Perched on a blue couch in her first-floor office of the Confederation Building, Lantsman, having just left Ques- tion Period, is wearing one of her signature tailored jackets and reflecting on the position in which she’s found herself. She comes across as personable and chatty. The novelty of serving as a pugilistic rookie MP opposing an unpop- ular government may have worn off, but Lantsman, who is no stranger to Ottawa’s ways, says she understands the precarity of the job. “I don’t think anybody ever knows how long they’re going to be here,” she muses. “That’s a fact of life, partic- ularly when the future of your career is in the hands of everyone else.” She described her first few years in the House: “I wanted to make sure that I was loud, I was seen, and I was here to oppose the government when they needed to be opposed. ... That is my singular focus when I’m here in Ottawa.” Lantsman’s earliest exposure to politics goes back to the 1990s, when she volunteered as a teenager for the campaign of Tina Molinari, a former Thornhill Tory MPP, canvassing in her own neighbourhood. Her parents, both Zionists, had emigrated from Odessa (then in the Soviet Union, now in Ukraine) in the early 1970s, spent a few years in Israel, then moved to Belgium, where her older brother was born. The Lantsmans settled in Toronto, joining one set of grandparents and eventually buying a home in the burgeoning and predominantly Jewish suburb north of Steeles and Bathurst. Her father, an engineer by training, drove a cab be- cause he couldn’t get certified to practise here, while her mother worked as an accountant. Lantsman says her moth- er encouraged her to follow her nose, career-wise, but re- calls that her family was apolitical, as were her friends from summer camp and various sports leagues. “Politics [was] actually the opposite of a thing in my high school [and] in my household,” she says, describing her folks as “typical immigrant parents who came in and tried to Canadianize themselves. … They actually discouraged me from spend- ing all of my time in politics because they thought that it wouldn’t lead anywhere.” Lantsman, however, was hooked from the get-go. “I absolutely fell in love with this thing called politics.” Her friends could see it, too: “It was always her goal, from when we were still in university,” recalls Leah Carr, a tech executive who has been one of Lantsman’s closest friends since high school. “She was very vocal that she wanted to work in government, and she then eventually wanted to be an elected official.” They volunteered a lot during their University of Toron- to days, says Carr: for the UJA Federation, a Birthright lead- ership training program, and, eventually, the St. George chapter of Hillel. They were both involved with Hillel in 2004, the year of the first Israeli Apartheid Week event. “We were kind of immediately swept into a lot of that con- versation at the time,” says another old friend, Andrea
Conservative party that wants to win an election, she really plays an important role.” Yet Lantsman also walks that finest of lines: she’s a high-profile MP in a party that lionized a leader who monopolized the limelight until he lost his exurban Ottawa seat and had to self-exile to rural Alberta. An aggressive de- bater, Lantsman tends to eschew Poilievre’s sloganeering, his arrogance, and his penchant for personal insults. She also obviously knows how to manage her public persona. While she avoided posing with the truckers, Lantsman did attend a private session with the organizers and several oth- er Tory MPs in 2022. The following year, three Tory MPs made news for meeting with Christine Anderson, a hard- right German member of the European Parliament. Lants- man joined with Poilievre to insist publicly that they didn’t know anything about Anderson’s politics. (She belongs to Alternative for Germany, a neo-fascist party.) She has also emerged as arguably the most high- profile Jewish MP in Canada — a form of political identi- ty she did not embrace, or even think much about, until October 7, 2023. Indeed, Lantsman’s initial goals in politics orbited around core conservative policies: lowering taxes, making life more affordable, and so on. But after Hamas’s attack, which killed 1,200 Israelis and saw another 251 tak- en hostage, she realized she had to become more visibly and outspokenly Jewish. “I wanted people to see [I was] a fighter for them.” While Lanstman is every inch a team player, questions about the stark differences in her and Poilievre’s personas will be moot … until they’re not. After all, Prime Minister Mark Carney sits atop a minority government that’s only a few seats shy of a majority. He’s been able to push his agen- da, partly with the Tories’ support. Although the parties are almost tied in the polls, Carney is far more popular than Poil- ievre, who faces a leadership review in January and a po- tentially make-or-break election in the next few years. If he follows the fate of his predecessors, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, Lantsman may be well positioned to succeed him.
N A CRISP fall morning, a Tory MP rises in a largely empty House to make a speech, accusing the Liberals of wrecking the long-standing national consensus on the benefits of Canada’s immigration system. Outside, protest- ers gather next to the Centennial Flame and solemnly read out the names of
children killed in Gaza. A guy who looks like he time- travelled from Woodstock stands near the West Block and shouts incoherently into a microphone. The entrances to Parliament Hill, which lead out to a noticeably occluded Wellington Avenue, are flanked by bollards and rows of canary-yellow metal vehicle traps. Heavily armed security guards patrol everywhere. This is what passes for normal in and around Canada’s House of Commons in 2025.
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