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A few days before a House of Commons vote on a New Democrat motion about Israel’s assault on Gaza in mid-March, Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed was sharing an iftar meal with 150 of his constituents in the riding of Vancouver Granville.
For an hour after the meal, Noormohamed and fellow Liberal MP Wilson Miao sat in the front row and listened to speaker after speaker relate the horrors unfolding against Palestinians, which the world’s highest court has ruled could be a “plausible” genocide.
Speeches even took a creative twist, with organizers dissecting his campaign using a SWOT analysis—a common business as well as activist tool that evaluates strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—complete with a slide show.
“We identified that there is a very significant risk that he will lose the next election based on the lack of support for Palestine,” recalled Laith Sarhan, a Palestinian-Canadian and one of the dozens of organizers who put on the town hall event in the riding, where the Liberal MP won his last election by just a few hundred votes.
After praising him for facilitating meetings for Palestinians with MPs and for showing at the town hall, they highlighted the weakness that he had not brought up his constituents’ demands in Parliament, the threat of losing his seat in the 2025 election, and an opportunity to gain the support of politically-engaged constituents by saying “yes” to the original NDP motion and calling for a full arms embargo against Israel.
At the end of the night, Noormohamed, Miao, and their delegation walked out as chants of “Vote yes! Vote yes” resounded in the hall for minutes.
Four days later, the House of Commons would pass an amended motion first tabled by Alberta NDP MP Heather McPherson, calling on the Canadian government to uphold the rights of Palestinians.
With scores of Liberal MPs reportedly prepared to vote yes to the motion, Liberal cabinet ministers scrambled to find a compromise. The motion would be altered at the eleventh hour to water down some of its requirements—like allowing existing arms contracts with Israel to continue, and changing Canada’s recognition of the state of Palestine to “working towards” this goal—but it would still lead the Liberals to freeze the authorization of any new permits for weapons exports to Israel.

In the months leading up to motion, Noormohamed wasn’t the only Liberal MP feeling the pressure of riding-level organizing.
Since December, from Yellowknife to Scarborough to Halifax, Canadians searching for a meaningful way to organize have turned to the Palestine Solidarity Network.
“The network itself is loosely coordinated by a small team of organizers who come from various movement backgrounds, largely people who come from labour, climate, and migrant justice organizing,” Emma Jackson, a core member of the Palestine Solidarity Network who came out of the climate and migrant justice movement, told The Breach in an interview.
Following a series of sit-ins at MP offices across Canada, the Palestine Solidarity Network created a strategy to post on their Instagram account (@palsolidaritycad) in late 2023, calling on people who live in 20 particular ridings to target parliamentarians, making clear their seats in the election were on the line.
“We were prioritizing largely Liberal backbench MPs that were at risk of potentially losing their seats, especially to the NDP,” Jackson said.
The group presented four demands to these MPs, all based on calls to action from the Palestinian Youth Movement. They wanted Liberal backbench MPs to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an end to Israel’s siege and blockage of the Gaza Strip, a two-way arms embargo against Israel to “end Canada’s complicity in Israeli occupation,” and a general call to support a free state of Palestine.
Palestine Solidarity Network would quickly become a beacon for people who had already been attending some protests, but were looking for help with resources or strategy.
Soon after, they released a 30-page toolkit outlining how people could deploy both “inside” tactics—identifying influential community leaders or major donors—and “outside” tactics—canvassing, postering, and hosting public events—in their ridings to escalate pressure on their MPs.
Once the initiative started to gain momentum, organizers said people from other Liberal ridings outside the initial list decided to join the campaign.
The groups targeting MPs, with names like VanGran4Palestine and LSM4 Palestine (representing Laurier—Sainte-Marie), have doubled since December, and their sizes have increased many times more than that, Jackson said. “We have teams in close to 45 communities across the country.”
When McPherson first tabled her motion on March 1, several members realized it was an important moment: an opportunity to test the strength of months of organizing. The network turned their focus towards pushing Liberal MPs to support the NDP motion.
Over time, the network has built a formidable capacity—with organizers joking that their volunteers managed to translate their public statement from English to French faster than the House of Commons translated the NDP’s amended motion.
In the midst of a historic mobilization against Israel’s attack on Gaza and alongside many parallel efforts, they are opening up cracks among the governing Liberals and lending deeper, potentially-longer term organizing clout to Palestinian solidarity.
Scaling up the organizing, a neighbour at a time
It was the same story among organizers in each of the four ridings—Yellowknife, Vancouver Granville, Scarborough-Rouge Park, and Laurier—Sainte-Marie—who talked to The Breach about their efforts.
Each had little to no previous experience organizing political movements, but were among the growing numbers of people attending local pro-Palestine protests since October, and craving more concrete action.
Romanie Wideman, an organizer in Yellowknife, said a group of about 70 people first gathered at a Palestinian-owned cafe, Javaroma, in late October to plan Palestine solidarity actions.
Along with rallies and film events, community members wrote to their local, territorial, and federal representatives asking them to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, fund aid organizations like UNRWA, and end Canada’s arms trade with Israel.
The drive to do this came from the community, she said.
“People might not realize that we do have Palestinian people living here and that citizens of our town, our territory are deeply impacted by what’s happening in a very real way,” Wideman said. “Those people are our friends and our neighbors.”
When she saw the Palestine Solidarity Network post on Instagram, Wideman reached out.

