Geist: Denial, Hate, and Silence: The Three Responses to Overwhelming Evidence of Canada’s Campus Antisemitism Crisis

2026/08/13 Leave a comment

Valid:

…The first response is denial, with some groups claiming the survey is unrepresentative, its methodology flawed, and that it conflates Jewish identity with Zionism. The objections do not withstand scrutiny. The survey’s community-recruited, non-probability approach is the standard methodology for researching discrimination against small, hard-to-reach populations. Indeed, it served as the methodology for surveys on 2SLGBTQ youth, urban Indigenous health studies, anti-Asian racism data, and trans communities. Governments have used the resulting data for policy development and few demanded probability samples before treating that research as a basis for action. Moreover, while relying on the IHRA definition is precisely what a study backed by a government that has itself adopted that definition should do, the findings do not depend on definitions. Set aside every Israel and Zionism-related item in the survey and the data still shows 56% of Jewish students witnessing discriminatory treatment of Jews as Jews, 54% witnessing intimidation or threats, 22% witnessing physical violence, and 45% regularly encountering Holocaust denial. No definition is required to classify “Hitler should have finished you off”, “the Holocaust did not really happen”, or “Jews, Jews, you cannot hide.” Critics themselves concede that the report documents “unmistakable antisemitism,” but are left to quibble at the edges by debating definitions rather than confronting what the data shows.

The second response is hate. Once again, my posts about the survey attracted replies on my social media that read like a live enactment of the report’s findings, validating a national dataset in real time. The survey found that 45% of Jewish students regularly encounter Holocaust denial or distortion; the replies included the claim that the Holocaust is “fake, just exaggerated slop to position yourselves as victims.” The survey found that more than 70% of Jewish students report harm to their mental health; the replies mocked that finding with comments about “mental illnesses suffered by Ashkenazi jews” lying “in the genes.” The survey documented students hiding their identity and considering leaving their universities; the replies suggested Jewish students “should transfer to Tel Aviv” and dismissed them as “professional victims.”

The most important response, however, was the non-response or silence from those who must act. One week after a government-backed report found that 70% of Jewish students believe their universities do not take antisemitism seriously, I could find no responses from university presidents, Universities Canada or other organizations. Political leaders have been little better: Culture Minister Marc Miller called the findings “alarming”, but a broader response or sense of urgency from governments has been missing. The Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion, which serves as the government’s replacement for the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism (who commissioned the CASE report), continues to signal that it is not a serious effort to combat antisemitism. At the report’s release, Council member and former senator Marc Gold read the Minister’s statement, declined to respond to criticism of the government’s approach, and described the council’s progress as: “we’re getting to know each other and we are providing input into a work plan.” The house is on fire and they are getting to know each other.

Simply put, silence is not neutral, as it confirms students’ worst fears and risks making them even more skeptical about reporting their experiences. The NECA recommendations released alongside the report provide a ready-made starting point, beginning with enforcing the policies universities already have. With the fall term just weeks away, no university leader can claim to be unaware of what returning Jewish students face.

The report’s findings were overwhelming, and so is what the past week has revealed. The deniers cannot bring themselves to accept what the data shows, the haters keep demonstrating it, and the institutions with the power to act have said nothing at all. It is time for a fourth response: action.

Source: Denial, Hate, and Silence: The Three Responses to Overwhelming Evidence of Canada’s Campus Antisemitism Crisis

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Conservatives call for Liberals to block ‘candy sentences’ for immigrants convicted of crimes

2026/08/13 Leave a comment

More on CPC immigration messaging. Valid to argue that this has been excessively enabled by the courts:

Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner reiterated her call Tuesday for the Liberal government to amend the Criminal Code to put an end to “candy sentences” that she says allow immigrants who commit crimes to avoid deportation.

Speaking to reporters in Ottawa, the longtime Conservative MP argued that a slew of recent headlines detailing how non-Canadians charged with various crimes but received reduced sentences so as to avoid deportation proceedings was “insane and disgusting.”

