At the end of April, Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism unveiled a new report on global antisemitism in the previous year. Overall, it painted a dire picture of Jewish life since October 7th, 2023, finding that “antisemitism has become more threatening, dangerous and violent,” and that it is “undergoing a process of normalization, marked by increased social tolerance.” While the report surveyed regions across the world, from Latin America to western Europe to Australia, and contended that antisemitism was a rising concern in all of them, it presented particularly shocking numbers for Canada, which currently has the world’s fourth-largest Jewish community. According to the report, the number of antisemitic incidents had increased by 670% between October 2023 and October 2024 as compared to the same time frame in the previous year—the highest increase of any country surveyed. As examples of antisemitism in the country, the report cited both direct attacks on Jewish institutions, like a Molotov cocktail attack on a Montreal synagogue, and demonstrations of political support for Palestine, like the president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union pledging to protect pro-Palestine protestors. In a press release accompanying the report, the Ministry declared that Canada had been found to be the world’s “champion of antisemitism,” as the Times of Israel reported, citing the 670% figure.
In addition to the The Times of Israel, Ynet, the English language website of Hebrew daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot, also reported Canada’s alarming rise in antisemitism but erroneously cited the figure at 970%. A few days later, Casey Babb, a fellow at the free market-oriented MacDonald-Laurier Institute and at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, wrote in Bari Weiss’s outlet The Free Press that a “pogrom” was “brewing in Canada,” calling Canada “one of the most antisemitic countries in the Western world,” and citing the 670% figure as one piece of evidence.
This 670% figure first came into play with another Diaspora Affairs ministry report from October 2024, specifically focused on antisemitism in Canada, issued by its online division, Mashlat. At that time, too, the story of a post-October 7th surge in Canadian antisemitism traveled widely: Multiple media outlets in Canada, Israel, and even India covered the story. Soon after the report’s release, a Free Press story entitled “The Explosion of Jew-Hatred in Trudeau’s Canada” became a viral sensation, with the 670% figure prominently cited in its subhead. “Despair has become a feature of everyday life for Jews across Canada who are experiencing open hatred—and yet are living under a government that appears either blind to it, paralyzed by it, or indifferent to it,“ wrote the author, Terry Glavin. The article was widely shared by conservatives and pro-Israel advocates, from Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre—who used it as an excuse to denigrate the leadership of then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), Canada’s dominant pro-Israel group, which is also affiliated with Jewish federations across Canada.
Yet for all the consternation it caused this year and last, there’s one major problem with this 670% figure: it does not appear to have a source. As its citation for the figure, the Ministry’s 2025 report linked to the 2024 Mashlat report, which in turn cited an August 8th, 2024 story from i24NEWS, an Israeli media outlet, which claimed that a recent World Zionist Organization (WZO) report had found a “670% increase compared to 2023” in antisemitism in Canada. Yet—as the organization Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East first pointed out in a December 2024 rebuke to the viral Free Press article—it’s not even clear where in the WZO’s materials “670%” has appeared, or what report the article is referring to. The WZO’s 2023 report for Canada indicated a “200-800% increase in antisemitic levels” in the final months of 2023 “compared to the same period the previous year”—which it attributed to police hate crime reports and additional “data from the WZO’s department for Combating Antisemitism.” The 2024 report, which was not even released when the statistic was first cited by i24NEWS, found a “562% increase in antisemitic incidents [in Canada] in 2024 compared to 2022” based on reports collected by the WZO and incidents recorded in the media. Neither number corresponds to the one used by i24NEWS in its original report, and neither uses the period of October 7th, 2023–October 7th, 2024 delineated by Mashlat.
Even allies to the Israeli ministry and WZO could not say where the number came from. “Quite frankly, I don’t know where the World Zionist Organization gets its numbers from. We have reached out to them, I haven’t heard back,” said Richard Robertson, the research and advocacy director for B’nai Brith Canada, which releases an annual antisemitism audit. While both B’nai Brith and CIJA have frequently raised the alarm about what B’nai Brith described as “perilous, record-setting heights” of antisemitism in Canada—often citing pro-Palestine advocacy as examples of antisemitism—neither B’nai Brith nor the CIJA used the 670% increase in their reports. Mashlat, i24NEWS, and WZO did not respond to requests for comment on the origin of the number.
