It is time to say plainly what too many in Canadian public life still prefer to obscure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Mark Carney\u2019s expected announcement Monday on antisemitism is not simply about antisemitism. It is about pressure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is about the fact that the situation facing Canadian Jews has become so bad, so visible, and so indefensible that Ottawa can no longer manage it with sympathetic statements and carefully staged concern. It is about the growing alarm south of the border over what life has become for Jews in Canada. And it is about a government that ignored, minimized, or slow-walked this crisis for years, only to discover urgency when the political cost of inaction began to rise.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Canadian Jews have not been quiet. They have not failed to explain what is happening. They have not failed to document the harassment, intimidation, vandalism, violence, institutional cowardice, and public abandonment that have marked Jewish life in Canada since October 7.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They have said it in meetings. They have said it in letters. They have said it in testimony. They have said it through schools, synagogues, parents, students, business owners, and ordinary Jews who simply want to live openly and safely in the country they call home.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For years, the answer has been some version of the same thing: We hear you. We stand with you. Antisemitism has no place in Canada.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And yet, somehow, antisemitism kept finding its place.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It found its place\u00a0outside\u00a0synagogues. It found\u00a0its\u00a0place on\u00a0campuses. It found\u00a0its\u00a0place in public schools. It found\u00a0its\u00a0place in the streets. It found\u00a0its\u00a0place on Jewish-owned businesses, on the walls of Jewish institutions, and in the silence of people who would have known exactly what to say if any other minority community had been treated this way.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ottawa is not suddenly discovering that antisemitism exists. It is discovering that others have noticed Ottawa\u2019s failure to confront it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That matters because Canada can no longer assume that its treatment of Jewish citizens will remain a domestic embarrassment. The United States has been paying attention. American lawmakers, Jewish leaders, commentators, and communities have begun asking what was once an almost unthinkable question: Are Jews in Canada safe? And if they are not, what responsibility does the free world have to say so?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Countries that\u00a0lecture\u00a0the world about human rights should expect to be judged by how they protect vulnerable citizens at home.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And on this file, Canada has failed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not because most Canadians are antisemites. They are not. Most Canadians are decent people who do not want their Jewish neighbours to live in fear. But decency without courage does not protect anyone. And too many Canadian leaders have spent the last several years trying to appease the loudest radicals while asking Jews to accept abstractions about tolerance in place of actual safety.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That is\u00a0the betrayal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Canadian Jews were told that their pain mattered while their reality deteriorated.\u00a0They were told that hate would not be tolerated while hatred was tolerated in practice.\u00a0They were told that Canada stood with them while institutions equivocated, police hesitated, universities surrendered, and politicians calculated.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The result is a Jewish community that increasingly wonders whether its government is unable to protect it, unwilling to protect it, or simply unwilling to pay the political price\u00a0required\u00a0to do so.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Canadian Jews are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for the ordinary promises of citizenship to mean something.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The right to send children to Jewish schools without fear. The right to attend synagogue without intimidation. The right to walk in public wearing a kippah or a Star of David without becoming a target. The right to expect that mobs do not get to decide which communities may gather, speak, pray, study, or exist in peace. The right to believe that when antisemitism appears in plain sight, their leaders will name it without euphemism and confront it without apology.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This should not be complicated.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A serious plan would include consequences. It would make clear that antisemitic harassment and intimidation will be prosecuted, not explained away. It would protect Jewish institutions with the seriousness the moment demands. It would hold universities and public institutions accountable when they\u00a0permit\u00a0hostile environments to flourish. It would distinguish clearly between lawful\u00a0protest\u00a0and targeted intimidation. It would stop treating antisemitism as a public relations problem and start treating it as a threat to Canadian democracy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Because that is what it is.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A country that cannot protect its Jews is not merely failing its Jews. It\u00a0is revealing\u00a0something\u00a0broken in itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is why Monday cannot be simply another press conference.\u00a0It cannot be simply another recital of values. It cannot be simply another solemn performance of empathy with no enforcement, no accountability, and no political courage behind it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If Prime Minister Carney brings forward a real plan, Canadian Jews should welcome it. Everyone who cares about Canada should welcome it. No one should root for failure when Jewish safety is at stake.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the bar cannot be\u00a0eloquence. The bar must be action.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Name the threat. Protect the community. Enforce the law. Hold institutions accountable. Stop rewarding radicalism. Stop asking Jews to be patient while their country decides whether their safety is politically convenient.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is a defining moment, not only for Mark Carney or the Liberal government, but for Canada itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The world is watching.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
More importantly, Canadian Jews are watching.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And they\u00a0have waited\u00a0long enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0Joe Roberts is a Jewish community leader, political strategist, political\u00a0advisor\u00a0and writer who currently serves as the Executive Director at Jewish Federation of Tulsa. Michael A. Sachs is a Canadian\/American Jewish community leader, strategist and writer who has held several leadership roles within the Vancouver Jewish community. He is now Senior Director at Jewish Federation of Tulsa.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is time to say plainly what too many in Canadian public life still prefer to obscure.\u00a0 Prime…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[3124,11060,22577,111,28866],"class_list":["post-69431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mark-carney","tag-antisemitism","tag-canadian-jews","tag-intimidation","tag-mark-carney","tag-public-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}