Beauregard went through his colleagues’ criticism of him point by point. Tepper, Gauthier and Braun accused Beauregard of seeking accreditation for Rights and Democracy at the April 2009 World Conference Against Racism. This was the so-called Durban Review Conference, a follow-up in Geneva to the United Nations’ lurid and toxic 2001 Durban conference in South Africa, which had degenerated into a multinational attack on Israel. “This is wrong,” Beauregard wrote. “We never requested accreditation to the Durban Review Conference, nor did we attend the conference as an observer.”
Next, Beauregard’s critics denounced him for a “missed opportunity”: failing to condemn Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for his virulently anti-Israel speech to the Geneva conference. Beauregard responded: “It would be incongruous to make a statement on an issue in which I, as president, decided that the institution would not be involved.”
But these were relatively minor skirmishes compared to the topic at the heart of the confrontation between Beauregard and Braun. After the January 2009 conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Beauregard had authorized a so-called “Urgent Action” project from discretionary funds to document any human rights violations in Gaza. The grants, $10,000 each, went to three groups in the area: B’Tselem in Israel, Al-Haq in Ramallah in the West Bank, and Al-Mezan in Gaza. The evaluation of Beauregard said Al-Haq’s director general, Shawan Jabarin, “was found to be a senior member of the terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, by the Supreme Court of Israel and many other organizations.”
Here, too, Beauregard saw things differently. All three of the recipient organizations “are seen as credible by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Dutch foreign minister,” he said. Jabarin hadn’t been a member of the PFLP since 1987. Israeli human-rights groups had protested the travel ban on him. Israel’s top court had imposed the ban after a trial in which Jabarin was forbidden, under anti-terrorism laws, to hear or reply to the evidence against him. Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae had met with Al-Haq in Ramallah on March 14, coincidentally only four days after Braun’s appointment to the Rights and Democracy board.
Along with the formal evaluation by Gauthier and Tepper, and Braun’s memo, the government had also received, and returned to Beauregard, another memo by Jacques Gauthier. In many ways this was the most upsetting to Beauregard. It included Gauthier’s claim that “while attending a conference in Cairo in the fall of 2008, Mr. Beauregard met with representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah.”
“This is patently false, and I consider it an attack on my reputation,” Beauregard replied.
“Finally, a section of this memo is the most troubling to me,” Beauregard wrote. During an informal dinner chat in March with a Rights and Democracy employee, Gauthier and the employee had asked about each other’s background. “I was also very surprised,” Gauthier wrote, “to be informed subsequently that there are no Jewish employees in the office of R&D in Montreal.”
This left Beauregard livid. “It is completely unacceptable for a member of the board to inquire about the ethnicity and/or religious affiliation of staff members,” he wrote, “especially for a human rights organization. When the union learns about this and when we know more about how Mr. Gauthier investigated the religious affiliations of our staff, all hell will break loose.”
Maclean’s emailed Braun and Gauthier at 12:14 on the afternoon of Tuesday, Feb. 9, with a list of questions pertaining to the allegations in Beauregard’s document. Each wrote back several hours later, saying it was impossible to reply before that evening’s publication deadline for this issue of the magazine. “The assumptions behind your questions are in large part demonstrably wrong, misleading, incomplete and/or distorted and I caution you against publishing an article based on them,” Gauthier wrote.
Reading Beauregard’s comments, it is not hard to spot a general tone of disbelief at his surreal predicament. He had spent 40 years working in government and non-profit organizations, after all, often in human rights. In 1986 he became the first person to run Ontario’s Office of Francophone Affairs, trying to figure out how to extend services to the province’s French-language minority. His work in that post has made him a nearly heroic figure among Franco-Ontarians. Later he ran the Ontario Human Rights Commission before working on a new constitution for Rwanda and human rights legislation for the Democratic Republic of Congao. He’d seen his share of tough fights.
But he’d never seen anything like this. His antagonists on the board were accusing him—in a secret memo they had fought to keep out of his hands—of failing to “improve the communications and interactions” between his office and the board. In his accompanying memo, Braun wrote that all this was “constructive criticism and it is hoped that it will be viewed in that light by Mr. Beauregard.” Braun had then spent three months trying to ensure Beauregard would not be permitted to view it in any light at all.
