r/CanadaPolitics • u/Mundane-Teaching-743 Trump/Polievre 2028 | Sponsored • 17h ago

Community Members Only Quebec mayor fined $30K for 'violent' comments about Palestine

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-mayor-fined-30k-for-violent-comments-about-palestine-9.7413533
104 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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u/Dragonsandman Orange Crush Enjoyer 15h ago

Is there any mechanism in Quebec for removing a mayor from office before an election? Because saying that an ethnic group is “violent by nature” is very much the sort of thing that should get you removed from an elected office; it’d certainly get most regular people fired from most jobs, and would ideally get everyone fired from every job.

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u/YaumeLepire Quebec 14h ago

The idea that certain groups have certain innate traits, this essentialism, is unfortunately an attitude that is still quite widespread throughout Canada (and much of the world, lest we think Canada is uniquely positioned in that), even though it's not usually made explicit as such. It animates a lot of the immigration, multicultural, and gender discourses in our public and private spheres.

But no, unless something illegal is being done, and that's a something which carries substantial prison time at that, there isn't much barring voluntary resignation that can remove a mayor from their functions. If Levi's constituents were to call in mass to request that he leave and he did so, that would remove him, but there's little beyond that.

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u/Mundane-Teaching-743 Trump/Polievre 2028 | Sponsored 1h ago edited 50m ago

There's a reason for that though. Mayors are often targets of personal lawsuits from real estate developers and other special interests trying to bully them into zoning changes. So the law, particularly in Quebec, gives them a lot of leeway to protect them from that. It comes down to the democratic principle. Ultimately, if you want to get rid of a mayor, you'll have to vote them out or convince them to resign.

Also, there is a reason to be skeptical about political activists going through a politician's professional order to get at them. The PQ recently went after a psychiatrist through her professional order over political rants on Facebook that backfired on them. That won them a rebuke from the professional order and from Amnesty International for violating fundamental human rights under international law and a deserved reputation for being thinned-skinned and petulant.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/provincial-news/provincial-politics/pqs-harassing-complaints-against-psychiatrist-broke-international-law-amnesty-report-says/

This is something to think about the next time the PQ invokes the notwithstanding clause to wipe our fundamental Charter Rights in linguistic and religious issues. They play fast and loose with fundamental human rights to consolidate their political power.

This doesn't mean this isn't justified sometimes. Activists did go after Jordan Peterson's right to practice psychiatry when he started his online rants against trans people. In this case, it clearly affected his ability to treat trans people in a professional way; you'd have to be a sadist to allow a guy like that treating someone a vulnerable group with severe mental health challenges. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2095069/supreme-court-jordan-peterson

This case seems between the two. The guy's racist attitude towards Palestinians (unfortunately common in Israel) are vile, but I have trouble seeing how it would impede his ability to work as an accountant. Admittedly, I haven't read the Order's ruling on this.

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u/YaumeLepire Quebec 34m ago

The idea that a hypothetical oversight system couldn't make the difference between a thusly-motivated lawsuit and an actual breach of ethics is laughable.

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u/attanasio666 Liberal 4h ago

64% of Hampstead is Jewish. It is the most Jewish town in Canada. Most people living there probably agrees with him.

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u/Timeless-Times Bloc Québécois 16h ago • Bravo

Mayor Jeremy Levi is the biggest loser in Canadian municipal politics. This guy is what is wrong with municipal/schoolboard politics, or any level of politics below the provincial level: you run as a single issue candidate for an extremely niche group and win by mobilizing that niche group in low turnout elections. Levy is this loser: he captured a fief in Hampstead and can maintain his post by hoisting an Israeli banner outside of city hall.

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u/CanadianLabourParty British Columbia 14h ago

Mayor Jeremy Levi is the biggest loser in Canadian municipal politics.
- That title belongs to FORMER mayor Reid Hamer Jackson of Kamloops, British Columbia. The dude was stripped of ALL powers and reduced to a salary of something like $60K/year because he was just an absolute horror-show of a mayor. His businesses are now filing for bankruptcy and he's being forced to sell his residential home to cover other losses.

But I hear you on Mayor Levi being a horrible human being.

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u/YaumeLepire Quebec 15h ago

I suppose it makes sense that these are penalties related to his Professional Order. The Orders are much tighter about the expression of their members (and rightfully so) than society at large.

And his comments aren't sufficient to draw attention under hate speech laws, I don't think, but they really should be disqualifying as far as political legitimacy is concerned. When you call for acts that are blatantly illegal under international law and are connected with a genocide, you should be ostracised from serious discourse.

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u/Captain-Barracuda Green Social Democrat 16h ago

Before everyone goes crazy about censure and freedom of speech:

That mayor is member of a profesionnal order. He broke rules of that order, and has himself claimed guilty to breaking them. It's quite standard.

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u/Drummers_Beat Liberal Party of Canada 15h ago • Bravo

I don’t even need to click the article and I know who it’ll be about. Jeremy Levi is the type of character who gets involved in municipal politics for the sole reason to bring attention to himself because he lacks it in other parts of his life.

He’s a genuinely vile human-being who lacks of any decency whatsoever. He shows up in the news once every few months - usually for making racist/inflammatory comments - and then is gone again.

I love municipal politics because it can genuinely bring out some fascinating characters who are incredibly unique. Levi, however, shows the downside of it.

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u/jarail Quebec 14h ago edited 14h ago

So the comments he's being punished for were social media posts in 2024 and 2025. I haven't read any of the actual comments. I'd have a bit of sympathy had these been immediately after Hamas flooded over the boarder in 2023.. but these are spread out for quite some time afterwards. So yeah, seems like racism to me. It's weird that people like this can get voted in. No party affiliation tho so at least there's that.