Category: CPA Statements

Open letters and statements to the public from the Canada Palestine Association.

CPA 2025 Year in Review

Over the past year, CPA has grown and strengthened both its activist base… Read more

Over the past year, CPA has grown and strengthened both its activist base and its organizational structure. We now have two active and highly functional subcommittees – BDS Vancouver and the Basil AlAraj committee, that carry on educational and public actions that support the Boycott Israel and the Palestinian prisoners movements. There is also a media/communications committee under development. Our executive has expanded in number and is increasing its scope of work to include archival postings and our legal defense fund. One of our main foci this year has been to strongly expose and highlight the dangers of pandering to the phony “two-state solution” and the Oslo 2.0 project (which regrettably obliged us to withdraw from the Canadian BDS Coalition*).
Respect to all the CPA activists and allies who continue to stand with Palestine.
We will never stop struggling for a Free Palestine, from the river to the sea!

Events and Campaigns: 

CPA Statements:

  1. CBC is complicit in genocide! January 3, 2025
  2. BDS Vancouver marks 10 years January 28, 2025
  3. Solidarity Statement with MMIWG February 13, 2025
  4. Support our legal defense fund! February 19, 2025
  5. Scotiabank increases their complicity in war profiteering! March 6, 2025
  6. The Delusionary Appeal of Electoral Politics March 21, 2025
  7. Vancouver holds first Palestine Land Day Protest 1976 March 25, 2025
  8. Demand to know where politicians stand – for justice or for genocide! April 3, 2025
  9. #IVotePalestine #IVoteAgainstGenocide  April 9, 2025
  10. Those Complicit in Genocide will be held Accountable!  April 22, 2025
  11. The “two-state” solution is a vehicle for normalization! It’s past time to call out the PA! May 4, 2025
  12. Scotiabank Preys on Genocide May 9, 2025
  13. Canada’s false diplomacy cannot hide its complicity in genocide! August 1, 2025
  14. Yes, we are bitter! September 20, 2025
    Canadian Palestinian Association condemns global complicity in Gaza | Al Mayadeen English September 22, 2025

Articles:  

Videos & Interviews:

Social Media:  

CPA Facebook pages:  
(all likes are generated organically; on principle, we refuse to pay for ads or for posts promotions)  

CPA Facebook groups:  

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram: 
BDS Vancouver/Canada Palestine Association (3,425 Followers)  
Instagram – cpavancouver (6,839 followers) 
Instagram- Basil AlAraj Committee (1206 followers)

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*(Both CPA and BDS Vancouver were obliged to withdraw from the Canadian BDS Coalition in May of this year due to serious contradictions within the BDS Coalition coordinating committee, that developed over the VotePalestine campaign. We were shocked to discover that not only did VotePalestine promote “recognizing the state of Palestine” as a core demand, but also that a majority of the Coalition’s coordinating committee (Just Peace Advocates JPA, Ontario Palestinian Rights Association OPRA, Palestinian and Jewish Unity PAJU) were amongst the initiating endorsers.
We viewed this as not only a political error, but also a violation of the Coalition’s basis of unity which stated: “We recognize that Zionism is a supremacist ideology which has created a settler colonial state in historic Palestine…We support the establishment of a secular democratic State of Palestine in the historic land of Palestine…”
We noted that promoting recognition of THE state of Palestine at this time meant in practice endorsing Oslo, the PA and the bankrupt two-state solution. Canadian PM Carney’s later statement regarding a “Zionist Palestinian state” aptly proved our point. Our efforts to have this issue brought to a membership meeting were sidelined in an undemocratic manner; ultimately, we were left with no choice but to leave the coalition.)

Yes, we are bitter!

Statement carried in AlMayadeen English: Canadian Palestinian Association… Read more

Statement carried in AlMayadeen English: Canadian Palestinian Association condemns global complicity in Gaza | Al Mayadeen English

Recently, there has been a flood of mainstream officials finally claiming to recognize the genocide in Gaza. To Bernie Sanders, to those UN officials and other Western politicians and personalities who recently discovered their morality…we acknowledge your late support but our souls are shrieking inside us, why didn’t you speak out sooner? What motivates you now, when there’s less risk? How many of our kids have died during your silence?

Do you think we will ever forgive any of you? And even when you finally “do the right thing”, do you feel remorse for the harm you created before? We are waiting for an acknowledgement of how your prior silence gave licence to genocide.

You still tiptoe around the Palestinian right to armed resistance, as if our very survival is a minefield for you. We remember how you held us responsible to convince you that we deserved your support, even as our people were being massacred. How the onus was on Palestinians to “justify” that we were worthy to be heard and to have dignity. Even at that, our voices were consistently sidetracked for the first celebrity or progressive Jewish person that finally spoke out.

Yes, we are bitter. Bitter that you still give more credence to everyone except the actual people who have survived 77 years of dispossession and Zionist brutality.

Now you want us to applaud your Oslo 2.0, this phoney recognition of a “Zionist Palestinian state”. For months, we have been warning of the dangers of this insipid plan that aims to distract and deflect from the ongoing genocide. Western regimes want us to believe that their conditional recognition of a demilitarized and gutted “Palestinian Authority” (with no authority) somehow compensates for their complicity in the massacre of Palestinians. These governments, including the Canadian government, are recklessly endangering the strategic interests of their own countries and peoples; their support for genocide and the vicious state repression of pro-Palestine advocacy will haunt them for centuries.

