In the many summers my family spent in Quebec, at the farm owned by my wife’s uncle Morris and his wife Louise, I could see Canada in its best light. Morris, who grew up in the old Jewish ghetto of Le Plateau-Mont-Royal in Montreal, always expressed gratitude to Canada, a country that birthed his own success and provided security his Polish forebears never enjoyed. “Canada,” he would say, almost tearfully, “is a very good country.”
Morris died not too long ago, but I am glad he is not experiencing what is happening now. Of course, Montreal Jews experienced prejudice before: beatings on the streets by local toughs, boycotts of Jewish businesses and quotas at McGill. For much of the first half of the last century, the country’s politics were in large part dominated by the antisemitic three-time prime minister MacKenzie King, one of the most hostile western leaders to Jewish immigration before the Holocaust.
Today sadly all too much now reprises the 1930s, with governments standing by as rioters deface Jewish institutions across the country. Some of this comes from political extremists, but a key driver has been poorly vetted immigrants from countries with very different traditions. In what is the fourth-largest Jewish country (after Israel, the United States and France), 82 per cent of Canadian Jews feel less safe today than before the October 7 pogrom.
The Jews of Canada have been abandoned by the very forces — the Liberal party, the big cities and the universities — which once nurtured them. The Liberals’ tilt away from Israel parallels rising antisemitism within Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s partners in the NDP. The new drift was epitomized by Trudeau’s pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he dared show up on the country’s tarmac. Such an action, he claimed, would show “just who we are as Canadians.”
There’s another word better suited for this: betrayal. We see some of this in the U.S. Democratic party but, for the most part, President Joe Biden and congressional leaders have restrained the anti-Zionist left. Oddly many American Jews expect president-elect Donald Trump to be far tougher on Islamic terrorists, expel foreign students breaking the law and protect besieged Jewish communities. Most Jews may dislike Trump for his crudity and nativistic leanings, but they supported him more than any GOP candidate since 2012, with huge margins among the Orthodox.
Canada’s Jews have also been shifting towards the Conservatives. Former prime minister Stephen Harper has long been well-regarded, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, likely the next prime minister, has been outspoken in his support of both Israel and the security of Canadian Jews. As in the U.S., it’s the left that torments the Jews, not the right.
Canada’s Jews need new allies because they are losing the demographic battle, and inevitably some electoral influence. The Muslim share of the population has more than doubled since 2000 to roughly five per cent in 2021. Meanwhile the Jewish population of roughly 326,000 accounted for under one per cent in 2016. As Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly admitted, citing her own district’s demographics, numbers matter.
Quebec has long sought to lure French-speaking North Africans to make up for a diminishing workforce. Nationally, Canada’s broken immigration system does little to screen migrants, which has led observers to conclude the country is a haven for terrorists, war criminals and other undesirables. Jews in Canada, notes analyst David Mendelson, a Montreal native, are finding out how things can unfold in the multicultural utopia of an increasingly post-Christian Canada.
In the past Jews have also had conflicts with Quebec nationalists, who often see them as outsiders lacking the right genetic stock. The great Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler, who went to the largely Jewish Baron Byng High School, as did Uncle Morris, took a great deal of fire for his famous book “Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!” which spelled out the danger posed by the province’s “tongue troopers.”
But today’s greatest danger comes from inadequately vetted newcomers from the Middle East who have been welcomed into the country. Still, most Muslims work hard, although many face more economic struggles than other immigrant populations, and contribute to Canadian society. Islamophobia is far rarer than antisemitism, which accounts for two-thirds of all religiously inspired hate crimes, according to Statistics Canada.
Over half of Canadian Muslims, according to one survey, worry about violent extremists. But there seems to be little open pushback against hard-core Hamas supporters. In Toronto, home to both Canada’s largest Jewish population and a much larger Muslim community, there’s been an ongoing pattern of mass demonstrations and attacks on Jewish institutions. Toronto, reckons former Liberal senator Jerry Grafstein, leads cities in the western world in per capita antisemitic hate incidents.
Things are not appreciably better in Montreal, which has recently experienced a massive anti-Israel gathering and a riotous demonstration of 85,000, complete with property damage and calls for a new “final solution.” As Montreal was being occupied by terrorist sympathizers, the prime minister was dancing at a Taylor Swift concert in Toronto. Vancouver, too, has seen mass demonstrations openly aligned with the terrorist cause and the eradication of Israel; of the major Canadian cities, only Calgary (and in some cases, Ottawa) seems willing to crack down on demonstrators who violate the law.
Anti-Israel attitudes have also been widely accepted by the education establishment, once largely populated by Jews, but now increasingly by those who are pro-Hamas. There’s been an attempt by the student government at the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto to restrict the sale of kosher food, and riots have recently broken out at Concordia University in Montreal.
Carleton University in Ottawa may have the best antisemitic bragging rights for employing Hassan Diab, who was convicted by a French court of bombing a Paris synagogue in 1980.
In such an atmosphere, it’s no surprise that teachers trained in Canadian universities now seek to indoctrinate a new generation of antisemites. In Toronto, children as young as eight were brought by their progressive teachers on a field trip to what turned out to be an anti-Israel rally. This does not augur well for the future.
These developments should not only matter to Jews. Canada has also benefited from the contributions of many Jewish people, from Uncle Morris to Richler, Leonard Cohen, the Reichmanns and Bronfmans. The decline of Canadian Jewry would be a national tragedy, reversing the very things that have made the country such a good one.
National Post