Carney just announced that Canada will violate a court order by barring Russian players from the upcoming World Junior Hockey Championship. While they bar Russians teenagers, Israeli athletes are ok.
On Friday the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Russia must be reinstated to international hockey competitions. The court overturned a ban imposed following Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Russian Ice hockey federation said they plan to participate in the World Junior Hockey tournament in Alberta, which begins in six weeks.
On Tuesday Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada will ignore the court ruling and deny entry to Russian and Belarusian athletes so long as there’s a war in Ukraine. “Russia and Belarus are supporting this illegal and unjustified horrific war in Ukraine, as long as that’s going on, there will be none of those athletes competing for their countries in Canada. So if you’re asking specifically about the World Juniors, the Russians will not be there,” the PM told the press.
Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was illegal and that war is brutal, but it was provoked and is being prolonged by NATO. As I’ve detailed repeatedly, Canada played a substantial role in laying the groundwork for Russia’s invasion by promoting NATO expansion eastward, helping oust an elected neutrality-minded president in 2014 and assisting efforts to sabotage the Minsk II peace accord.
By any serious metric, the immorality of what’s transpired in Gaza is far more straightforward. In that case a people who were mostly ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948 and have faced a ferocious two-decade long siege, with periodic ‘mowing the lawn’ mass killings, attacked the occupier. The explicitly supremacist state then used the Palestinians resistance to launch a live streamed genocide against a population facing uniquely isolated living conditions.
Yet Canada opposes Israel’s exclusion from sports or song competitions. Amidst the genocide IOF veterans have competed in the Invictus Games in Vancouver, Canada played Israel in tennis in Halifax and the Israel Premier Tech cycling team competed at the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal. Additionally, notes Ben Thompson, Israelis competed at Skate Canada International, World Skydiving Championships, Artistic Swimming World Cup and Maccabi Games in Canada. A former IOF soldier also played an MLS match in Montreal.
Taking a slightly different angle, Davide Mastracci posted to X, “Mark Carney has let Netanyahu fly over Canada repeatedly, in violation of the ICC arrest warrant he’s bound to uphold. He’s now refusing to let Russian athletes into Canada, citing the Ukraine war. Carney will punish teen hockey players, but let a genocidal leader off the hook.”
Even before the past three years of Israeli horrors in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere, the Israel/US vs Russia sports boycott double standard was flagrant. In March 2023 I asked then sports minister Pascale St-Onge about her push to bar Russian and Belarusian athletes from international sports competitions in response to Moscow’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. As an assistant sought to whisk the sports minister out of the room, I asked whether she felt the same way about US athletes after that country invaded Iraq? St-Onge smirked and walked away.
I followed the minister out of the room to ask whether Canada’s athletes should also have been excluded after this country led the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, which remains divided and devastated. She continued to move towards the elevator while her assistant sought to (politely) disrupt my line of inquiry.
As the minister waited to descend, I asked what she thought about Israeli athletes participating in international competitions despite its apartheid and illegal occupation of Palestinian land. St-Onge waited uncomfortably. As she entered the elevator, I again asked about Israel and gave the minister a final opportunity to reply by hitting the elevator button to re-open a near closed door.
Several million viewed the clip on various social media platforms while it was reported on by Chinese, Indian, Russian, Qatar and Venezuelan media. While it was a dramatic interaction, the video’s popularity was due to the flagrant double standards it exposed. It also (indirectly) highlight media complicity in the racist, imperial double standards.
Carney’s ‘ban Russian teenage hockey players but allow Israeli soldiers to play’ double standard is absent from dominant media reports. Wednesday’s front page Globe and Mail story on the ban ignores it while (liberal) Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur does the same. Arthur writes that “Russia is the enemy of Europe, and of free societies everywhere” and his only mention of the US, which has bombed nine countries over the past eighteen months, is to complain that Trump’s “aligned with Russia on issue after issue.”
Will any journalist with access ask Carney, foreign minister Anita Anand or sports minister Adam van Koeverden “why is Canada defying a court ruling to bar Russian athletes but embraces Israeli athletes?”