We are also bitter about the Arab regimes and their empty slogans, thinking they can still deceive their own people. Egypt signs a $35 billion deal with Israel for gas, the Gulf regimes give the US billions of dollars (and a free jet), and then they all want us to believe they don’t have immediate means at their disposal to change the trajectory of this US-Israeli genocide and massacre.  

Yes, we are bitter, in ways that run deeper than you will ever understand. But our time is coming and the sun will rise over Palestine. As surely as the monstrosity of Zionism will be booted to the dustbin of history.

Canada’s false diplomacy cannot hide its complicity in genocide!

Let’s not fool ourselves or our supporters by pretending that the recent move by the Canadian government to conditionally “recognize the state of Palestine” in September bodes well (in any way) for the liberation of the Palestinian people.  It does not. In fact, this flush of Western leaders recently making the same declaration are all part of a well-orchestrated maneuver to once again disenfranchise Palestinians, an Oslo 2.0. 

You need only to look at Carney’s statement and the document released by the UN meeting this week to see the trajectory of how this is supposed to unfold. An entity (we can’t call it a state) that must be demilitarized and is forbidden to decide who can run in its own elections. And, as has been detailed before, all of this is expected to occur with “mutual” recognition of Israel by those Arab states who have not yet done so and the eventual dismantling of UNRWA. 

Both are full of fine-sounding phrases that have been heard before… “an independent, viable, and sovereign Palestinian state” or “achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee issue”. Palestinians have been hearing such nice words for literally decades now, since Oslo was signed in 1993. But its a smokescreen as history has shown clearly, a smokescreen to cover further Israeli aggression, ethnic cleansing and now genocide. 

And the timing of this new diplomatic flurry is particularly dastardly, as it seeks to cover up and distract attention from the horrors of the ongoing US-Israeli genocide and the complicity of most Western governments. Complicity like Canada’s ongoing arms shipments to Israel that were further highlighted in a new report out just this week.

We all want a progressive Canadian policy on Palestine, but this is not it. In past statements, we in CPA have been clear that legitimizing the corrupt Palestinian Authority was a dangerous and flawed policy and that the phoney “two-state” solution is a vehicle for normalization.

However, this will not be the first time that one of the US imperialist schemes won’t go according to plan; the people of the region will reject all of these infamies and determine their own destiny.  
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Epilogue: Further clarity from Canadian PM Mark Carney, Sept. 21, 2025 in his official statement on Canada’s recognition of the state of Palestine:
“Recognising the State of Palestine, led by the Palestinian Authority, empowers those who seek peaceful coexistence and the end of Hamas.”
“The Palestinian Authority has provided direct commitments to Canada and the international community on much-needed reforms, including to fundamentally reform its governance, to hold general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part, and to demilitarize the Palestinian state. Canada will intensify efforts to support the Palestinian Authority’s implementation of this reform agenda, on which progress has already been made.”

Scotiabank Preys on Genocide

Scotiabank’s global asset fund, 1832 Asset Management, has a deadly history of complicity in Israeli genocide. A year and a half ago, it owned 5% of Israeli arms company Elbit Systems worth almost $500 million US. Then, it gradually divested some of its shares and at the end of September 2024, it was down to just $118 million. This incremental “divestment” followed activist protests that spanned the country and mobilized sectors from artists to workers to community groups. It even resulted in the Giller Prize finally dissociating itself from Scotiabank in Feb. 2025. 

However, true to the nature of financial entities, the last quarter of 2024 brought the news of a shift in their strategy, as they grabbed more Elbit stock which was valued at the time of reporting to be worth $180 million US. However, Elbit share prices have been on an upward trajectory since late January of this year; it seems the ripple effects of Trump’s policies have resulted in European countries buying more of their own military equipment, as well as Morocco shamefully increasing its business with Elbit. 

In February 2025, it was reported that Morocco had signed another major arms deal with Elbit. In fact, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), “Israel has become Morocco’s third-largest arms supplier, accounting for 11% of its military imports.” It was also noted that this “latest contract further strengthens Elbit Systems’ presence in Morocco and confirms Israel’s growing role as a strategic supplier to Rabat.” Back in July 2023, there were already reports that Elbit Systems was expanding its production footprint in Morocco.  

As of today, Scotiabank’s investment in Elbit is worth approximately $240 million US and exceeds the dollar amount that was reported a year ago.  

Although their partial divestments were noteworthy, this simply proves that we can never have faith in multinational corporations to do the ethical thing. War, death and destruction are good for the bottom line! And even though the protests temporarily affected that bottom line, Scotiabank was able to navigate its way out of the public eye and has reverted to its guiding mantra – whats good for the imperialist economy and their alleged “stockholders”! 

Any funding of genocide is too much. We will not rest until Scotiabank divests completely from Israeli war crimes. 

New instagram video: CanadaPalestineAssociation/BDS Vancouver (@cpavancouver) • Instagram photos and videos
Check out sbfundsgenocide.ca and watch for upcoming campaign actions.