That was the June meeting. Donica Pottie, the government representative, resigned from the board in September. Still short of a workable voting majority, Braun cancelled the October board meeting on two days’ notice. Three weeks later, the government appointed two new board members, Michael Van Pelt and David Matas. Van Pelt runs a Christian-oriented think tank. Matas is a former federal Liberal candidate who volunteers as legal counsel with B’nai Brith Canada.
Beauregard realized he was losing allies inside Rights and Democracy. He made a futile attempt to get help from outside. On Nov. 3, he wrote a desperate letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon about the “profound divisions” at Rights and Democracy. “This situation cannot last,” he said. “I would like to meet you as soon as it will be possible for you to discuss this.”
Beauregard had reason to hope Cannon would pay attention. Beauregard and Cannon’s chief of staff, Paul Terrien, had been friends since university. But Cannon never answered Beauregard’s letter. This week he told Maclean’s he does not recall seeing it.
When the board finally met again in January, Matas, who had already served on the board in the 1990s, and Van Pelt showed themselves to be reliable allies of Braun, Gauthier and Tepper. The removal of another board member and the resignations of two more gave Braun an unbeatable majority. And then Rémy Beauregard died. Of course nobody can know whether he would have lived longer in other circumstances. But his death throws more public scrutiny on Rights and Democracy than any of the players expected.
Two public statements published simultaneously in Israel and Canada, days after Beauregard’s death, hint at the broader strategy behind the changes at Rights and Democracy. The first is an op-ed in the National Post signed by Braun and six of his allies on the board. Referring to the grants to Al-Haq, B’Tselem and Al-Mezat, they write that two of the groups “are active in the lawfare movement, which is a strategy of abusing law to achieve military objectives—in this case, to punish Israel for anti-terror operations.”
The same day in the Jerusalem Post, Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar Ilan university, published an op-ed congratulating the Canadian government for “reversing course” on a policy of abusing human rights and international law “as weapons to demonize Israel.” Steinberg mentioned the board changes at Rights and Democracy, and the federal government’s refusal to renew funding for an interfaith human-rights group called Kairos, as evidence of this trend.
Steinberg runs an organization called NGO Monitor, which diligently chronicles international criticism of Israel’s human rights record and portrays it as an attack against Israel’s right to exist. He is a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, whose website reads in part: “Israel’s growth and survival are dependent on its winning the war of ideas. The challenges that Israel faces today are not only military. They extend to the United Nations, the mass media, foreign universities, and non-governmental organizations.”
Steinberg’s list of organizations he regards as anti-Israel is long. In one publication he decries CIDA aid to what he calls “extremist political groups” opposed to Israel, among which he counts Médecins du Monde, Oxfam, and the Mennonite Central Committee of Canada. Braun is a friend of Steinberg’s who sought to have him speak last year to the Rights and Democracy board. The board, as it was then composed, declined Braun’s offer. It would perhaps vote differently today.
There is room for a rich and ornery debate over all the issues raised by the Rights and Democracy controversy. Is every criticism of Israel’s human rights record an attack on its right to exist? Does it still make sense to maintain an arm’s-length relationship between a government like Canada’s and a quasi-NGO, funded entirely from federal coffers, like Rights and Democracy? Is this any way to run a human rights shop?
But the government of Stephen Harper has preferred action to debate at every step. It appointed every member of the Rights and Democracy board, including those who supported Beauregard. Indeed, the Harper government appointed Beauregard himself.
But with five board appointments in 2009, the government set out to transform the style and personality of the organization. And in the midst of the astonishing uproar that has followed Beauregard’s death, Foreign Affairs Minister Cannon has stayed mute on the issues at the centre of the controversy. Three months after Beauregard wrote him to complain about Braun’s behaviour, Cannon finally met privately with Braun.
Stephen Harper used to complain that Liberals made policy changes this way: with strategic appointments of people who would take positions more extreme than any government facing a Parliament ever would, and strategic silence when those appointees went about the business of promoting their agendas. It turns out he was doing more than complain. He was learning lessons he would apply when his own time came.
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