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For Sarah Jama, the incumbent independent MPP for Hamilton Centre, the night was over within minutes.
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The onetime NDP member, expelled from caucus for airbrushing the October 7 atrocities, came a distant fourth, with less than 5,000 votes, by the time the seat was called for the NDP’s Robin Lennox, an assistant clinical professor of family medicine at nearby McMaster University.
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Jama sat as an independent after being booted from the NDP caucus in 2023 over comments she made about the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Jama was accused of being a “radical anti-Israel advocate” by B’nai Brith when she ran for the NDP in a byelection in March 2023.
Last April, she was ordered removed from Queen’s Park after refusing to take off her keffiyeh. Speaker Ted Arnott had banned the scarf after a complaint, saying it was being worn to make a political statement, contrary to the rules of the assembly.
A keffiyeh is a checkered scarf typically worn in Arab cultures that has come to symbolize solidarity with Palestinians.
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Jama seemed unfazed by the long odds she confronted just before polls closed, recalling how her removal from the NDP came in “the middle of figuring out how to grapple with witnessing the most violence I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, in the palm of my hand,” she wrote Thursday evening.
“This campaign has been about breaking the limitations of what’s possible electorally, and I can confidently say we’ve had the most organized campaign in Hamilton, despite lack of party infrastructure.”
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