“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”

                          —Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. 

                                           Penguin Classics, 2000, p. 293.

It began with a slip—not of the tongue, but of an unguarded conscience.

At a campaign rally in Calgary, as Mark Carney mounted the stage to speak, a protester’s voice sliced through the choreography of applause: “There’s a genocide happening in Gaza!” Without hesitation, Carney replied: “I’m aware. That’s why we have an arms embargo.” The response, at once unfiltered and unsanctioned, hung in the air like the start of a sentence that no one was prepared to finish. Within hours, it was sheathed in ambiguity: he hadn’t heard the word genocide, he clarified; international courts, not politicians, should speak with such gravity. By the next day, any trace of moral certainty had been subdued, folded back into the pleats of political decorum. What had flickered for a moment—a rare, unscripted recognition of atrocity—was quickly reframed as a misunderstanding. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swiftly lashed out at Carney, accusing the Canadian PM of giving credence to genocide claims against Israel. “Mr. Carney, backtrack your irresponsible statement!” Netanyahu thundered on X.

The Rupture

That brief rupture, accidental yet revealing, mirrored another unfolding elsewhere in the Canadian cultural sphere. It was the story of the controversial play The Runner,  a solo play by Christopher Morris, heading to Toronto and is scheduled to play a limited run at the Meridian Arts Centre in Toronto this spring, presented by the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company in association with Koffler Arts. 

Earlier last winter, on the West Coast, a festival’s programming decision became the latest theatre for a conflict that Canadian politics continues to dodge. The Runner, was abruptly withdrawn from Vancouver’s PuSh Festival after mounting protest. The drama, which traces the psychological unraveling of Jacob, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish member of ZAKA—the Israeli emergency response team charged with collecting body parts after attacks—centres on a harrowing choice: Jacob must decide whether to treat a wounded Palestinian woman, suspected of causing an explosion, or an Israeli soldier injured in the same event. He chooses the woman, and for this act of mercy, finds himself ostracized by his community. The play unfolds in a torrent of inner conflict, laced with religious duty, trauma, and an urgent plea for human empathy.

But empathy, it turns out, is never neutral.

For Palestinian artist Basel Zaraa, whose installation Dear Laila—a miniature reconstruction of his childhood home in a refugee camp—was also scheduled for the festival, The Runner did not represent shared humanity but its erasure. The Palestinian characters in Morris’s work, he argued, exist mostly as plot devices: voiceless, nameless, and abstracted, their suffering instrumental to the moral reckoning of the Israeli protagonist. In a time when Gaza is being turned to dust—when tens of thousands have been killed, entire families annihilated, and history itself razed—Zaraa could not abide his work being placed in conversation with a play that, in his view, reinscribed the hierarchy of grief. The festival relented. The Runner was pulled.

The reaction was swift and polarized. Some decried the cancellation as a blow to artistic freedom, a silencing of dissent at the very moment when theatre should engage with discomfort. Others insisted that the real silencing had always been structural: Palestinian narratives, when they appear at all, are filtered through a language of abstraction or folded into the suffering of others. The Canadian stage, like its politics, has long claimed to champion balance. But balance, too, is a construction—often indistinguishable from avoidance.

A core tension

Both events share a core tension: the desire to affirm shared humanity without confronting asymmetry. Carney sought to gesture toward humanitarian concern while remaining within the confines of acceptable foreign policy discourse. Morris, and the festivals that first defended then withdrew his play, attempted to foreground compassion while sidestepping the foundational imbalance of occupation and colonization. Yet neither could contain the contradiction. Words, like art, do not float in abstraction—they land amid death counts, embargos, ruined homes, and daily dehumanization.

What these two flashpoints also reveal is the performative nature of moral clarity under liberalism: how quickly it curdles under institutional scrutiny. Carney’s party, like the arts festivals, face intense public and political backlash—not merely for what was said or programmed, but for who got to say it, and whose pain was centered. In both cases, the loudest criticism came not from a rejection of humanism, but from those insisting that humanism, if it is to be real, must include those consistently dehumanized.