The group had a Google Form sign up sheet in their Instagram account bio. Those who filled it out and shared which riding they were in soon received an email connecting them to each other. Signing up in this way is how Sarhan met some of his neighbours in Vancouver for the first time.
“When I say neighbours I genuinely do mean people that live right next door to me,” Sarhan said. “We had some people in our neighborhood group who even found out that they live in the same building, on the same floor.”
In most ridings, a structure of organizing soon emerged with the help of the national team: a small core group of up to 10 volunteers who worked with a wider team of anywhere up to hundreds of people to coordinate actions targeting their MPs—phone zaps, email campaigns, online petitions, and collecting signatures from their ridings by canvassing door-to-door.
“It was very helpful to join the national movement to help us in terms of direction and to lead us in what actions are effective and strategic when it comes to MPs,” Wideman said.
There were practical benefits too. The national team could support Wideman and organizers in other ridings with graphics, campaign slogans, email templates, and, for a smaller, more isolated community like Yellowknife, access to a wider network of like-minded peers.
Not long after joining the national movement, Wideman had her first—and only—meeting with MP Michael McLeod in which, she said, they mainly talked about the call for an arms embargo against Israel.
“He was asking me about what an embargo would mean, and would it be a symbolic gesture or not,” Wideman said. “We spent most of the time talking about why an arms embargo is not only a symbolic gesture, it’s in line with ending Canada’s complicity.”
According to Wideman, McLeod conveyed that there was more people and passion involved in the pro-Palestine movement than he had previously understood; that he would look more deeply into the prospect of an arms embargo; and that he might bring it up in meetings with the Liberal caucus.
While organizers in Yellowknife and Vancouver Granville got at least one meeting with their MPs, some others received nothing but silence. Still, they found ways to make their demands heard.
‘Avoiding us like the plague’
In Ontario’s Scarborough-Rouge Park riding, Mohamed Benaicha and his branch of organizers have been trying in vain to reach MP Gary Anandasangaree since December.
“I would describe him, with regards to us, as avoiding us like a plague,” Benaicha said. “We’ve given [Anandasangaree’s staff] invitations to a community vigil that is less political in nature [and] told them his constituents would be at the vigil and would like to hear from their MP. We didn’t even get a call back.”
To Benaicha, it seems Canada’s political leaders are “surprised, if not frightened by the level of organizing.”

In Quebec’s Laurier-Sainte-Marie riding, Mariam El-Amine and her organizing branch has also never met with their MP, Steven Guilbeault, the minister of environment and climate change, and one of the few cabinet ministers included in the Palestine Solidarity Network’s original list of MPs to target.
The growing team of volunteers, she said, tagged Guilbeault on social media, invited him to a town hall meeting with constituents, sent numerous emails, and organized phone zaps in the week before March 18, urging him to vote yes on the NDP motion.
While he declined all invitations to engage, El-Amine said the group heard from a staffer who worked for Guilbeault that his office had received an overwhelming amount of emails and phone calls about the Israel-Palestine assaults since October and November.
“She told us that they were trying to call back constituents that had previously called and left voicemails,” El-Amine said. “She said we should continue our [organizing] efforts…We reiterated our wish to meet him [and] she said she would talk to him.”
Despite these silences, El-Amine and Benaicha say community support for their groups have grown, as have their organizing efforts. In Scarborough-Rouge Park, Benaicha said MP Anandasangaree’s silence has led to a mosque banning him from campaigning there in the future.
“This is a huge loss for him because he’s campaigned here multiple times, and [it] represents an important point for a large demographic,” Benaicha said.
“We still have new people come in all the time, maybe because public opinion is also shifting a little bit, especially since it’s been going on for six months and now we’re hearing more and more—especially in traditional media—of atrocities happening,” El-Amine said about their growing movement.
Each week, the different Montreal-based riding groups would reconnect at the regular Palestinian Youth Movement march, uniting under their different neighbourhood banners.
Their next steps will be to “educate more people, collect signatures, and to put pressure on Steven Guilbeault and make him feel like this is going to be an issue during the next elections.”

DM’ing Taleeb
Much of VanGran4Palestine’s contact with Noormohamed has been through Instagram comments and direct messages (DMs), Sarhan said. It started with their first action in December, when a group of 100 protesters collected signatures for a petition and went to Noormohamed’s office to deliver it.
“There were police stationed outside of the MP’s office and around the site of where we were going to be doing the rally,” Sarhan said. “He himself had closed his office and didn’t show up [that] day.”
“The ironic bit was, as this event was happening, we were live streaming it on Instagram and he was watching us on Instagram. So we called him out on it [and] we started going back and forth on Instagram.”
Noormohamed, he said, deserves credit for at least listening to the organizers, pro-Palestine constituents, and facilitating meetings between them and other MPs. At the same time, Sarhan feels betrayed that his MP was the one behind changing the motion significantly.
According to people who were present at the Vancouver Granville town hall, Noormohamed, who’d had a brief opportunity to address the attendees at the end, said, “I’m definitely not going to vote against [the motion]” and hinted that he was in talks with McPherson to “make some changes” to how it’s worded.

