Remember their names.
A reflection on the anniversary of the October 7th massacre and our obligation to vote
Ben Mizrachi. 22 years old.
Ben Mizrachi grew up in Vancouver's Jewish community. He was 22 when Hamas gunmen shot him at the Supernova music festival in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Vivian Silver. 74 years old.
Vivian Silver was born in Winnipeg and moved to Israel in 1974. She co-founded Women Wage Peace and spent decades arguing for a negotiated future with her neighbours in Gaza. She was killed in her home on Kibbutz Be'eri. For weeks, her family believed she'd been taken hostage.
Judih Weinstein Haggai and Gad Haggai. 70 years old and 72 years old.
Judih Weinstein Haggai grew up in Toronto. She taught children meditation in bomb shelters so they could cope with the fear. She and her husband Gadi Haggai were shot on an early morning walk, and her body was carried into Gaza.
Alexandre Look and Tiferet Lapidot were from Montreal. Shir Georgy, Netta Epstein and Adi Vital-Kaploun, a mother of two small children, also held Canadian citizenship. Netta threw himself on a grenade to protect his fiancée. Eight Canadians, killed in one morning.
Alexandre Look. 23 years old.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin was 23. A grenade tore off his arm in a roadside shelter, and he was dragged into Gaza. He was held for almost eleven months before his captors shot him and five other hostages.
Shiri Bibas was taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz holding her sons, Ariel, who was four, and Kfir, who was nine months old. None of them came home alive. Hamas returned their bodies in February 2025, after parading the boys' coffins on a stage.
Tiferet Lapidot. 22 years old.
About 1,200 people were killed that day and 251 were taken hostage. In March 2024, the UN's special representative on sexual violence in conflict reported reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape happened in at least three locations. The report also found clear and convincing information that hostages had been subjected to sexual violence. It made the news for about a day. A lot of people who had something to say about everything else that year never mentioned it.
Shir Georgy. 22 years old.
Not everyone killed was Jewish. Thai farm workers, Bedouin Israelis and others died too. But Hamas came for Jews. Its founding charter quotes a call to kill them, and that morning it did. Everyone else who died was killed for being near us.
Netta Epstein. 22 years old.
Before Israel had responded in Gaza, people were already calling the massacre “resistance”, or saying “it never happened”, or celebrating in the streets, including streets in Canada. Three years on, plenty of people hold settled views about that day built from clips, captions and chatbot summaries they never properly fact-checked. Social media and AI tools make it easy to take in a thousand claims in an afternoon and verify none of them.
Adi Vital-Kaploun. 33 years old.
Some of this message was organized. In October 2024, Canada listed Samidoun as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code, citing its close links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. American officials said the group was headquartered in Vancouver, and days earlier a rally it organized here had chanted "death to Canada." That designation may have shut down one organization. But, it doesn't retire the ideas that organization spent years spreading, and those ideas are still here.
Anti-Zionism is a form of Jew hatred. Singling out one people as the only one on Earth without a right to a state, and treating the people who live there or who identify with that state as fair targets, is hatred with a foreign policy vocabulary.
Hersch Goldberg-Polin. 23 years old.
Ariel Bibas. 4 years old. Shiri Bibas. 32 years old. Kfir Bibas. 9 months old.
Our municipal election in BC is on October 17. In Port Moody, there is advance voting today and Saturday at the Recreation Complex. A week later, on October 24, we vote again in the snap provincial election David Eby called last month. That's two ballots in eight days and a lot of people asking for your trust in their ability to represent you and lead our communities.
Running for office takes courage. You put your name on a sign and your family's weekends and evenings on hold, and you take criticism from people you’ve never met or taken the chance to participate in the world worst job interview. Most candidates are decent people. The rule I try to hold myself to is to be generous about motives and rigorous about positions.
This means you should assume the person that shows up at your door means well. Then check and verify what they've actually done. Don’t rely on brand or rhetoric — review their record.
That applies in every direction. If you've decided you'll never vote for a Conservative, or never for a New Democrat, you've let a party label do your thinking. Judge the person by their actions and their words, and by whether the two match.
Here's what I'd ask my candidates:
What did they say about October 7 in the weeks after, when saying something cost a little?
Do they show up for some communities' grief and stay home for others'?
Do they advocate for safety for all communities, or sacrifice the safety of some for political rhetoric?
When Jewish schools and synagogues in this country were shot at and set on fire, did they speak up?
Have they shared a stage or a photo with people who call for Israel's destruction, and if so, what did they say afterward?
If they've held office, does the record match the brochure?
Some people in elected office have said nothing for three years, or have lent their names to people who chant for the elimination of the only Jewish state. (I lump the silence in with the active, because silence is complicit in the spread of hate.) Ask them how that serves everyone they represent, and make them answer in person.
Ben, Vivian, Judih, Alexandre, Tiferet, Shir, Netta, Adi, Hersh, Shiri, Ariel and Kfir.
Learn their names.
Then learn the record of whoever's asking for your vote.
Zikhronam livrakha: may their memory be a blessing.
Find your Port Moody voting place: portmoody.ca/vote
Find your provincial voting place: elections.bc.ca