to leave; they needed to take cover. They ended up spending most of the day hiding in a bomb shelter. The email she sent me said that they had been waiting for safe passage out of Israel, and that they heard that there are over 1,000 Canadian citizens also in need of leaving Israel—some of them are residents; many of them were tourists.

I’m thankful that my friends are currently safe, and I hope that they can soon return home to safety. Unfortunately, this is not the same story for everyone after the horrific attacks.

Thousands of Israelis were attending a music festival in Gaza, and suddenly they were under fire. One concert attendee, Gili Yoskovich, told the BBC, “I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to die, it’s okay, just breathe, just close your eyes,’ because [there] was shooting everywhere. It was very, very close to me.” That is not what someone attending a concert should be saying.

For anyone listening who doesn’t know, Hamas is called the Islamic Resistance Movement—with the goal of creating an independent Islamic state within historical Palestine. They have maintained that Palestine is an Islamic homeland that can never be surrendered to non-Muslims. Put bluntly, according to United Nations standards and Canadian law, Hamas is a terrorist organization, plain and simple, and they wish to eradicate the Israeli state.

Let’s talk about what happened on Saturday, October 7. This was not a liberation movement. It was a brutal attack on humanity. Many news outlets have reported that the Hamas terrorists who infiltrated Israel were carrying manuals with instructions on how to kidnap and torture people. This was a planned attack, with the purpose to cruelly torture their captives. This was not a military-to-military battle. Quite simply, this was an attack on everyday civilian people simply trying to enjoy an event.

As of yesterday, and I may be wrong on this, it’s been confirmed that five Canadians have been amongst the many who have been killed because of this attack. I’m told that currently, over 1,400 Israeli people, mostly civilians, are dead, and I fear that my numbers are inaccurate and they’re growing.

We’ve learned through media reporting that there have been top-secret documents found on the corpses of some of the Hamas terrorists detailing plans on how to kill as many people as possible in targeted places like elementary schools and a youth centre. Other documents have been shown to give the directive to achieve the highest level of human loss possible and then take captives. The mission was clear: Their strategy was to hurt and to murder as many innocent civilians as possible.

Following the attack, many Ontario citizens expressed their grief and their fear. They may have family and friends in Israel. They may have family and religious roots in Israel. Everyone watched in horror as they saw children and the elderly being beaten, being taken, being slaughtered and, as we’ve heard today, even being beheaded.

As the Premier of this province said on Tuesday, these attacks are not just another conflict somewhere on the other side of the world. This is an attack where, because of the history of the Holocaust, it is even more important for us to intervene. Atrocities like the Holocaust can never be repeated, not while we’re standing by.

The motion before the House today emphasizes our government’s commitment to human rights, to democracy and to the Jewish community. Across the world and across history, Jewish people have a long history of persecution. We need to stand together and support the Jewish people here in Ontario and in Israel.

As democratically elected representatives of the province of Ontario, it is important that we defend our democracy and all democracies around the world. Israel is one of the few democratic states in the Middle East. Hamas has declared war on a democratic, sovereign nation. When someone attacks one democracy, they have, in fact, attacked all democracies.

And all of this because of a hateful set of beliefs. It shocks and amazes me that a belief in God, a belief in any religions which guide us on how to get along with each other, ends up as a horrible excuse for murderous brutality. I’ve never been able to understand that.

Within this House, there are many people of many faiths, ideologies, beliefs, but we can work together because we choose to work together in a civil setting and work through our differences. Hamas has not done that. Hamas is not willing to do that. Instead, they choose to take matters into their own bloody hands in an attempt to show who is somehow most powerful.

Now, at a time when Ontarians and the world were grieving, the member from Hamilton Centre chose to post on social media justifying this unprovoked attack. She chose deliberately harsh and inflammatory rhetoric, claiming that Israel’s generations-long occupation of Palestine was nothing other than settler colonialism. When Israel, Ontario and the whole world are grieving, it is not the time for someone to monopolize their own personal social agenda. It is a time when the people of Ontario are looking to us, their elected representatives in this place of power, to be their support.

We have heard that on October 7, more innocent Jewish men, women, children and infants were killed on that day than on any other day since the Holocaust of World War II. Whether or not the intention of the statement by the member of Hamilton Centre was to aggrieve the Jewish communities of Ontario, I assure this House, it did. And it aggrieved the majority of peaceful Ontarians of any faith.

Following the publishing of the member’s statement on social media, the Leader of the Opposition then requested an apology from her own member and a retraction of that offensive comment. At that time, obviously, the leader of the NDP recognized that the comment posted online was wholly inappropriate. It’s unfortunate that the leader’s words were weak and subsequently ignored.

As has been mentioned, in the previous term of this House, the then member for Lanark–Frontenac–Kingston made offensive comments regarding a federal cabinet minister and shared those same comments through social media. At that time, this House stood together for the decorum of our democratic House, using a very similar motion to what we are looking at today. That member was given an order from this House that an apology to the Speaker’s satisfaction was to be made. Mr. Hillier—my former MPP, actually—chose to ignore those instructions from the House. Madam Speaker, I believe, and I think that all members here believe, that it is motions like this that ensure the dignity of this House and its members.

Early in 2022, the opposition found themselves in a similar situation. It was discovered a member of their own caucus was demonstrating a pattern of publishing troubling Islamophobic, homophobic and racist views. The provincial director of the NDP at the time wrote a statement saying, “Any other candidate and any other caucus member—in any context ... attempting to run for any reasonable party—would be disqualified for ever having been a member of an Islamophobic, racist group.” The previous leader and her party understood how important it was for the members of this House to be true representatives of all the people of Ontario.

We may not like it all the time, but as elected officials, we are held to a higher standard. Today, we are calling on this House to come together as a democratic institution to uphold that standard. Now and long into the future, the people of Ontario must know that racism and discrimination will not be condoned by this institution.

Madam Speaker, when I last heard from my friend Robin, it was that her children had found flights into Europe and that their parents were waiting on help and a possible flight from our heroic Canadian Armed Forces. I think, and I hope, that they are safe, and I weep for all the families and the friends that don’t have that hope. She had reached out to me as the only elected official that she knew personally.

So I hope and I believe we must—I hope this House respects the term “elected official” by passing this motion and ensuring that everyone knows that we will always condemn that horrific and violent attack.