This statistic has provided ammunition for a mainstream Canadian Jewish community increasingly at odds with their fellow Canadians over Israel/Palestine. A June 2025 poll from the market research firm Leger showed that roughly half of Canadians agree that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza—a conclusion now common to most major human rights organizations. In line with these trends, the Canadian government’s tone towards Israel has sharpened since December 2023, with the Liberals supporting United Nations ceasefire resolutions and limiting weapons sales to Israel. Meanwhile, staunch pro-Israel politics remain dominant among Canadian Jews, even more so than for their American counterparts. According to Mira Sucharov, a professor of political science at Ottawa’s Carleton University, Canadian Jews are more likely than American Jews to have visited Israel, have knowledge of Hebrew, and send their kids to Jewish day school. While there are various Jewish groups with differing opinions, she said, few have thus far been able to mount successful opposition to the conservative Zionist consensus.
In this environment, the definition of antisemitism has become contested terrain. While Canada has seen increased attacks on synagogues and Jewish day schools in the past 20 months (resulting in property damage but no casualties), Jewish groups have also leveled accusations of antisemitism at critics of Israel’s war on Gaza. For example, when Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned Israel for allowing widespread starvation in Gaza, B’nai Brith Canada tweeted that the politician was “fuelling a narrative that emboldens hate and antisemitism.” In this environment, both the growing incidence of Palestine solidarity protests since October 7th and the increasing frequency of incidents targeting Jewish people and spaces are viewed as a singular phenomenon of out-of-control antisemitism. For many Israel advocates, it appears, a statistic claiming a “670% increase in antisemitism” seems credible because it confirms their fears about the future of pro-Israel politics in Canada.
Accurate data about antisemitism in Canada can be difficult to find. In a February 2024 survey of Jewish attitudes about Canada and Israel published last spring in Canadian Jewish Studies, University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym concluded that, for a variety of reasons—including changes in the scope of data collected over time—“figures testifying to a steadily rising level of anti-Jewish behaviour over decades are likely inflated.” Still, many sources agree that there has been a rise in prominent antisemitic incidents in Canada since October 7th, 2023. These include, for example, three shootings at the building of a Jewish girls’ elementary school in Toronto in the middle of the night; an arson attack at a synagogue in Vancouver, and multiple firebombings at a synagogue in Montreal. Such incidents—which are alarming, but have not resulted in any casualties—were cited by the federal government’s March “statement of intent on combatting antisemitism,” which noted that Jews had experienced a 71% increase in hate crimes reported to police in 2023 compared to 2022. For Brym, this is not necessarily surprising: His analysis found that in Canada, like elsewhere in the world, “spikes in anti-Jewish incidents including hate crimes are associated with Israeli military campaigns against Palestinians—and troughs are associated with the cessation of hostilities.” Brym wrote that, “based on past experience, one should expect a decline in the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes” once Israel’s war on Gaza ends.
This is no comfort to Canadian Jews: A key result of Brym’s survey was that “Canadian Jews today tend to feel unsafe and victimized.” In 2018, Canadian Jews saw themselves as the minority group facing the fifth-most discrimination in the country; last year, they viewed themselves as the group facing the most discrimination. Yet Brym also discovered that the “degree to which Canadian Jews feel they are unsafe is strongly associated with their emotional attachment to Israel.” As an example, his survey found that up to 69% of Canadian Jews regard “extreme negative statements about the state of Israel—denying the need for a Jewish state, referring to Israel as an apartheid state, supporting the boycott of Israel products, and asserting that Israel is committing genocide in its treatment of Palestinians—as antisemitic.” Brym concluded that because Zionism is key to many Canadian Jews’ identity, challenges to Israel’s existence are “often perceived as a threat to the existence of the Jewish people and therefore as antisemitic.”
That view is dominant among Canada’s major Jewish institutions—including B’nai Brith, CIJA, and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center—which frequently describe political actions to hold Israel accountable and pro-Palestine protest activity as antisemitic. For example, after activists vandalized the window of a store owned by a woman who funds scholarships for IDF soldiers, CIJA compared the vandalism to Kristallnacht. For Sheryl Nestel, a member of the anti-Zionist Independent Jewish Voices Canada who has critiqued B’nai Brith’s antisemitism audits, the institutional Jewish community bears responsibility for creating panic about antisemitism in Canada. “If you look at the [mainstream Jewish community’s] descriptors for the situation, it’s Germany in 1933,” she told Jewish Currents.
