It was with “great frustration and disgust,” that B’nai Brith Canada’s director of research and advocacy reported 6,800 antisemitic incidents in Canada last year, at the release of the organization’s annual audit on April 27.
That amounts to 18.6 hateful incidents per day, Richard Robertson told an Ottawa press conference, a 9.3 per cent increase over 2024, and a stunning 145 per cent hike from 2022. “It’s a national crisis and is getting worse.”
Canada is moving backwards in its fight against racism and hatred said Robertson, lead author of the Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, noting 2025 numbers are “shocking but not surprising, reflecting prolonged inaction, lack of leadership, and if our elected officials don’t respond, civil society must demand a change.”
Ontario had almost half of all incidents in 2025, at 3,194, an increase of 79.2 per cent from 2024; Atlantic Canada increased by 114.5 per cent to 384 (more than in 2023 and 2024 combined); Manitoba and Saskatchewan collectively saw 841 incidents, an 88.1 per cent increase; British Columbia had 847 incidents, up 26.2 per cent; and Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut recorded 13 events. Quebec (573) and Alberta (677) however, saw significant decreases from 1,651 and 916 respectively.
From schoolyard slurs, graffiti, and vandalism, to Holocaust denial, death threats and terror plots, last year’s figures mark the highest volume of antisemitic incidents recorded since B’nai Brith’s audits began in 1982.
While linked in part to the Middle East conflict, Robertson said the 2025 antisemitism surge is so widespread it can’t be attributed to a single cause. “Conspiracies about Jews and Jewish influence in Canada are no longer only something we see on the radical fringes. In recent years, especially 2025, it has become clear that antisemitism is increasingly normalized throughout Canadian society.”
Of the total, 6,491 incidents were harassment, 299 vandalism, and there were 10 cases of violence. The digital realm remains the primary driver with 91.9 per cent occurring online.
The most common forms included calls to harm Jews; dehumanizing stereotypes; Holocaust denial; antisemitic imagery targeting Israel or Zionists; and holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions. Essentially, Robertson said, Jews are blamed “for all of society’s ills.”
Quebec director Paola Samuel noted that “the historic peak in late 2025 after Bondi Beach, when somebody murdered a little girl, and people praying and lighting Hanukkah candles, showed that just when we think that people will rally around us, we are wrong.”
To those who ask where the line is for those who want to criticize Israel, Robertson says “that’s not what we recorded in our audit, but rather the demonization of Zionism.” That is, denying the right of Jews to live in their ancestral homeland, and to “subject a minority in this country to unprecedented levels of hate and abuse because of actions of a foreign government.”
He added that anti-Zionists often use classic tropes that dehumanize Jews and “when it becomes acceptable, and even popular, to demonize Zionists, Jewish communities suffer.”
The report also notes a steady surge in right-wing, neo-Nazi and extremist movements, and widespread online Holocaust denial, including AI-generated distortions.
Some of the more notable 2025 incidents include student organizations participating in Canada-wide demonstrations targeting Israel with slogans and placards using antisemitic rhetoric; a former city of Ottawa lawyer desecrating the National Holocaust Memorial to liken the Holocaust to the conflict in Gaza; Montreal Pride Parade organizers trying to ban a Jewish group and the subsequent physical attack on Jewish participants; a Jewish man beaten in front of his young children; graffiti espousing murder of Jews at McGill University ; and foiled ISIS-inspired plots against Canadian Jews.
B’nai Brith CEO Simon Wolle told The CJN that all these events create a “real lived experience” for Canadian Jews. “When Jews ask each other how they’re doing… we may say ‘I’m great, we’re thriving,’ but it must be qualified. It’s that spiral of normalization: ‘It’s only 19 incidents per day, so I guess it could be worse.’
“People are starting to accept a certain number of daily incidents as normal, which is deeply concerning. We’re talking about individuals targeted simply for being Jewish. That basic fact is lost in broader narratives and the concept of ‘manufactured complexity,’ where people justify antisemitism by attaching it to political narratives.”
Wolle called for moral clarity from political leadership, “about what is right and wrong in this country, what it values. We are expecting bold statements without qualifications followed by actions that support those statements. Not word salads.” Calling something a hate crime and then dropping charges, or weak sentencing, “doesn’t demonstrate seriousness. This is not demonstrating clarity.”
Reacting to the recently issued Senate report on antisemitism, Wolle was grateful that the Senate “made recommendations looking to drive change in the right direction,” and welcomed $10 million in federal security funding as “one of the actions we called for.” Still, “it’s a total and complete absurdity that Jewish community advocacy agencies fight for funding to privately secure our own facilities. The fact that we have volunteer community protection efforts, an institutional Jewish security network funded largely through philanthropy, because our children and families no longer feel safe in this country.
“Now not only do they not feel safe, they are not safe, and that has been evidenced by beatings, shootings, people firing into synagogues, schools, businesses, vandalism, threats. This tells us our fears are warranted and valid, and if this was happening to any other community, culture, or faith, I strongly believe that clarity would’ve been injected into the equation immediately.
“We have been failed.”
Spikes during the summer of 2025 were fueled in part by the 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran said Robertson, and the year concluded with record monthly totals in November and December that can be linked to heightened domestic division and “a sinister wave of antisemitism that followed the Bondi Beach terror attack in December.”
