Israel Wants Canada to #Unsubscribe from our Commitment to the International Criminal Court, (and Conservatives Agree)
Canada Has Re-Committed to Arresting Netanyahu If He Steps Foot in Canada, and Netanyahu isn’t about that
What Happened
On October 19, 2025, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney publicly committed that Canada will comply with the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if Netanyahu travels to Canada.
The ICC issued warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in late 2024 over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza—including documented mass killings, starvation as a weapon, and destruction of civilian infrastructure during Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Israel denounced both the ICC’s action and Carney’s pledge, pressuring Canada to walk back its commitment and arguing it undermines Israeli sovereignty and diplomatic relations.
Worth Noting:
Conservative Politicians & Pundits Are Framing International Law as “Virtue Signaling”—Here’s What That Actually Means
When accountability threatens power, watch how quickly “law and order” becomes “judicial overreach.”
Within days of Prime Minister Mark Carney confirming Canada would enforce the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, Conservative politicians mobilized what felt like a coordinated that benefits from their digital narrative dominance. Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, Conservative MPs, provincial leaders like Alberta’s Danielle Smith, and commentators like Brian Lilley all pushed the same line: arresting Netanyahu would “irreparably damage” Canada’s relationship with Israel, abandon an ally, and amount to “virtue signaling with international courts.”
Here’s what’s actually happening: Conservatives are reframing international legal accountability as optional politics.
When they call enforcing an ICC warrant “virtue signaling,” they’re not critiquing empty gestures—they’re dismissing justice as ideological preference. Enforcing this warrant isn’t performative. It’s what countries that claim to respect international law are obligated to do. Canada is a signatory to the Rome Statute that created the ICC. Enforcement isn’t a choice.
Calling it “virtue signaling” reveals exactly how Conservatives view international accountability: something you invoke when politically useful and dismiss when it threatens alliances you want to protect.
What This Reveals About Conservative Foreign Policy Priorities
The Conservative response to Carney’s ICC commitment makes their priorities explicit:
• Geopolitical alliances over international law
• Economic relationships over human rights obligations
• US and Israeli diplomatic comfort over legal accountability
• Framing justice as “politics” when it challenges Western interests
This isn’t new. Conservatives have long positioned themselves as defenders of “law and order” domestically while treating international law as optional when enforcing it becomes politically uncomfortable. They invoke legal frameworks when convenient and dismiss them as “judicial overreach” when they don’t align with their interests.
Canada Barely Chose Accountability—And That Should Terrify Us
Mark Carney’s commitment to the ICC matters. But let’s not mistake one decision for a national consensus.
The last federal election wasn’t a landslide—it was a scrape-by. Carney won with 169 seats to the Conservatives’ 144. A few thousand votes in key ridings could have flipped the outcome. That means nearly half this country voted for a party explicitly opposed to enforcing international law when it conflicts with their geopolitical alliances. Pierre Poilievre didn’t become Prime Minister, but the Conservatives pulled in enough seats to show that rejecting accountability has massive political support in Canada.
So while Carney upholds Canada’s ICC obligations, we can’t pretend that reflects the will of the entire country. This is a deeply divided electorate, and the threat isn’t just external. The call is coming from inside the house too. The same forces that produced Trump’s rise have been growing here for years—through the “Freedom Convoy,” through “parental rights” campaigns that mask anti-trans bigotry, through disinformation networks that mirror far-right tactics south of the border. These aren’t imported ideologies. They’re Canadian-grown threats shaped by our own institutions and culture.
And here’s what makes this moment even more urgent: Canada still sells arms to Israel. While Carney commits to arresting Netanyahu for war crimes, Canadian-made weapons continue flowing to the Israeli military. That’s not accountability—that’s contradiction. Real accountability means stopping arms sales, ending complicity in occupation and genocide, and confronting decades of Canadian foreign policy that protected Israeli state violence while erasing Palestinian humanity.
One correct decision on the ICC doesn’t erase that. It’s a break in the pattern—but barely. And if Conservatives regain power, even that break disappears. So yes, this matters. But don’t confuse one step forward with safety. The fight for accountability is just beginning, and half this country voted against it.
OCP Media Disclaimer: We are #TeamHumanity
Let’s be honest about what this isn’t: cheerleading for Mark Carney or the Liberal Party.
Canada’s political institutions—across party lines—are products of a settler colonial system built to consolidate power, not redistribute it. Liberals and Conservatives don’t represent equal opposites; they operate within the same architecture of settler legitimacy. Conservatives defend that power openly. Liberals manage it more carefully.
We refuse false equivalence, but we’re also not pretending Parliament Hill is where liberation happens.
One party is actively dismantling international law to protect empire. The other is inconsistentlyconstrained by it. That difference matters—even if neither offers justice.
Political institutions in a settler state can be used for what scholars call “settler harm reduction”: minimizing damage until deeper transformation becomes possible. But actual justice—the kind that returns land, power, and life—won’t be legislated from the top down. It will be built through movements, organizing, and kinship that exist beyond electoral politics.
So we fight inside institutions to slow harm. And we organize outside them to end it.
International law isn’t liberation. Enforcing an ICC warrant isn’t decolonization. But it’s a tool that can prevent harm in the present—and that matters when people’s lives are on the line.
Hold the complexity. Keep the clarity. And don’t confuse pragmatism with principle.
xo,
your informed besties
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For more context on the ICC, International Crimes etc , we invite you to scroll through and read some of the explainers, originally shared on Instagram in November 2024, to better understand what is happening.
Sources:
l https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/israel-urges-canadian-pm-carney-drop-call-arrest-netanyahu-2025-10-21/
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-netanyahu-carney-icc-warrant-israel-gaza/
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/mark-carney-says-canada-would-enforce-icc-warrant-arrest-benjamin-netanyahu-if-he-enters-country-israel-responds-101761121433272.html
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-871186
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/poilievre-trudea-netanyahu-arrest-warrant-extre
... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/11/23/fire-trudeau-netanyahu-arrest-warrant-pierre-poilievre/
https://rabble.ca/columnists/poilievre-makes-specious-argument-against-netanyahu-arrest-warrant/
https://www.cjpme.org/election_guide_2025
https://armsembargonow.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Exposing-Canadian-Military-Exports-to-Israel_07292025_compressed-.pdf
https://www.readthemaple.com/canadas-arms-to-israel-scandal-explained/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/arms-ammunition-shipments-israel-canada-1.7596091
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/michel-rempel-garner-two-tier-justice-1.7608055
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-israel-friendship-gaza-1.7541957 https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/trudeau-says-canada-would-abide-by-icc-arrest-warrant-for-israel-pm-netanyahu/