Tammy Jakeman’s journey from candidate to pariah and back

On Friday, Nov 8, Tammy Jakeman was canvassing as a New Democratic Party candidate in Eastern Passage for the upcoming provincial election on Nov 26, unaware this was the beginning of a blurry and tumultuous week.

“I was having the most amazing conversations” with voters on their doorsteps in her riding, Jakeman tells The Coast. Then, coming off one doorstep just after 2:30pm Friday she checked her phone and saw missed text messages from James Pratt, the NDP’s provincial election planning coordinator. She called him back.

Pratt told her to go straight home. “He said, ‘Don’t go to your office. Don’t go anywhere—go home.”

On the phone, Jakeman says Pratt told her that the party “needed me to stop campaigning, then and there. “I was confused. Nothing in that moment made sense.” She walked across the street, got in her truck and drove home.

Once there, Pratt told her to log onto her X account, which she did on her computer, and opened a public statement he’d sent to her phone. Earlier that day, the Atlantic Jewish Council and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs had co-authored a press release about her. Citing two old social media posts of Jakeman’s, the AJC and CIJA said her “comments on Israel and the Holocaust” were “deeply troubling.” She read the statement while texting back and forth with Pratt. “I’m reading the statement about who they’re saying I am, going ‘Holy crap, no—that’s not who I am.’”

Pratt told her to delete the two X posts from 2023, and to post an apology that he would send her shortly. She got it and posted it. “I deeply regret my comments, and I’m very sorry for the harm I have caused,” the apology starts, ending: “I unequivocally apologize and commit to undergo training on issues impacting vulnerable communities.”

She then called a friend who works in the NDP who is Jewish to apologize. For the rest of the night, she didn’t sleep.

The damage control continued on Saturday. “I got up,” says Jakeman, “to messages from Pratt saying, ‘We need to come over.’”

Pratt texted that the “issue that developed last night looks like it’s about to be national,” and the party was worried they were heading “to a worst-case scenario.”

“I wasn’t offered a path forward.”

She thought, “they’re coming to tell me I have to resign.”

Jakeman—who ran as an NDP candidate in 2021, and has worked for 18 years as an educational program assistant and as a local chapter activist with the Canadian Union for Public Employees for the last 12 years—knew that giving up her candidacy would require some paperwork.

She texted Pratt: “Just bring me the form because now I have to figure out how to talk to my family.” At that, Pratt responded “we’re on our way.”

“He didn’t reply, ‘No, you don’t have to drop out, we have a plan,” says Jakeman. “I wasn’t offered a path forward.” When Pratt came over along with her friend from the party, Jakeman was feeling defeated and deflated. She was in her pyjamas, unable to get dressed.

Jakeman says the message she got that morning was that “the NDP are doing well in the polls; we don’t want to take away from that, and we’re sure you don’t want to take away from that,” and that “the best way we can protect you, is to get you out of it.”

Pratt helped Jakeman write and send her resignation letter to the NDP. She says she had to leave the room multiple times to cry. “I was just thinking, ‘this is what they want, so what else am I going to do?’”

She didn’t hear from anyone else in the party until after she’d resigned. Pratt and her friend left her house Saturday around noon. Within hours, the NSNDP issued a public statement that the party is “committed to ensuring the safety and dignity of all members of the Jewish community and Nova Scotians of all faiths,” and that Jakeman “has apologized for the harm her comments have caused” and was no longer running under the party banner. “She shares our belief that the focus of our campaign must remain on delivering solutions to the issues facing Nova Scotians.”

Then, Jakeman deactivated her X account. But she didn’t reach out to Elections Nova Scotia, to tell the voting agency what was going on.

Saturday afternoon, national media began publishing articles about Jakeman. One in the CBC said she and the NSNDP had parted ways after concerns raised by Jewish organizations; another in The Canadian Press said Jakeman was “out,” and included a statement by an NDP spokesperson that “the party was not aware of the posts during the candidate nomination period,” and that the NDP “‘are always reviewing and improving our vetting process.”

On Sunday, CIJA posted an update that Jakeman had stepped down, and linked to an article in the National Post.

The NS Progressive Conservative Party joined in the fray, issuing their own release Sunday that referred to Jakeman as an “antisemitic NDP candidate” and questioned NSNDP leader Claudia Chender for endorsing Jakeman “despite a public record of harmful, antisemitic comments.”

