Canada continues to slap its Jews in the face.
This week we hosted Canada's Prime Minister in our Toronto synagogue. He spoke to every Canadian — except us Jews.
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This is a guest essay by Adam Hummel, a lawyer in Toronto.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In his first breath, he told us we weren’t the audience.
“I will speak to this community,” the Canadian Prime Minister said, a few sentences into his remarks at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, “but I want to speak to the nation.”
A room full of Jews, gathered in the heart of their own sanctuary in the third year of the worst assault on them in living memory, was informed at the outset that it was the venue and not the interlocutor. We were the backdrop against which the country would be addressed.
Everything cold and evasive that came after was already folded into that one sentence. He was speaking past us almost immediately.
I had expected an empty speech, but what arrived was worse than expected, and the difference is, I think, the whole point. Empty I could have forgiven. Empty is a Tuesday. He’s now a politician, after all.
What he delivered instead was fluent and learned, and he spent every ounce of his craft on carefully not saying the one thing the evening existed to say. Incompetence would have been a mercy. This was competence in the service of evasion, and that is a harder thing to watch, and a much harder thing to forgive.
Before he rose, the warm-up acts did their work, as they always do now. Evan Solomon, the broadcaster turned minister, one of the few Jewish faces this government can field when it needs one, delivered the line of the night: “No one,” he assured us, “takes this issue [of antisemitism] more seriously than the Prime Minister!”
I wonder if Evan Solomon can say that with a straight face after the speech, after what he heard the Prime Minister both say and not say. I’ll grant that he meant it kindly as he’s sitting in the man’s government, after all.
But sit with it anyway, because the Prime Minister then stood up and showed us precisely what his “seriousness” consists of. The demonstration was not at all reassuring. If that is what taking it most seriously looks like, then we have learned where the ceiling is, and it sits far lower than we feared.
The truest thing said all evening was said before the Prime Minister rose. Holy Blossom Temple’s Rabbi Yael Splansky put it plainly: Antisemitism is not the Jewish People’s problem, any more than misogyny is a women’s problem. The hatred is not a burden the hated are meant to carry, manage, or solve. It is a failure of the society that tolerates it and of the people who practise it, and the obligation to end it therefore runs the other way, toward everyone who is not its target.
It was clear, it was unhedged, and it set the fault exactly where the fault belongs. The Prime Minister even noticed! She said it better, he conceded from the lectern, and she would say it quicker. He was right on both counts. Hers was the best speech of the evening. Then he stood and spent 27 minutes proving precisely how much better.
The Prime Minister came with a syllabus — 3,000 years of Jewish tradition, conscripted into his argument, the prophets Isaiah and Amos, Aristotle on civic friendship, Charles Taylor on recognition, Article 27 of the Charter.
Considered as a lecture, sure, it was something, but we didn’t tune in for a lecture. We came bleeding, and he handed us a reading list. “Here, this essay by Aristotle should heal that wound,” he seemed to say. There’s a strange cruelty in being instructed at length, and in two languages, on the concept of recognition, by a man who would spend 27 minutes declining to recognize the one actual thing in the room.
And two languages, to a Jewish community that lives its life overwhelmingly in English, he delivered long stretches in French. On its own I would have let it go. A Prime Minister usually speaks the country’s two official languages, and that’s usually fine when business is normal, but business today is not normal.
This act, the bilingualism, didn’t stand on its own either. It stood next to his opening admission.
He had already told us the nation was his audience, and the French was simply him making good on the promise, addressing the country over our heads while we sat in the pews and supplied the setting. The language wasn’t, in my opinion at least, a courtesy to the room. It was a reminder of who the room was for.
I’ll give him some due: He named the wounds, such as bullets fired at Jewish schools, firebombs at synagogues community centres attacked, businesses targeted, patients harassed in hospitals, students driven out of the common spaces of their own campuses, Holocaust memorials desecrated, parents who must now weigh whether a Jewish school is safe, the man on the subway deciding whether to tuck the kippah away.
He put the number on the record: two-thirds of all religiously motivated hate crime in this country aimed at the 1 percent of us who are Jewish. For a few minutes he described our actual lives, accurately, and in a room that has grown used to being abstracted into a talking point, accuracy almost passed for care.