At least some of the communal alarm seems to stem from a shift in the Canadian government’s posture towards Israel. A decade ago, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party was known for his staunch defense of Israel—a fact that pushed more Canadian Jews, historically aligned with the Liberal Party, to vote Conservative. (Today, Canadian Jews’ voting patterns tend to be varied and split.) The Harper government sided with Israel on a host of UN resolutions, which is believed by some to have cost Canada a seat on the UN Security Council in 2010. “We joke that Canada was more pro-Israel than Israel under Harper,” said Corey Balsam, the national coordinator for IJV. When Trudeau was elected in 2015, he adopted a more moderate tone but similarly pro-Israel policies, continuing to veto most UN resolutions in Israel’s favor and condemining the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
Yet a decade later, at the end of Trudeau’s long tenure and the beginning of his Liberal successor’s, the Canadian government has begun to shift its posture. While Trudeau initially expressed strong support for Israel’s military after October 7th, in December 2023, Canada voted at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in favor of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. At the start of 2024, Canada said that it would stop approving new permits for Canadian companies to sell military goods to Israel; that September, the federal government went further and announced that they had suspended around 30 permits previously approved before the pause. This June, Canada joined Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK in imposing sanctions on Israeli cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and a month later, Canada joined 25 countries in calling for an end to the war in Gaza. Canada has also cracked down on domestic Israel advocacy organizations: Last August, the Canada Revenue Agency stripped the Jewish National Fund Canada of its charitable status, claiming that the organization was “engaged in activities that are not in furtherance of charitable purposes,” which commenters have speculated refers to the group’s involvement in funding infrastructure projects on Israeli military bases. The organization has since lost two appeals to overturn this decision. Most recently, Carney rebuked Israel by announcing at the end of July that Canada would soon recognize a Palestinian state at the UNGA.
According to Independent Senator Yuen Pau Woo, appointed by the Liberal government, the statehood recognition is an indication of how politics in Canada have evolved in a short period of time. “There was a motion in March 2024 to recognize Palestinian statehood, among other actions related to Palestine, but that provision was deemed too controversial,” he told Jewish Currents. A letter sent to Carney the day before his declaration from 173 former Canadian ambassadors and diplomats captures the sea change among Canada’s political class. They wrote that they are concerned that “longstanding Canadian values and interests in a world order that respected international law and the rights and dignity of all peoples” are being “abandoned daily” in Gaza, and that while Canada has long supported Israel, “this cannot include a dispensation to forsake its responsibilities under International Humanitarian Law to protect civilians.”
The impact of these changes remains limited. A new report released in July from Arms Embargo Now, a coalition of Canadian pro-Palestine groups, found that arms shipments continued to flow to Israel through “hundreds of previously approved permits” even after the government announced its pause. Meanwhile, Carney has said that his declaration on Palestine statehood was contingent on the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to hold general elections in 2026 without Hamas’s participation and on the demilitarization of the future state, conditions which are unlikely to be met soon by either the PA or Hamas, and which critics have said perpetuates a power imbalance while Israel remains armed. Even so, such policies have raised hackles in both Canada’s Jewish institutions and the Israeli government. The section on Canada compiled by CIJA for the international J7 Annual Report on Antisemitism states that one of the top three “antisemitic challenges and concerns” in the country is “anti-Israel actions taken by the federal government that display a double standard towards the Jewish state, such as the imposition of an arms embargo.” For its part, Israel updated its travel warning for Canada in May, citing “an increased threat by terrorists against Israelis and Jews in Canada,” and urging “all Israelis traveling to Canada [to] exercise increased precautionary measures, avoid displaying Jewish and Israeli symbols . . . and remain extra vigilant while in public.”
Still, not even the Jewish community is immune to Canada’s shifting political tides on Israel/Palestine. A December 2024 poll conducted by Canada’s progressive Zionist organizations, for which Brym was a consultant, found clear generational divides on Israel among Canadian Jews: While 94% supported Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state,” that number dropped to 81% for respondents under 35. The 18-24 age group reported significantly lower levels of attachment to Israel than older respondents, with 64% “very” or “somewhat” attached, compared to 78% for those 25–34, and 86% for those over 34. And despite strong support for Israel’s “right to exist,” only 51% of Canadian Jews said that they identify as Zionist, a result that the survey’s commissioners admitted left them “puzzled.” Ultimately, the survey concluded, “In many cases, we see no majority opinion as well as high levels of uncertainty. Therefore, not only are claims of monolithic support misrepresentations of Canadian Jewish diversity, they also erase the spirited nature of Jewish life in Canada.” For Balsam of IJV, the threat of intracommunal dissent offers one explanation as to why the fraudulent 670% figure from the Mashlat report remains a potent tool for pro-Israel groups. “Exaggeration of the situation with made-up or unreliable statistics serves a number of purposes,” said Balsam. “One is keeping Canadian Jews in the fold.”