Jakeman’s PC opponent for Eastern Passage, justice minister Barbara Adams, is quoted in the release as saying “it seems like the NDP were willing to turn a blind eye to antisemitism and hate to let a party insider run again.”

But then the tone began to shift. On Monday, members of a local organization called Independent Jewish Voices Halifax published a statement that condemned the “smear campaign” against Jakeman, and criticized the NSNDP for “not fully, unreservedly and loudly defend[ing] Jakeman from these false accusations.”

Ben Sichel on behalf of IJV-Halifax said in the statement that Jakeman “has a huge heart and a long track record of fighting for marginalized people, and nothing she wrote was remotely antisemitic.” Sichel went on to say “it is infuriating but not surprising that the AJC and CIJA would team up with Tim Houston’s Conservatives to deflect attention both from legitimate criticism of Israel, and Tim Houston’s recent dog-whistle attacks on immigrants and refugees.”

On Wednesday, Nov 13, a group of 21 scholars in Nova Scotia emailed an open letter to Jakeman and to NDP leader Claudia Chender. It condemned the NSNDP “for its abandonment” of Jakeman, writing, “we are deeply disappointed that the party failed to stand up for freedom of expression and the democratic importance of fostering vigorous debate on contentious political issues.

“Jakeman should never have been encouraged to resign, especially considering other members of your NSNDP caucus have made their support for the Palestinian cause clear.”

“I was gaslighting myself, thinking I had done all of this to myself.”

The letter quotes IJV-Halifax’s Larry Haiven as saying at a rally: “By framing the issue to say that [Jakeman’s] remarks ‘did harm’ to Jews, the NDP is succumbing to a horrible moral blackmail. Whenever anyone criticizes Israel, whether robustly or mildly, some Jews are going to feel hurt.”

Jakeman received individual letters of support, too, from across the country. One on Tuesday Nov 12 was from a federal NDP candidate from Vancouver who is part of the Jewish Faculty Network at the University of British Columbia. They wrote, “there are many New Democrats and many Jewish folks across the country who are outraged at how you’ve been treated. ” They said they were familiar with CIJA, whom they described as “cry bullies”—adept at “playing the victim and the aggressor at the same time.”

Another email Jakeman received Monday Nov 11 was from someone who lost family members in Auschwitz and has Holocaust survivors in her family. “I remained unconvinced that a knee-jerk reaction to posts that came to light—posts that someone might legitimately want to have a serious and nuanced conversation about—was the best choice the NDP could have made,” they wrote. “I fear it may have opened a rift in the NDP that the premier is all too happy to exploit, not out of principle but out of opportunism and expediency.”

Jakeman says she hasn’t received one hateful letter or message.

Under the rules set by Elections Nova Scotia, the deadline for candidates to be nominated to run in the election was Wednesday Nov 6—just a couple days before Jakeman’s old posts were resurfaced. Her resignation from the NSNDP after the deadline, on Saturday Nov 9, meant the party was too late to put a different candidate forward to run in Eastern Passage

But Jakeman had gone through the official Elections NS nomination process, so her name would remain on the ballot—now without the party endorsement—until she decided otherwise.

It wasn’t an easy choice for her to make. “I wasn’t getting out of bed,” says Jakeman. “I wanted to hide. I kept going over and over and over everything in my head and trying to fully comprehend, ‘how did I get to this spot?’

“It wasn’t until my husband encouraged me and when I started looking at all the emails of support from people that I came back around—they really pulled me out of it.”

These are what convinced her to stay on the ballot and run as an independent candidate—a decision she made on Friday Nov 15, to close the week.

The public statement against Jakeman from Nov 8—the one that started it all—had resurfaced two social media posts of hers from 2023. The AJC and CIJA said in these posts she had “accused Israel of genocide, demeaned Holocaust remembrance efforts, and described Israel as ‘happiest when terrorizing Palestinians.’”

The statement said it’s “profoundly disappointing” for a political candidate to make “such inflammatory and hurtful accusations.” It said her “use of the term ‘genocide’ in reference to Israel” was “deeply offensive,” and that remarks like Jakeman’s “often have real-world impacts.”

It went on: “Accusing those who suffered through the Holocaust of perpetuating genocide not only shows a troubling lack of historical understanding but also serves to distort and diminish recognized acts of genocide, such as the Holocaust.”