But he didn’t mention when this started. This is bizarre because there’s actually a date, and a specific thing that happened on that date when this all began, and it wasn’t from our own doing. On October 7, 2023, at 6:29 in the morning Israel time, things began to get bad. Those bad things started that day in Israel, and continued the rest of the day on Canadian streets, where anti-Israel protestors began their assault on our community while our hostages went missing, while bodies lay dead, and well before any military incursion into Gaza began.
He could have recognized that, but chose not to.
Then he arrived at the cause, and the speech just walked around it.
In an entire address on the hatred of Jews, delivered in the third year of the worst of it, the Prime Minister of Canada never once said the word “Israel.” He did not say “Zionism.” He did not say “anti-Zionism.” He did not say “October 7th.” And do not mistake this for a man who lost his nerve or ran out of clock. He came right up to the edge of it, over and over, and engineered every sentence to stop a half-step short.
“A Canadian child,” he said, “must not be seen as the representative of any foreign state.” “We must not transpose foreign conflicts onto one another.” “No Canadian should have to answer for the acts of a government,” in his words, “wherever it may be.”
He knows.
He knows exactly what’s happening: Jews here are being made to answer for a state abroad, that a conflict is being imported and laid at their doors, that this is the very engine of the surge he had just described so well. He knows about our aching love for our ancient homeland, and he knows that Israel is not the source of the world’s problems. He understands the mechanism finely enough to legislate around it. He just won’t name the state, or the ideology that has made the hatred of it respectable.
“Anti-Zionism” is the door almost all this now walks through, and he found the door, stood square in front of it, and painted it the same colour as the wall so that no one would have to look at it. That’s not an oversight, but the most skilful thing in the speech. He is an anti-Zionist, there’s no question. Just look at the statements, the double-standards, the care he gives, and whom he decides to scold and when.
Which brings me to what I have difficulty ignoring.
Laying out his elegant foundation of pluralism, he allowed that “differences generate friction,” that “accommodating competing claims is real work sometimes,” that “we’ll always have legitimate debates about where those lines properly fall,” and that these “debates are part of how a pluralistic country sustains itself.”
In the abstract, that is fine — but in this room, on this subject, set exactly where he set it, it did a terrible thing. It characterizes the surge of antisemitism as mere friction. It makes the firebomb a growing pain of a maturing democracy and the campus mob a community working out where its lines belong. It takes the oldest move there is — anti-Judaism, the one that explains the hatred — by gently implicating the hated, and dresses it in Aristotle.
He would deny that this is what he meant, and I would hand him back his own speech, the part where he pauses to insist that naming the other hatreds (Islamophobia, of course, he just couldn’t help himself) is not equivalence. Sorry, but you don’t reach for that disclaimer unless you can feel yourself doing the thing it denies. The caveat is the confession.
Because he performed the equivalence, disclaimer and all:
“The covenant runs in every direction. Antisemitism breaks it, Islamophobia breaks it, burning churches breaks it, transphobia breaks it, the targeting of any Canadian for their faith, their origin, their identity breaks it.”
“Now, I want to be clear, particularly to the Jewish community: naming those other assaults is not equivalence. The crisis of antisemitism in Canada today is specific, it’s severe, and it demands a targeted response. And that is what our government is fully committed to.”
The covenant, he tells us, is broken by antisemitism, and by Islamophobia, and by burning churches, and by transphobia, the specific crisis dissolving in real time into a general homily about everyone at once.
The institutional home he then announced for it seals the dilution. The new body is not a body to fight antisemitism, but a Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion, chaired by the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture (Marc Miller), into which antisemitism has been tucked as the first item of business.
Then read the title of his own address again: “Rights, Equality, and Inclusion.” The hatred that supposedly summoned the evening (antisemitism) could not even win the marquee of its own speech. On Canada’s Cable Public Affairs Channel right now, the title of the speech isn’t even about antisemitism. It is titled “Prime Minister Carney Launches Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion.”
