Asking Joly about arms exports to Israel

Or, this week's ICYMI headline round-up ...

Mar 30, 2025

Friday night, I got a paid Facebook ad inviting me to a Q&A with Jean-Yves Duclos and Mélanie Joly in my riding. I emailed my partner who had already gone to bed: one of us has to go. I registered both of our names as one person and went to bed.

Yesterday came and I went. I dragged my kid along with me to get him out of the house and go on an adventure to get there (bike 3KM and then leave our bikes at a stirwekk where we would walk down 120 steps right onto what is basically a highway with no sidewalk in the direction we need to go). Despite being a downtown riding, they managed to pick one of the least accessible spots for someone without a car but, in their defence, it’s a nice, new space.

I didn’t go as a journalist. I wanted to hear Joly, see the energy and, as I figured that it would be my only chance to do anything local related to this election beyond actually voting, I went. There didn’t seem to be any journalists present. There were maybe 60 or 70 people , including nearly all the Liberal candidates for the region (the other sitting MP excluded). This wasn’t an event for Quebec-Centre alone, it was for the region. Nor was it an event for all voters, it was a solidly Liberal rally.

At 70 people, the turnout looked smaller than what photos showed of Pierre Poilievre’s Quebec City event (though probably not that much smaller, or maybe the photos lied). Joly is the highest ranking Quebecer in government and people came with many, many questions about Trump. There was nothing too challenging so, fine, I decided I’d ask a question (immediately after emailing my partner saying that I wasn’t going to ask anything.)

I said that a new report showed that a 2019 contract to supply the US Department of Defence with artillery propellant had been amended in September 2024 to include Israel as one of the two secondary recipients (Ukraine was the other). You can read the report here. This was done a week or so after Joly had promised to stop the sale of arms to Israel. And so I asked: what will it take to stop Canada from buying from and selling arms to Israel?

Joly said that the policy towards Israel has not changed and that this report was false.

It wasn’t the kind of place for me to ask for a follow up, or to press her further, so I said thank you and sat down.

I don’t know if it’s the first time that she’s been asked about this contract since Project Ploughshares published their report, but it’s not the first time she was questioned on it. Back in August, after saying to The Maple that their information “was not based in fact,” Alex Cosh explained on Bluesky that actually, she had to intervene to stop it from happening.

And so, here we have Project Ploughshares with information obtained from the US Department of Defense that seems to, again, contradict Joly’s line that this isn’t true … who are we to believe?

I haven’t seen any mainstream journalists jump on this report. Joly has avoided a level of scrutiny that the moment demands, and so I knew that even though I had no desire to whatsoever, I had to at least ask.

One of the few people at the event who didn’t look like he was a die hard Liberal came up to me after and said, “thanks for your question. You have no idea how many people agree with you. It needed to be asked.”

Here are the headlines that were featured this week on the Daily News podcast.

New Brunswick

N.B. man says he complained about fuel leak 7 weeks before Tim Hortons shut down in Woodstock

Québec

Les policiers découvrent une femme isolée depuis 27 ans par son ex-conjoint

Black and Arab people overrepresented in Laval police stops, data show, reflecting broader Quebec pattern

Alberta

Alberta changes reservist leave rules to allow for Kananaskis G7 summit deployment

‘Let’s just put things on pause': Alberta premier under fire for Breitbart interview

British Columbia

Family of Indigenous B.C. youth who died in care say they believe she froze to death

Manitoba