Zane Caplansky, owner of Caplansky’s Deli, who is sponsoring the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. Handout/PayPal. Photo: Postmedia News/Files With Irish Jim O’Connell there and Scotty Jack McDonald,
There’s hunky Frederic Herzal gettin’ tight but that’s alright,
There’s happy German Trixie there with Frenchie gettin tipsy,
And even Joe the Gypsy knows its Saturday tonight.
— Sudbury Saturday Night, Stompin’ Tom Connors
On Aug. 8, when Torontonians gather at Christie Pits Park for a free outdoor screening of the Palestinian film Laila’s Birthday, they will be able to buy smoked meat on rye from a food truck emblazoned with the words: Sometimes You Just Have to Jew It Up.
The truck is going to be there because Zane Caplansky, owner of Caplansky’s Deli, is sponsoring the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, to the delight of the organizers.
Caplansky is doing this because he is disheartened by the tone of some of the public discussion about the war in Gaza.
“For a well-known Jewish business in Toronto to publicly support a Palestinian film festival makes a statement of brotherhood, sisterhood and community that I feel very strongly about,” he told me Friday. “To me, that’s the best part of Toronto and the best part of Canada is our diversity and the fact that we all coexist so well here.”
I think Caplansky is right. Peaceful coexistence is our defining national characteristic.
It’s a good idea to think about this, especially during this summer of televised horrors from distant battlefields, because we don’t want Canadians to ever fear their neighbours.
Local Input~ UNDATED – A March 2012 handout photo of Zane Caplansky of Caplanky’s Delicatessen with PayPal Here credit card reader for cell phones. Handout/ PayPal.
We can’t assume we will always be so fortunate.
France, where the equality of all citizens is a founding principle, can’t prevent street violence related to the Gaza conflict.
Last week in Paris, pro-Palestinian protesters burned down Naouri Sarcelles, a kosher supermarket, and there have been nasty protests outside synagogues, which must be terrifying for French Jews, given the history of pogroms and the Holocaust.
“We have heard ‘Death to Jews’ one more time,” said French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, calling for the violence to stop. “It’s one time too many. Synagogues are under attack again. Our synagogues, like our churches, our temples, our mosques, are our shared heritage, indivisible parts of France, protected by our idea of secularism.”
How fortunate we are that our prime minister doesn’t have to make that kind of speech.
Even the United States, a country of immigrants, has a much more difficult time maintaining social peace. This weekend, hundreds of protests will take place across the country to urge Barack Obama to expel child migrants from Central America.
In 1992, after Los Angeles police were acquitted of beating Rodney King, 52 people were killed in riots.
In Canada, in contrast, even our most painful conflicts are resolved with little bloodshed.
In 1990, during the Oka crisis, Corporal Marcel Lemay of the Sûreté du Québec, was shot and killed.
In 1970, in the October crisis, Pierre Laporte and James Cross were killed by terrorists from the FLQ.
Those are tragedies, but how many countries in the world can claim such a low death count from civil strife over the same decades?
We can list the victims of political or ethnic violence by name. In other countries they are statistics.
John Ralston Saul argues convincingly in his book Reflections of a Siamese Twin that Canada’s peaceful tradition comes from our early leaders, who avoided violence as they set about the delicate business of forming a country with two mutually suspicious language groups.
Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin, the reformers who led the Union of Upper and Lower Canada in the 1840s, refrained from cracking heads because they “understood instinctively” that they must govern with “restraint and moderation,” Saul wrote.
There are exceptions — the hanging of Louis Riel, the imposition of the War Measures Act, wartime internments — but for the most part our government doesn’t hit people on the head or shoot them when we can find a way to settle things peacefully, as we did at Oka. (I don’t think we have yet reconciled or even acknowledged all of the crimes against aboriginals, but that’s another story.)
There’s also a grass roots, matter-of-fact consensus around multiculturalism, as Stompin’ Tom chronicled. Some Quebec nationalists believe it is a threat, but in general, Canadians are open to multiculturalism and becoming more so.
There is likely no country in the world where people from different backgrounds mix with less fuss.
Caplansky told me Friday that his deli is an example of that.
“This is Toronto,” he said. “This what you have here. I’ve got a Japanese slicer, a Tibetan manager, a French black cook all standing together behind my slicing station right now. If I was to go into the kitchen, there’s a Vietnamese guy, there’s a Filipino guy. Everyone’s from someplace else. This is Canada. We all get along really well here. If we can export that, that would be lovely to me.”
smaher@postmedia.com
@stphnmaher
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