John Ivison: In these dark days, look to Irwin Cotler

No wonder hope seems so much harder to conjure up than despair when one reads the daily news.

In particular, the counter-revolution against the post-war liberal consensus being led by Donald Trump inspires dread and fear.

His moves to override the courts and neuter Congress; his attacks on the whole notion of human rights and the rule of law enshrined in the UN Charter and international agreements induce a sense of dislocation and gloom.

As the New York Times’ Bret Stephens wrote last week, after the president had written a spiteful obituary to murdered film director Rob Reiner, suggesting he died because of his anti-Trump views, “our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized… I wonder if we are ever getting them back.”

In his social media post on Reiner, Trump said, “the Golden Age of America is upon us.” Stephens said the country “feels (more) like a train coming off the rails.”

Every day brings a new outrage. The president said the U.S. “has to have” Greenland for security reasons and has refused to rule out the use of force to get it. “We’ll have to work that out,” he said when asked.

That is a tacit threat against a NATO ally, Denmark, which is taking it seriously. In the annual threat assessment released last week by the Danish Defence Intelligence Service, it was noted that the Americans are leveraging economic power to assert their will. “The possibility of employing military force — even against its allies — is no longer ruled out,” it reads.

The menace of the Russians, the jihadis and Chinese is one thing. It was ever thus and is to be expected. But how does one compute the prospect that Denmark might invoke NATO’s Article Five over a kinetic threat from the United States?

My mental health has been much improved by working on a forthcoming biography of Irwin Cotler, Canada’s former justice minister, a four-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and an under-appreciated (at least in his native land) giant of global human rights.

If Trump is the symbol of ethical rot, Cotler is the personification of moral regeneration. He is, as he said of Nelson Mandela in Parliament on his death in December 2013, “a metaphor of hope.”

Cotler’s moral compass was set at an early age by teachings handed down by his father in the book, Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), a compilation of Jewish theological and ethical maxims.

Chief among them is the concept of Tikkun Olam — repairing the hurt in the world; that is, the idea that each of us has the ability to do something for a victim of hurt or discrimination. “While one is not obliged to complete the work, one is not free to neglect it,” it reads.

As his wife, Ariela, has put it, Cotler is “a man who carries the world on his shoulders” — someone who has pushed himself beyond his physical limits in an attempt to complete the work, almost single-handedly.

But he is not alone. The former McGill law professor has proven to be an infectious and inspirational figure for generations of human rights lawyers and activists around the world. “He has sown thousands of seeds all over the world,” said his former chief of staff, Howard Liebman.

“Irwin rubs off on you to be the best version of yourself,” said Evgenia Kara-Murza, who worked with Cotler to help free her husband, Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was incarcerated in Putin’s gulag before being released in a prisoner swap last year.

Cotler’s inner motor is driven by the need to ensure justice for the marginalized and vulnerable, and by the smouldering conviction that the bullies can’t be allowed to win.

As former federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff put it in a Substack post on Trump’s assault on liberalism: “All revolutions run their course. They exhaust the wild-eyed enthusiasm and cold-eyed calculation that brought them to power.” That echoes Gandhi’s sense that all through history there have been tyrants and murderers, “and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall … always.”

Cotler maintains the same conviction, despite the evidence that the arc of the universe is bending towards authoritarianism, rather than justice.

As he told me in an interview this fall: “I take a long view of history and I do believe that it will bend towards justice — we just need to help it. We are in a struggle for the soul of humanity.”

On that upbeat note, a very happy and peaceful 2026 to all readers.

National Post

jivison@criffel.ca
Twitter.com/IvisonJ