Moral Vision, Empirical Rigour

J. L. Granatstein’s review of The Great White North: Inside Far-Right Activism in Canada features some rather disturbing assumptions about what constitutes extremism in this country. What begins as a clear-sighted, informative overview of the dangerous far-right factions currently active in Canada pivots midway into an alarmist diagnosis of Canadian social unrest in the wake of the events of October 7, 2023, and the war on Gaza. The logic of the review crumbles when the author’s reactionary takes on the “far left” take over.

That Granatstein paints the student encampments and other anti-Zionist mobilizations as an “explosion” of antisemitism and, therefore, as extremist, and that he mentions these in the same breath as a small number of violent attacks on Jewish institutions, is beyond misleading. Canadians’ constitutionally protected right to protest the carnage visited upon Gaza is part of an unprecedented and long-overdue wave of global solidarity with the oppressed in Palestine. By conflating this with the hate-fuelled mechanisms of the far right, Granatstein plays into a moral panic that does an injustice to the important contents of the book he is reviewing.