He brought a ledger to read out, as expected: six bills. The Combating Hate Act, with new offences proposed for intimidation outside synagogues and schools and community centres. The reaffirmed definition. $36 million last year to counter violent extremism, $75 million more for the security of synagogues and day schools and community centres and, yes, he had the grace to say that the need to spend it shames us.
“It’s not enough to protect,” he said. “The deeper work is the renewal of the Canadian covenant itself.”
He was right.
And then, for that deeper work, the work he had just named as the real work, the hard work, he produced a council whose first four assignments are to assess the drivers of antisemitism, to coordinate across government, to improve the collection of data, and to measure the impact of its own efforts.
Seriously? After three years, the bold new idea is to study the problem, convene the meetings, and gather the statistics?
The bingo square made real, gavelled to order, a senator appointed to sit on it. We did not need a council to assess the drivers. We’ve been naming the drivers for three years! He declined to say even one of them aloud: Israel and Zionism — the historic love of the Jewish People for our ancestral homeland, and the modern day celebration of the miracle of it’s re-establishment.
There was a moment that wore the costume of accountability but that still fell short. He admitted, he said, that Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians. This was really the crux of his remarks. Watch the grammar one more time: The compact is failing, in the passive voice, all by itself, with no government (his government) anywhere in the sentence.
And then, having raised the matter of fault, he mailed it to 1939 and the MS St. Louis — the refugees Canada turned away to their deaths, for which a Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rightly apologized in 2018. It is a real and shameful history, and it carries the great convenience, for him, of being somebody else’s.
Reaching back 87 years to a sin already confessed is so much easier than reckoning with a surge that has unfolded, in real time, on his own government’s watch — by him, who recognized the State of Palestine which does not, by any stretch of the imagination, meet the international requirements for statehood and which recognition came while Israeli civilian hostages were still held by Hamas in Gaza’s tunnels.
In recalling the MS St. Louis, Prime Minister Carney summoned the memory of a Canada that looked away. He did not seem to notice that he was, at that very lectern, looking away from what now matters to us: Israel. What exists today to ensure that something like the MS St. Louis could never happen again. Today we have somewhere that will never say that none is too many.
In the whole of that address, the Prime Minister never said that the Government of Canada stands with the Jewish community. He never said he had sat down with us, listened to us, asked us what we needed.
His “personal anecdote” recounted turning up to a Chabad opening and a menorah lighting, ceremonies he attended, and that was the full extent of the relationship on offer. He didn’t talk about the fact that in the very building he was speaking (Holy Blossom Temple), there are armed guards with submachine guns patrolling the property during the High Holidays, because of the antisemitism that slaps us in the face each day.
He lectured us on recognition for 27 minutes and never produced the single sentence that recognition is actually made of: “I stand with you.” “I feel your pain.” “I know many of you are trying to leave Canada because of the situation here. I’m begging you to give us another chance.”
He just couldn’t bring himself to say it.
And if you can’t bring yourself to say it, then at the very least, the next time you gather us inside our own sanctuary, do us the courtesy of speaking to us, in the language we actually speak, and telling us to our faces that you stand with us. It is the lowest possible bar. It was lying flat on the floor of Holy Blossom. He stepped over it on his way to the cameras.
Finally, he thanked us for having him, and we applauded, because we’re a gracious people and because applause was the one thing the evening was built to capture. Then he left, without taking questions or engaging with the assembled crowd.
Those in attendance likely filed out into an ordinary cool Toronto night, received not as ourselves but as a concept, recognized in the abstract, addressed in the third person, and left precisely as exposed as we had walked in.
Canadian Jews are WEAK (polite beyond the point of stupidity.) No one stood up & said,”What the hell do you mean you won’t take questions.” SHAME!
I don’t understand why you wrote this article. Why did your synagogue invite Carney in the first place? Why were only certain Jewish organizations allowed to attend? Why was the media filtered and restricted? Are you really still that naive to believe that Carney was actually going to say anything of substance? Where are our leaders, who are our leaders, because it certainly isn’t Holy Blossom synagogue. The Prime Minister of Canada basically told a room full of people what the rest of us Jews already know. Carney doesn’t give a shit about us. It’s way past the time for us to step up to the plate. Enough!