The problem is that it's European.
People who say that it's the Jewish side of Israel that is causing it to be a murderous ethno-supremacist genocidal apartheid state are being anti-Semitic. All of that comes from the European part of Israel's nature.
In a healthy and functioning democracy, all I would need to do is research the issues, the party policies, the candidates, cast my vote and go about my life with a minimal level of stress.
As I am not in a healthy and functioning democracy I instead pounded the pavement and campaigned for Vote Palestine and my local Liberal candidate, Adam Van Koverden, who publicly did everything that I could realistically expect of him on the Palestinian cause.
He won. But there's a lot in the election that gives me a lot of stress.
And here I will vent about it.
I have spent quite some time on this blog, and in my life, shouting at anyone who would care to listen about the deficiencies in the "Winner Take All" First past the post electoral system Canada uses at all levels of governance. As a customary jab at Justin Trudeau and his broken promise on reform, the reason I specify "Winner Take All" is that his preferred system, Instant Runoff Voting, is also a "winner Take All" system.
But that is a tangent as the purpose of this blog is not to dunk on Justin Trudeau but to fulfill my destiny as an electoral reform nerd by designing my own system. To very much toot my own horn, and also wallow in horror at the amount of time I wasted on this when I really should be trying to sell my novel, I also simulated what the 2021 election would have looked like under this system.
Tremble at my glory! Or pity me. Or do both. Both works.
So, permit me to introduce the CLMP system which stands for...
As a Prime Minister Trudeau, at his best, was witty and concise. Within the space of a soundbite he was able to capture a moment the way he wanted the world to see it; presenting it to the camera with a winning mixture of charm and gravitas that was able to go, at least by the standards of Canadian politics, viral.
Two of these moments bookend his career. The first came when he was newly elected on a sunny November day in Ottawa where he responded to a question on why he had a gender balanced cabinet with the quip of "Because it's 2015".1 It was a break from the dark and angry days of his predecessor, Stephen Harper, and cemented his image as a bold, progressive and inclusive leader, strong in his principles and set on building a brighter and more hopeful future. He successfully set the tone for what was an unusually long honeymoon with the Canadian public.
Recently (on the 27th of Feb 2025) an election was held in the province of Ontario, my place of residence. The most important part of the results is that the ruling party of the Progressive Conservatives under Doug Ford got about 42% of the vote, got about 60% of the seats, and therefore earned themselves 100% of the political power in the province for four years thanks to the First Past The Post (FPTP) rules of the election system.1 It was a cynical snap election call and Ford was rewarded for it, evidence of an unhealthy society and a broken election system.
This outcome is pretty much exactly what advocates of a proportional system like me decry as undemocratic as, under proportional systems (henceforth called PR) getting about 40% of the votes means a party gets about 40% of the seats and has to negotiate power with other parties. Another fun bit of factual ammunition that came out of the election was the NDP party getting about 11% less of the vote than the Liberals (around 600K votes less) and yet getting double the number of seats as them.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's a mess.
And Justin Trudeau had promised to fix it at the federal level by 2019.
This is an accounting of how he broke the promise, and lied about it until the end of his career as Prime Minister of Canada
I took a bit of an unplanned break from social media since I made my cover reveal and preorder opening posts. Life has been happening pretty fast and there were a few family things to take care of. I've learned from Palestinians to say Alhamdullilah for it all and get back to it. I'm blessed to be able to rest for a bit but I do not want to let it lead to stasis or despondency.
So what I want to do here is to write out my ideas as 'scripts' for the short videos that I want to make. That way I'll get my thoughts out of my head and onto paper and it might make for interesting blog content as well. It'll definitely shed some light on how I approach social media posting. More after the click.
The deathly silence that surrounds the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people has been to a significant degree dented since the 7th of October 2023, but, here in January 2025, more than fifteen months in, it has proven to be still resilient.
If we are fortunate enough to have a future in which honest histories get to be written, there will be volumes written about all of the reasons that the people of conscience in the West were not able to voice their condemnation of the genocide happening in the name of their values and with their tax dollars, let alone organize against it.
So there's way more than three reasons for the silence, but I feel the need to express my thoughts on why I feel so lonely when I'm wearing a kuffiyeh out in public in Canada and why the topic is so repelling to so many. I have three.
Here I am again, late at night, writing a blog post and trying to get a newsletter out because I want to, at the very minimum, post on the 23rd of every month until my book comes out.
So as the last hours of the 23rd of October slip by, let's hear it for achieving the bare minimum!
But that bare minimum included some major progress on a number of different fronts. Read on for more!
So it's been four months since my last blog post, which was definitely NOT what I had planned. But a lot of progress has been made and I do have a lot of updates to provide.
The biggest being that I do have an 'official' date of publication for Under The Full and Crescent Moon and that is, Inshallah, the 23rd of September 2025! Which is, Inshallah, exactly a year from when I plan to put up this blog post!
That's a lot of Inshallah's already! Read on for a few more.
My life has been very busy lately and I am feeling a little overwhelmed. I am just grateful that at least a little bit of the chaos I'm navigating is caused by what I want to achieve and that I am able to direct some of my efforts towards those ends. It is a privilege that not everyone has and I try to be mindful of that.
But still, because of all the things I need to get done, I need to prioritize. And with that comes the constant sense that maybe I'm focusing on the wrong things.