A Globe and Mail article published about a week after March 18 vote by a senior political reporter identified Noormohamed as the MP who talked to McPherson to amend the motion and avoid exposing a rift in the governing Liberal Party, in which 80 MPs (out of 157) were ready to vote yes on the original NDP motion.
In public discourse, both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel groups have claimed credit and support for the last minute changes to the original NDP motion, which passed by 204 to 117 votes (with every Conservative and three Liberal MPs voting against it) .
The amendments to the final motion, according to the Global and Mail reporting, were made because “Muslim and Palestinian groups urged the New Democrats to make concessions.” But a Vancouver rabbi, who met with PM Trudeau and Noormohamed a week after the vote, also publicly took credit for the changes, saying Noormohamed’s move was based on a meeting with him and other rabbis.
On the other hand, pro-Palestine organizers with Palestine Solidarity Network who have been in regular contact with Noormohamed believe he initiated changes to the motion to “thread a needle” between two impassioned groups of constituents, while maintaining a Liberal party that looks unified.
“From my perspective, Taleeb is motivated by a vision of a Canada that allows people to hold different perspectives and ultimately sit with disagreements,” Sarhan, the Vancouver Granville organizer, said.
“As a Canadian, I think we should be allowed and able to have disagreements. I don’t think that those disagreements extend to watching a genocide.”
Other organizers are also grappling with mixed feelings of dejection and hope at the fact that the movement achieved some real change.
“Getting the Liberal Party to compromise on their fairly uncompromising stance on Israel…and actually vote for things like telling Israel to stop, calling for a ceasefire, initiating an arms embargo policy, we feel that that was a huge move,” Benaicha said.
“The ability to influence the strongest party in Canada to compromise on their status quo, that was one positive aspect. The other aspect is overall the NDP party themselves taking up this initiative, and seeing all the support for the NDP motion; all that was overwhelmingly inspiring for me.”
For Jackson, the fact that the NDP motion would have split the Liberal party if it hadn’t been watered down is a big win for the organizing movement that brought the demands of months-long protesters directly to MPs over several months.
The final motion is “a massive testament to the amount of power that we’ve built and how much we’ve been able to move the Canadian public to recognize that the brutality of the Israeli regime can’t continue and that Canada should not and cannot be complicit in that violence,” Jackson said.
An exercise in ‘Palestinian hospitality’
Avi Lewis, who was among three speakers from the University of British Columbia who addressed Noormohamed at the March 14 town hall, described the event as a powerful one.
“It was really intense but really respectful,” Lewis said. “I thought it was a very sophisticated attempt to engage with electoral power in a mature way…very forthright and in his face in the room, but in a way that he could sit and listen to. I think it had an effect.”
This was intentional, said Sarhan.
“We asked [attendees] to share Palestinian hospitality and despite the fact that we were all incredibly angry and upset about what was happening, to extend the spirit of Palestinian hospitality to any guests that we would welcome into any of our spaces.

With the victory of gaining some Liberal party recognition of the Palestinian cause marred by amendments that allow existing permits for Canadian arms export contracts with Israel to continue, each riding group plans to continue their calls for a full scale, two-way embargo.
“We were pretty disappointed with the changes, specifically that the arms embargo was weakened so significantly to not represent any current or ongoing contracts,” Wideman said. Up next, Wideman says her Palestine Solidarity Network branch plans to connect with organizers who advocate other subjects in the Northwest Territories, and involve them in longer term planning.
In Scarborough-Rouge Park, which has a more active protest network than Yellowknife, Benaicha said the movement already has the support and membership of leading organizations like the Ontario Federation of Labour and the University of Toronto Scarborough campus student union. He plans to “cement our initiative” and still holds hope for a conversation with his MP.
Addressing Anandasangree, Benaicha said, “the sentiment against you, against your silence is growing. This is not how your constituents expect to be treated by someone who’s been their MP for 12 years. If you want to speak, we’re still ready to speak.”
The Whatsapp Community the Palestinian Solidarity Network uses to coordinate efforts across the country now includes close to 2,000 members.
Nearing the mebership limit on the app means they’re having to find creative ways to restructure in order to include more organizers, with many riding level groups creating their own separate Whatsapp Communities while remaining plugged into the national network.
In Vancouver Granville, Sarhan’s plan is to continue engaging with community members and continuing conversations by hosting more local, neighbourhood-friendly events, like setting up a “Free coffee, Free Palestine” chat booth at a local park.
He said he recognizes that on the ground, there’s been a loss of faith in a Canadian political system that refuses to acknowledge and act to end their complicity in further killing in Gaza.
“That loss of faith is what we’re using as a bit of a lightning rod, to get people engaged,” Sarhan said.
“When we started organizing, the goal for us was at the end of the day, we wanted to build enough political power to make sure that the next elected representative of Vancouver Granville stands clearly in solidarity with Palestine.”
This goal remains unchanged.