Quebec director Samuel says there’s no one specific cause of the drops in Alberta and Quebec. “It’s more that last year was just so elevated, especially in Quebec (1,651). We had record numbers of encampments and manifestations (demonstrations), it was huge. It’s almost unfathomable that it could have gone higher. The numbers are still ridiculously high.” If compared to pre-October 7, it’s quite dramatic. “We’ve become desensitized. We say only 10 a week in Quebec, or only 18 a day across Canada? That’s unacceptable. Even though 2025 feels like a slight relief compared to 2024, it’s not. We have to compare to 2022. If someone told us back then what things would look like now, we wouldn’t have believed it.”
Robertson also insisted that antisemitism cannot be rendered “into mere statistics. There was an immense and tragic human cost to the 6,800 incidents recorded.” Each case meant “pain, suffering and anguish for a human being, a fellow Canadian. A Jewish person that was harassed is not just a statistic; they were told that they should have been gassed with their ancestors at Auschwitz.” A Hakenkreuz (Nazi swastika) in a schoolyard is not just vandalism, but “a diabolical act of hate that leaves Jewish children afraid to go to school.”
What’s more, an assault on a Jewish man in a park in front of his children, “is not just another notation in the violence column. It is an incident that creates generational trauma and leaves an entire cohort of society questioning if they are safe to remain in this country.”
The year also saw alarming increases in the number of direct calls to exterminate Jews or remove them from Canada, including use of terms like “liquidation” and menacing hashtags about cleansing countries of Jews. “Antisemitism has become so ubiquitous in our society that the word Jew is now commonly used as an insult. In contemporary Canada, Jewishness itself has become derogatory.”
Though shocking, the numbers “are not surprising. This is what happens when elected leaders at all levels fail to heed the warning signs, decline to act and enable a permissive environment. If they are incapable of leading us through this crisis, we as a collective must compel change,” Robertson said.
Thornhill Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman called the audit report “a clear indictment,” also taking issue with Ottawa’s record. “Not a single measure this government has proposed will change anything on the ground, and at this point, they’re not even pretending otherwise. Canadian Jews deserve accountability that matches the rhetoric they’ve been sold for years. Right now, only Conservatives are actually showing up to deliver it.”
Mount-Royal Liberal MP Anthony Housefather agreed that antisemitic incidents in Canada “are far too high as they are across the western world,” adding that with more than 92 per cent of incidents happening online, “people who spend lots of time online feel antisemitism far more markedly than people who do not spend time online.” That he says, points to a need to get an online harms bill adopted. “We need social media companies to enforce their own written rules.”
He says the 2024 House Justice Committee Report is the blueprint for what government, police and universities need to do. Ottawa produced the Combatting Hate Act (C-9) to give police more tools to tackle hate “and this needs to pass the Senate very quickly,” says Housefather, adding “the vast majority of recommendations we made to provinces, municipalities, police and universities have not been followed, and every part of this country including civil society needs to step up and work together to confront this.”
Lantsman says a report like this would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. “Now it simply confirms what Jews across Canada already know: synagogues need security guards, students are harassed on campuses nationwide, and a government that mouths ‘never again’ has been not just absent, but two-faced. Condemning antisemitism publicly while legitimizing its state sponsors quietly.”
Those conflicting views aside, the report calls for eight actions all governments should take.
Recommendations:
Federal: A national antisemitism emergency task force; treating violent antisemitic attacks as domestic terrorism; and additional national security resources to protect Jewish institutions.
Provincial: Funding security protection for Jewish institutions and establishing a special hate crime prosecution unit.
Municipal: Ban hate- and intimidation-inciting events; zero tolerance for intimidation in public spaces; and prioritize protection of Jewish neighbourhoods and institutions.
The report repeats B’nai Brith’s call for a royal commission to help identify root causes and systemic failures, with people testifying under oath. “It’s not a short-term solution,” said Wolle. “We need action now: law enforcement directives, prosecution, education, and strategies to combat online radicalization. A royal commission would be one part of a broader response, but I can tell you what isn’t working: What we’re doing right now.”
The report also addresses the Muslim Brotherhood, calling for chapters that meet Criminal Code thresholds to be listed as terrorist organizations. That call comes a week after Parti Québécois leader Paul St.-Pierre Plamondon was pilloried by federal ministers for raising the issue of Frèrisme, the entry of Muslim Brotherhood ideology into Canada, and potential threats to Quebec secularism and social peace. Plamondon was responding to questions from independent reporter Natasha Graham and a member of a Quebec nationalist groupat a recent Jewish community town hall in Montreal.
B’nai Brith also took aim at Al Quds Day, the worldwide event conceived by the former Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, as a call for worldwide condemnation and erasure of Israel. “It’s an event directly linked to the Iranian regime and to the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], a listed terrorist entity in this country,” said Robertson. “It is unacceptable that events directly associated with terror are allowed to occur on an annual basis in this country. That must end immediately. Every Al Quds Day, we see hateful rhetoric which promotes and glorifies terrorism.”
In jurisdictions that aggressively counter extremism and regain control over digital spaces, he noted, “we see less vitriolic rhetoric, we see less hate… Our online realm has become a cesspool.
“Governments in Canada know the nature of the threat, the scale of the problem, and consequences of continued inaction,” Robertson said. “What is needed now is a serious and immediate response commensurate with the gravity of the moment.”
Joel has spent his entire adult life scribbling. For two decades, he freelanced for more than a dozen North American and European trade publications, writing on home decor, HR, agriculture, defense technologies and more. Having lived at 14 addresses in and around Greater Montreal, for 17 years he worked as reporter for a local community newspaper, covering the education, political and municipal beats in seven cities and boroughs. He loves to bike, swim, watch NBA and kvetch about politics.