But neither of Jakeman’s two posts mentions genocide.

Her first post, from March 2023, is rooted in the news that Israel ranked fourth in that year’s UN World Happiness Index. In response, somebody put a post out on X with a video that took a positive TV story about the index, and intercut it with graphic scenes of violent arrests, a lifeless child and bombs in the occupied Palestinian territories. Some other X user reposted the video, adding the comment: “Apartheid Israel is at its happiest when terrorizing Palestinians.” That quoted post from Mar 30 is what Jakeman then further reposted, without adding any comments of her own.

Her second post was on Nov 20, 2023. Jakeman shared and responded to a memorial post from the Auschwitz Museum on World Children’s Day that honoured the 232,000 children, including 216,000 Jewish children, who were deported to the camp “where they were murdered or imprisoned.” Jakeman’s response—which she says she deeply regrets making in this context—begins “This – on a day that children in Gaza will die because Israel is obsessed with killing all Hamas regardless of the human expenses…”

Jakeman wants to explain what she was thinking when she wrote that. She’s a union organizer and shop steward with CUPE Local 5047. Her role is to support other union members in various ways, including attending occupational health and safety meetings, helping members with paperwork, and “sometimes just being a venting board because that’s what they need.”

Jakeman says before she made that post, she was supporting a fellow union member who is Palestinian from Gaza. The CUPE member still has family in Gaza, but she had been living in Nova Scotia with her husband and kids for close to four years, and she was dealing with violence in the workplace.

“She had a student who had left physical marks on her and had ripped the hijab off her head, and she didn’t get any support from people around her,” says Jakeman, who was doing what she could to support this member.

Just under two weeks prior, Israeli air strikes hit a children’s hospital in Gaza City and killed eight people, as reported by Reuters and others. Among those killed was the nephew of the union member Jakeman was supporting. The member was mourning the loss of her nephew, and near-loss of her sister, while dealing with violence in the workplace.

“When I made the post,” says Jakeman, “that’s where my head was. If I could have my time back and take the emotion out of what I was feeling in that moment, I wouldn’t connect my post to the Auschwitz Museum. I’m very sorry for that.”

Jakeman says she wasn’t given the opportunity to explain any of this to the NSNDP when it was in “worst case scenario” and panic mode leading towards her resignation.

On Monday, Nov 18, the Halifax chapter of Independent Jewish Voices emailed a statement to journalists calling out the “coordinated attack on the NDP and [Jakeman] for seemingly comparing Israel’s current genocide of Palestinians to the Holocaust” and a “double standard on antisemitism and hate” within the AJC, CIJA and the NS PC Party.

“This week, it comes to light that one of Tim Houston’s most senior advisors has done something arguably worse,” it reads, in reference to an op-ed written by the premier’s communications director, Stephen Moore, for the National Post in 2023. The IJV-Halifax says in the article, Moore is “defending the use of the swastika by Freedom Convoy truckers in Ottawa, and comparing Justin Trudeau’s government to Nazi Germany.”

The IJV-Halifax release on Moore says the group is “calling on Tim Houston to remove Moore from the campaign immediately and offer a public apology for the harm caused by Moore’s comments. If CIJA and the AJC are truly concerned about the rise of antisemitism, IJV-Halifax calls on them to explain their silence on Moore’s participation in the Houston campaign.”

The IJV-Halifax said that the AJC, CIJA and the PC Party “demanded and got Jakeman’s resignation, and the Nova Scotia NDP shamefully did not challenge these false accusations against their candidate,” but that “IJV-Halifax came to Jakeman’s defence.”

They had.

The IJV-Halifax’s earlier statement—on that Monday, Nov 11 after Jakeman’s Saturday resignation from the NSNDP—had said “criticism of Israel is not antisemitism,” and that “we know that many in the NDP understand this and speak out frequently in support of Palestinians. While antisemitism is a real problem, and growing commensurate with other forms of bigotry and white supremacy, it is incumbent upon us as Jews to separate real instances of antisemitism from bad-faith, politically motivated attacks.”

IJV Canada co-founder and Saint Mary’s professor emeritus Larry Haiven teaches about this, writes about this and has spoken about this at the Provincial Legislature in 2022, when he cautioned against the province adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s broad definition of antisemitism, now used by federal government’s Department of Canadian Heritage.

