Something is rotten in Canada, not just the crumbling coalition government.
Some 400,000 Jews – the fourth-largest Jewish population center in the world after Israel, the US, and France – live in the beautiful, spacious country that takes pride in its heritage of tolerance and pluralism.
Now, this population is under attack. B’nai Brith Canada (BBC) saw a record high of 5,791 antisemitic incidents in 2023, a 109% increase from years prior.
Shimon Koffler Fogel, the outgoing CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), the leading Canadian Jewish community advocacy agency, recently gave testimony before the Canadian Senate’s Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.
As Post columnist David Weinberg wrote on Friday, Fogel told the committee that since Hamas’s October 7 massacre and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza, there has been a 93% rise in hate crimes in Toronto, nearly half of them directed at the Jewish community.
In Vancouver, reports of antisemitism increased by 62% in 2023 over 2022, marking a 70% rise after October 7. In Montreal, antisemitic incidents rose by 250%.
As for Toronto, shots have been fired on three different occasions at Bais Chaya, a Jewish girls’ school, with the most recent incident occurring on Friday night.
In Montreal, assailants last week firebombed Congregation Beth Tikvah, a modern Orthodox synagogue in the Montreal suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux, for the second time in just over a year.“This is a terrifying reminder that Montreal is increasingly unsafe for Jewish people,” the synagogue’s cantor, Henry Topas, said in a statement.
An accountability failure
“This is the result of the failure of leaders at all levels to hold accountable those responsible for the hate and violence that is infesting Canadian society,” Topas, who is also the BBC’s regional director for Québec and Atlantic Canada, added.
“In a matter of months, Canada has become a country in which masked thugs took over our streets to burn Canadian flags, salute Hitler, celebrate terrorists, and call for violence,” said Richard Marceau, the vice president of external affairs and general counsel at the CIJA.
The efforts to combat the rising tide of antisemitism in Canada weren’t helped at the weekend by the exchange of statements between Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli and Canadian Liberal Party MP Anthony Housefather, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Jewish community adviser.
In a post on X/Twitter, Chikli claimed that Canada was no longer safe for Jews. Responding to Chikli, Housefather said that his comments were “false and exaggerated” and that Canada was one of the best places in the world for Jews to live in despite the rise in antisemitism.
What is the truth?
The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Trudeau said he was “sickened by reports of shots fired at a Jewish elementary school in North York.” He called it “a hateful, antisemitic attack.”
Trudeau issued a similar statement last week after the Montreal attack, but many Jews in Canada say that his government’s desire not to provoke the country’s large Muslim population has muted any concrete response.
Additionally, they say that Canada’s lukewarm support of Israel post-October 7 (Trudeau is one of the few Western leaders who did not pay a solidarity visit to Israel) has emboldened the anti-Jewish sense of empowerment.
On Friday, however, the Canadian government announced that it has created a National Forum on Combating Antisemitism, which will be held in Ottawa in February 2025.
“The Government of Canada recognizes the urgent need for national leadership to ensure Jewish Canadians feel safe in their synagogues, schools, and communities,” a statement read.
Deborah Lyons, Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, welcomed the forum, saying, “Jews are the number one target of reported hate crimes in Canada despite making up just over 1% of the population. Antisemitism shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”
How Canada responds and deals with the scourge of antisemitism will have far-reaching implications for Jews in the rest of the Diaspora. If Jews aren’t safe in Canada, they won’t be safe anywhere.
Let’s hope that the platitudes of protecting the Jewish community will translate into concrete action that demonstrates there will be zero tolerance for targeting anyone solely because they’re Jewish.