For weeks, countless news media outlets have given an eager platform to a new initiative by anti-Israel activists called Vote Palestine. News reports gave attention to the effort, and opinion columns praised the project.
The website votepalestine.ca called for candidates for Parliament during the 2025 federal election to sign onto their platform which included five demands: an arms embargo on Israel, ending Canadian “involvement in illegal Israeli settlements,” combatting “anti-Palestinian racism,” recognizing the “State of Palestine,” and funding UNRWA, the discredited United Nations agency with ties to Hamas and whose staff took part in Hamas’s October 7 massacres of 1,200 innocents and hostage taking of 250.
Among the groups endorsing the platform were Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), an extremist organization that has openly celebrated Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacres, the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council (CMPAC), which sponsored speakers on a campus tour who have praised Hamas’ mass murders, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), which has defended Hamas’ use of violence against Israelis, the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, which has sought to label opposition to Palestinian radicalism as ‘racism,’ and Canadians for Justice & Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), a group which has whitewashed Palestinian terrorism.
In spite of the widespread media coverage that Vote Palestine was able to garner, its election results tell a very different story.
As of April 29, the website lists 362 candidates who signed the platform, including 216 NDP candidates, 116 Green Party candidates, 28 Liberal Party candidates, and 2 Bloc Québécois candidates. There were no signatories from any other party.
Of the 216 NDP signatories, 210 lost their bid for election, while six won. A number of vocally anti-Israel high-profile NDP Members of Parliament (MPs), including Matthew Green and Niki Ashton, signed the platform but lost their seats.
Of the 116 Green Party candidates who signed the pledge, just one – co-leader Elizabeth May who infamously said “I take marching orders from the official representative of Palestine to Canada” – won her seat.
Of the 28 Liberal Party signatories to the platform, 18 won, while 10 lost.
Both Bloc Québécois signatories lost their bids to become members of parliament.
Overall, of the 362 candidates for federal office who signed the Vote Palestine platform, only 25 won their races, while 337 lost. Put another way, 6.9 percent won, while 93.1 lost.
Of Canada’s 343 Members of Parliament elected on April 28, the overwhelming majority – including roughly 90 percent of elected Liberal MPs – did not sign the platform.
These results tell a story that is unmistakable: voters overwhelmingly rejected candidates who adopted the Vote Palestine platform, and the huge majority of MPs did not sign onto the policies demanded by the organizers.
This is hardly surprising. Despite the loud antics of anti-Israel activists over the last 18 months, these efforts have remained on the fringes of Canadian society, and these election results show that no matter how much noise is made by these groups, they remain marginal. Their protests have whittled to small numbers, and the majority of Canadians polled have opposed their demonstrations.
Since so many news media outlets appeared eager to report on Vote Palestine’s efforts before the election, they would do well to do a post-mortem and let the public know just how spectacularly this anti-Israel effort failed among Canadian voters.
