Andrew Bennett: Trump’s consideration of pathway for Canadian Jews fleeing hate shames us all

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Marches in the streets, harassment on campus, arson, attacks on businesses and violent assaults. These are what we have enabled through our silence on antisemitism.

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Silence and inaction feeds the antisemitism that infects Canadian urban life, enabling it to fester and infect the body politic. The silence is undergirded by the often not-so-quietly held, deeply misguided convictions of our urban elites and soft leftist dilettantes: “Well, the Jews brought this on themselves,” and, “After all, Israel is committing ‘genocide.’ ”

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Now our country is being called out for the silence and inaction of our governments and institutions. After watching the rise in hate crimes targeting our country’s Jewish citizens, U.S. President Donald Trump has hinted that he might be open to creating a special immigration program for Jewish-Canadians fleeing antisemitism.

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Given our strained relationship and often knee-jerk anti-Americanism, this is particularly galling. It exposes the vacuity of our smugness. Our civic self-worship echoes with “no space for hate” and “diversity is our strength” — empty mantras chanted by those who fail to act. They are our country’s shame.

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Our inaction stands in the face of reality: a Canada in which Jews are the target of more than 70 per cent of all religion-motivated hate crimes despite representing about one per cent of our overall population. Jews experienced more police-reported hate crimes in 2025 than every other faith, more than those who reported a hate crime based on their sexual orientation and more than all racial minorities except Black-Canadians.

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If that wasn’t enough, a recent report commissioned by the Department of Canadian Heritage found that almost 96 per cent of Jewish post-secondary students surveyed said they had experienced or witnessed at least one antisemitic incident in the preceding 12 months, with 18 per cent of cases involving faculty members.

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Antisemitism in Canada is a challenge we at Cardus have been trying to help address in recent years, most notably through the Simeon Initiative, which brought together Christian leaders and their Jewish counterparts to build a foundation of solidarity, mutual respect and action against hatred. This flowed from the Canadian Christian Declaration on Antisemitism in hopes of engaging more Canadian Christians in the fight against Jew hate.

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Yet the problem is ultimately not a problem for Jews to solve. It is a problem for the 99 per cent of Canadians who are not Jewish. It is our problem because it shows that in a fundamental test for our common life as citizens, ensuring the respect and defence of every person’s human dignity, Canadians are failing. And now we are being called out by the last person we would want to do so: Donald J. Trump.

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In June, Prime Minister Carney announced a new council to combat racism and hate in all forms, and these esteemed individuals were assigned a variety of behind-the-scenes tasks to help combat antisemitism, among other priorities, with no public timetable. The prime minister also tied Bill C-9, the Combating Hate Act, into this announcement despite a tenuous connection to the problem of antisemitism. All of this is insufficient and is more ragging of the puck than decisive action.