OPSEU/SEFPO has published its official Statement of Respect, the statement read aloud when its members gather. Watch who gets named — and who doesn’t.
The statement accords respect to persons “including and not limited to people of African descent, Black, Caribbean, South Asian, Asian, Palestinian, women, men, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples.”
Palestinians are named. Jews are not. Nowhere. Not once.
Do not tell me they named no religions. Judaism is an ethno-religion, and OPSEU knows it. They found room in their liturgy for the one party to a foreign war — a political cause dressed as an ethnicity — and no room for the Jewish members of their own union.
And when was this published? March of this year. In a country where, Statistics Canada reports, roughly 70% of religiously motivated hate crimes are directed at Jews. Six months after OPSEU posted it, a gunman opened fire outside a Belleville synagogue on Kol Nidre, shouting “You are going to die for the Jews,” and only a police officer stationed outside — there because the congregation needed guarding — kept him from the worshippers inside, taking multiple bullets to do it. Canada came within one wounded constable of a massacre. That is the country Jewish Canadians live in. Their own union’s statement of respect does not contain their name.
This was no error. Statements like this are read, reviewed, and approved before a union posts them as its official word. They chose to put Palestinian in. They chose to leave Jewish out. Both choices were deliberate, and both were made by an institution whose conduct toward Jews is consistent in every direction you look.
This is the union that made BDS official policy in 2024, advocating, in its own words, “the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against apartheid in Israel.”
This is the union whose president, JP Hornick, stood before the U of T encampment and promised: “Our job is to put our bodies in between you and whatever the administration brings at you. If the police come, we will be your human shields, we will be your line of defense.”
And this is the union that will not say whether it disciplined campaign officer Rawan Qaddoura after her posts resurfaced: “Every time I read about Hitler, I fall in love all over again.” “I honestly wish I was born at the time of the Second World War just to see the genius, Hitler, at work.” She was a teenager, we are told. Most teenagers, somehow, manage not to profess love for Hitler.
Twenty-seven Jewish OPSEU members have filed human rights complaints against this union, alleging a culture of antisemitism. They are being taken before a tribunal by their own members. Watch this video, and ask yourself whether those members are wrong.
I know this institution from the inside. I am taking OPSEU — my own Local 562, which is not some rogue branch but the union as a member actually meets it — before the Ontario Labour Relations Board for breach of its duty of fair representation. OPSEU closed my case almost a year before I was fired.
I say, and my application sets out, that they dropped me because I am a pro-Israel member of an institution that has made anti-Israel politics its own, and that does not provide representation to members like me. This video is not an aberration. It is the institution explaining itself.
A statement of respect that cannot bring itself to name the Jews is not a statement of respect. It is a map of who counts.
I'm an OPSEU member and this pisses me off.
Sue them into bankruptcy.