The federal NDP party has also publicly raised questions about the IHRA’s definition, as recently as Nov 2, 2024. The party writes that since the adoption of the “working definition of antisemitism by the Liberal government, New Democrats and progressive Jewish organizations”—including Independent Jewish Voices Canada—“have raised concerns about its capacity to silence legitimate criticism of state institutions and their actions. Notably, Kenneth Stern, the original drafter of the IHRA definition, raised similar concerns, arguing that the weaponization of the definition had threatened free expression and the open exchange of constructive ideas.”

IJV is a grassroots organization “grounded in Jewish tradition that opposes all forms of racism and advocates for justice and peace for all in Israel-Palestine.”

The IJV-Halifax statement in support of Jakeman on Nov 11 said that “through many election campaigns, federal, provincial and municipal, ‘establishment’ Jewish organizations like [CIJA] have followed a similar modus operandi:” to flag “any criticism of Israel by candidates and sitting legislators and then feed bogus accusations of antisemitism to the media and rival political parties; political candidates and politicians targeted this way include Sara Jama, Syed Hyder Ali, Hans Marotte, Jerry Natanine, Sana Hassainia, Craig Sauve, Shameela Shakeel, and Nova Scotia’s Rana Zaman and Morgan Wheeldon, among others.”

“I got told that people were going to slam doors in my face and it was going to be horrible…It’s not.

Jakeman acknowledges that “I don’t know what I don’t know,” and isn’t sure what would have happened had the NDP backed her and encouraged her to continue to run. “I was gaslighting myself, thinking I had done all of this to myself.”

The Coast asked the NSNDP what it did to support Jakeman, its position on criticizing foreign state government actions and whether her posts would have prevented her from being endorsed had they known about them.

By way of response, the party shared a statement that “Jakeman apologized for her comments and offered her resignation to the NSNDP. We accepted and supported her in that decision.”

In a follow-up statement, the party said, “We’re in a time of heightened anger and heartbreak. The [NSNDP] was the first provincial party in the country to call for an immediate ceasefire and peace, self-determination and statehood for the Palestinian people. Thus far, we are the only Nova Scotia party to do so.”

Jakeman has been back to full days of door-knocking in Eastern Passage since Monday Nov 18, now unattached to any party.

“I got told that people were going to slam doors in my face and it was going to be horrible,” she says. “It’s not. The things people out here are concerned about is affordability and the fact that this community is a food desert—to get food they have to have a vehicle, but it costs money to maintain a vehicle.”

Jakeman says she met a father of three on Monday who’s been on the province’s Need a Family Practice Registry for seven years. “His name keeps getting removed, and then he has to go back and re-register, which throws him back down to the bottom of the list.”

Jakeman says the people she’s spoken with “are really interested in the idea of somebody not tied to a party—that it’s all voices and not just the party message.” She also knows that, if elected as an independent member of the Legislative Assembly, any bills she brings forward will be private members bills, meaning “there’s a lot of conversation that has to happen across all three parties to get things done.”

But “working collaboratively with people and building relationships—that’s what I do with my students,” she says. “They say Nova Scotians are all three degrees of separation, so finding commonalities is how to help.”

Elections Nova Scotia counted Jakeman’s resignation from the NDP Party on Nov 9 and, at 4:47pm that day, her status changed to “independent.”

A spokesperson for ENS told The Coast that ballots cast before the close of candidate nominations—which was 2pm on Nov 6—included the names of registered political parties and a space for the voter to write in the name of their candidate of choice. Any write-in ballots where voters only selected the NDP name and didn’t specify Jakeman as their choice are now rejected, or spoiled. But, if any voters wrote in Jakeman, those will count towards her independent candidacy.

On Nov 7, early voting switched to e-Ballot, meaning voters could select Jakeman by name. The ENS spokesperson said these votes will still count towards her.

Jakeman is one of four independent candidates running across 55 districts in the general provincial election. Since leaving the NDP, she’s had to do things the party took care of before, such as appointing a new official agent, the person responsible for all financial activities for the campaign and filing financial reports after the election. “I’m in a position that I didn’t expect to be in—of having to learn as I’m doing it. It’s kind of fun.”

She says “a lot of people are appreciating that I’m still out there. No matter how hard this is, I’m still out there. That’s been the message the last couple days.”