The parallel between Mark Carney’s retreat from his initial comment acknowledging a “genocide” in Gaza and the controversy surrounding The Runner reveals how cultural and political discourse in Canada is tightening around the edges of what can be said, shown, or supported—particularly on Palestine. Both incidents expose how institutions—be they political parties or publicly funded theatres—navigate discomfort, pressure, and the ethics of representation amid escalating atrocity.

The Metaphor

It is this very avoidance that defines the 2025 federal election campaign.

We are now midway through a national contest that purports to debate leadership, policy, and moral vision, and yet scarcely breathes the words Gaza or genocide. Even as images of craters where hospitals once stood filter into public consciousness, even as mass graves are unearthed and humanitarian workers assassinated, the official discourse tiptoes around the catastrophe. The violence is backgrounded, wrapped in euphemisms—conflict, crisis, situation—as if language itself might be coaxed into neutrality. Carney’s moment of unintended candor thus reveals something deeper than a misstep. It reveals that politics is allergic to grief when that grief is not symmetrical, to responsibility when it might demand rupture. 

Both his comment and its retreat illuminate a deeper malaise: the choreography of moral clarity under liberalism. There is, in this political grammar, an urgent need to appear humane while refusing the implications of humanity. The arms embargo—invoked by Carney as a badge of conscience—remains partial, porous, its symbolism outsized to its substance. Existing permits for arms exports continue. The embargo is less of a shield than a fig leaf.

The Runner, for its part, becomes a metaphor for the broader dilemma. Jacob, the protagonist, is trained to collect the scattered remains of violence—to restore order, however grim, to the aftermath. But what if the system that trains him is complicit in the violence it cleans up? What if compassion itself becomes a form of containment—tender in gesture, but blind to power? The play, intentionally or not, echoes the architecture of Canada’s political response: valorize individual acts of empathy while leaving the structures that necessitate them untouched.

Morris has insisted that The Runner is not propaganda, and perhaps it is not. But that is not the point. The question is not whether a play, or a candidate, holds the correct view. The question is what stories we platform when the bodies are still warm, what words we retreat from when they name things too plainly, and what silences we enforce in the name of civility.

The elusive G-word

To speak of genocide in Gaza today is to rupture the smooth surface of political and artistic consensus. It is to name an asymmetry that our institutions, from Parliament to playhouse, are loath to confront. It is to insist that suffering is not a neutral terrain, and that not all deaths are mourned equally. What’s striking is not just the evasion, but its elegance: a campaign that appears committed to human rights while deferring their application; a stage that appears open to dialogue while quarantining dissent.

And so, the campaign proceeds—orderly, polished, adrift from horror. Protesters are shuffled out of sight, Gaza is airbrushed from the stump speech, and the G-word hovers, unspoken but present, like ash in the wind. Yet the silence is not benign. It is the silence of institutions more afraid of being accused of taking sides than of being complicit in atrocity. It is the silence of a nation that prides itself on empathy, so long as that empathy asks nothing of it.

And in both cases, the final irony may be this: what was disavowed, silenced, or withdrawn has only amplified the question at the heart of the matter—how long can Canada, culturally and politically, avoid naming the violence for what it is, and whose stories are allowed to break that silence? 

The wider implication is clear: in Canada’s public sphere, moral reckoning around Gaza and Palestine is not absent—it is present, but precarious. It flares in the gaps: between an impromptu comment and a party line, between a programming choice and a cancellation. What’s at stake is not just the freedom to speak or stage, but the capacity of our institutions to hold discomfort without defaulting to safety, to move beyond narrative symmetry and into the asymmetry of truth.

In the end, perhaps the play was always off-stage. The real performance is here, in the language of evasion, in the well-lit theatre of Canadian politics, where the words Gaza and genocide are too explosive to be uttered, and too true to be entirely ignored.