A record number of reported antisemitic incidents took place in Canada as a whole in 2025, but Quebec’s numbers dipped significantly, says the annual B’nai Brith Canada Audit of Antisemitic Incidents.

While incidents increased by 215 percent in Quebec to 1,651 from 2022 to 2024, last year’s numbers amounted to 573, a 65 percent decrease from the previous year. However, across Canada, 6,800 incidents took place, an increase of 9.3 percent, amounting to an average of more than 18 incidents a day compared to eight incidents a day in 2022.

Research and advocacy director Richard Robertson told a press conference last week that the 573 incidents recorded in Quebec still “attest to the unacceptable new baseline of antisemitism that has been established in Canada following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack in Israel… [this is] higher than the total in 2022 and 2023.”

B’nai Brith Canada CEO Simon Wolfe, accompanied by Robertson and Quebec regional director Paola Samuel, said the overall results “reflects the severity of the moment in which we presently find ourselves.

“As a testament to the lived realities of Jewish Canadians, the audit’s findings are far more than just numbers on a page. Sadly, the data we are releasing confirms beyond a doubt what Jewish communities all across the country have come to know all too well. Antisemitism is not simply on the rise in Canada. It is becoming more normalized and more visible, and continues to represent an increasing threat to Canadian society.”

Robertson told the press conference he was reporting the results with “great frustration and disgust.

“In 2025, for the third straight year, a record number of antisemitic incidents were recorded in Canada,” he said. “The sustained year-over-year increase in incidents of anti-Jewish hate make it clear that, when it comes to antisemitism, we have become a nation that tolerates disgraceful levels of hate.”

Robertson characterized the overall situation as a “national crisis, and it is one that is getting worse.

“The province of Ontario logged the highest yearly total ever registered by a single province or region since the inception of B’nai B’rith Canada’s annual audit in 1982. More incidents, 3,194 to be exact, were recorded in Ontario in 2025 — more than all the incidents recorded in Canada in 2022.”

Robetson added that the most prevalent forms of antisemitism recorded in 2025 were “calling for or justifying the killing or harming of Jews; making false, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews; denying the occurrence, scope, or mechanisms of the Holocaust; using antisemitic symbols and images to characterize Israel, Israelis, or Zionists; and holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel… A Jewish person that was harassed is not just a statistic. They are a person that was told that they should have been gassed along with their ancestors at Auschwitz.”

Robertson said “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.”

Some of the incidents reported by The Suburban in 2025:

• An Orthodox Jewish man was beaten in Parc-Extension in front of his children. Sergio Yanes Perciado had been remanded to the Pinel Institute for 30 days and was later found not to be criminally responsible for the assault.

• A man made death threats to an observant Jewish man and others at the corner of St. Louis and Fraser streets in St. Laurent. ”Your time will come!” says a man wearing a keffiyeh in a video circulating on social media. “You’re a f–king pig! You understand me? I’m just waiting for the king! F–king monkeys! There is one king — Allah!”

Some points in the audit regarding Quebec:

• “In 2025, Montreal remained a hotspot for some of the most militant attacks on Zionism. Groups such as Pink Bloc, Montreal Antifascist, and others have taken credit for vandalism targeting companies, banks, universities, or other institutions purported to be associated with Israel, Zionism, and imperialism.”

• “During April, the Students’ Society of McGill University implemented a Policy Against Genocide in Gaza that resulted from a 2024 referendum. The document commits the union to a ‘strong’ and ‘consistent’ stance against ‘settler-colonial apartheid’ in Palestine. This framing implies an antisemitic rejection of Zionism as it depicts Jews as an alien force in Israel.” n