Just after a Purim celebration on March 2, a synagogue in Toronto was hit with gunfire. Four days later, shooters fired into a different Toronto synagogue while people were still inside. A half-hour after that, shots were fired at a third Toronto synagogue.
It’s fair to say this is cause for alarm. Especially when you consider the recent history of such incidents. In the summer of 2024, a Jewish girls school in Toronto was hit with gunfire. A few months later, the same school was shot at again. Two months after that, it was shot a third time.
Also in 2024, in the span of a month, yet another Toronto synagogue had its windows and doors smashed up twice. By November 2025, that synagogue—Kehillat Shaarei Torah—was vandalized 10 times. Then there was the Jewish schoolbus that was torched, and the popular bookstore that was vandalized because it is owned by a Jew… welcome to Toronto.
This doesn’t include all the incidents of nonviolent anti-Semitism, which were numerous and saw a steep increase each year after October 7.
The pattern is easy to figure out: Anti-Semitic activists go around targeting Jewish institutions, and the more dangerous the attack, the more likely it is to be repeated.
Yet the mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, has decided the way to address rising anti-Semitism is to pour fuel on the fire. In November, she went before a national Muslim group and added her voice to the “genocide” blood libel against the Jewish state.
So if the mayor is no help, can the Canadian government do anything? Yesterday, the national public safety minister announced the state would pour more money into what can only be described as a fortress strategy, in which the Jews hunker down behind bulletproof glass:
“Under the [Canada Community Security Program], organizations receive funds for security equipment and hardware such as protective barriers, minor renovations to enhance security like reinforcements for windows and doors, security and emergency assessments and plans, training to respond to hate-motivated events, and time-limited third-party licensed security personnel.”
How about cops? Got any of those? A grant to hire your own security isn’t nothing, I suppose, but doesn’t Canada already pay police officers to… police the streets? And why aren’t areas that have been shot at under some kind of real-time monitoring?
More important is the failure of the justice system. In a bombshell piece in the National Post, Chris Selley points out that “even when laws are enforced, it often goes nowhere. Pick a well-publicized incident of anti-Israel attacks since Oct. 7, 2023 where charges have been laid, and chances are very good those charges have been dropped.”
Selley provides examples. The bookstore vandalism referenced earlier: Most of the charges were dropped and the two who pleaded guilty will avoid having criminal records. Charges were dropped against an anti-Israel protester who assaulted a police officer, and have several times been dropped against those accused of harassment-related offenses, public obstruction, property offenses, unlawful mob demonstrations, and the like.
“The Alliance of Canadians Combatting Antisemitism (ALCCA) has been keeping track of such cases as well,” Selley writes. “The only convictions it notes that are relevant to this discussion are those of Omar Elkhodary, who assaulted a woman putting up posters of child hostages taken by Hamas, and received a five-month conditional sentence followed by a year of probation; and Razaali Bahadur, who got a year in jail for inciting hatred against Jews, to wit, bellowing at children through a megaphone that their parents had ‘raped and murdered (Palestinian) children.’”
It’s hard to find fault with Globe and Mail columnist Robyn Urback’s response that the public security minister’s announcement of financial security-related aid was basically an “admission of failure,” as if officials are saying “we can’t fix our broken culture and we’re not going to try, so here’s some money for bulletproof glass.”
Culture is a difficult thing to fix, of course, but Canada’s does need fixing. That Toronto’s mayor perpetuates a Big Lie about Israel is absolutely evidence of a broken civic culture.
And on the national level, Canada hasn’t had a prime minister who wasn’t relentlessly hostile to the Jewish state in over a decade, when Stephen Harper left office after a term of admirable pro-Western leadership and staunch opposition to anti-Semitism.
If you rile up the public by playing into libels and feeding atmospherics of Jewish collective responsibility, it’ll take more than offering Jews some bulletproof glass to solve the problems you create. If, that is, you want to solve them.
