Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where your Thanksgiving hopefully was filled with turkey pie and happiness over whatever family arguments you managed to survive; the Israeli flag won’t fly if Mississauga’s mayor has anything to say about it; and more. Let’s get to it!
October 26 is Election Day in Mississauga, Ontario, which describes itself as “a connected, diverse, and experience-rich destination on the shores of Lake Ontario.” And as part of her reelection campaign, Mayor Carolyn Parrish offered an unusually candid explanation for her move to ban all national flags except for Canada’s from a city park known as Celebration Square.
Parrish proposed the ban, and it was approved by the city council in April. She explained the decision at a local mosque, which gives you a hint about where all this is going. “I met with Arafat many years ago in the desert,” she said about the former Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, according to a video posted Friday on X. “He took off his keffiyeh, and he gave it to me, and he made me an honorary Palestinian.”
Parrish then turned to the flag ban. “We also raised the Palestinian flag in Mississauga, and right after that, we banned all foreign flags because the next one would have been the Israeli flag. So we made sure that one was not raised.”
That’s not even close to the words Parrish used when she floated the idea. Her proposal to the city council said only that national flags “have recently become a source of controversy and at times division within the community, and are now taking up significant staff time and incurring legal costs.”