“These types of rulings now happen so frequently that a judge in Montreal accused Montreal prosecutors of proposing candy sentences for criminals at risk of deportation, affirming that this is a common practice across the country,” she said.

“Practices that let certain people commit crimes with impunity are corrosive to a high-trust society. It makes Canada unsafe, leading to a society that is less trusting to everyone, including immigrants who have come to Canada and work hard and play by the rules.”

National Post has recently detailed many cases where a judge cited an accused’s immigration status as a mitigating factor when issuing a criminal sentence. In one case cited by Rempel Garner, a judge granted a Ghanaian man and loan shark who violently stole a woman’s phone a conditional discharge, citing his immigration status.

The Conservative MP once again called on the Liberals to amend the Criminal Code to prevent immigration status from being a consideration during sentencing for a crime. She also re-iterated her longstanding call for Immigration Minister Lena Diab and Justice Minister Sean Fraser to resign….

Source: Conservatives call for Liberals to block ‘candy sentences’ for immigrants convicted of crimes

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Quebec law ending mandatory oath to King faces constitutional challenge

2026/08/13 Leave a comment

Another one to watch:

A constitutional lawyer is seeking to strike down a 2022 Quebec law that abolished the mandatory Oath of Allegiance to the King for members of the province’s National Assembly, arguing the provincial government overstepped its constitutional powers.

The application was filed in Quebec Superior Court in Montreal on Monday by the Public Interest Litigation Institute and its founder, Lawrence David, who teaches at University of Ottawa’s faculty of law.

The lawsuit names the Attorney General of Quebec as the respondent and the Attorney General of Canada as an interested party….

Source: Quebec law ending mandatory oath to King faces constitutional challenge

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Brunner: Making immigrants into settlers: settler colonial common sense in Canadian citizenship guides

2026/08/11 2 Comments

One of the rare examinations of the language and approach across different citizenship guides (Nora Sobel did an earlier analysis). This analysis also covers the evolution of the guides but fails to acknowledge IMO the reality that any such guide will invariably present a somewhat sanitized version of our history, and a guide that presents an overly “black armband” of Canadian history would never be accepted by any serious political party and by the vast majority of old and new stock Canadians. The last para of their conclusion partially acknowledges that reality.

Whether the current government releases its version of Discover Canada, first announced five ministers ago, remains to be seen. My guess is not, given other priorities and a weak Minister:

In federal citizenship guides, settler colonialism is never named; the foundational structure of the Indian Act is omitted; references to reserves appear as decontextualized descriptions; and residential schools are minimized in ways that individualize harm. Treaties are absent until 1995 and, when introduced, are framed through a transactional logic that naturalizes settler title and casts Indigenous rights as historical accommodations rather than living, nation-to-nation obligations. Land is repeatedly depicted through frontier and extractive imaginaries, while Indigenous relations to land are relegated to culture or history.
…
In the context of ongoing settler colonial dispossession, education alone cannot serve as the ‘key condition for reconciliation’ (Chatterjee 2018, 3). State-produced citizenship guides in settler colonial contexts will not escape settler logics, nor can a revised narrative‘undo’ settlerism. Yet these texts still matter. They can either deepen so-called consensus and reinforce settler ignorance, or create openings for interruption.

As Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd (2011) writes, ‘settler, native, and arrivant [must] each acknowledge their own positions within empire and then reconceptualize space and history to make visible what imperialism. has sought to obscure’ (xxx). Within settler states, even this more modest demand – for truth rather than structural transformation – remains politically fraught. Citizenship guides operate within an apparatus designed to stabilize, rather than interrupt, settler colonial authority; yet they nonetheless constitute one of the few official sites through which prospective citizens encounter state-sanctioned narratives of belonging. At minimum, such texts could invite immigrants – differently positioned within racial hierarchies and imperial histories – to confront citizenship not as an untroubled inheritance, but as a relationship constituted through ongoing colonial conditions and responsibilities. While this falls far short of dismantling settler colonialism, it gestures toward a refusal of innocence, historical amnesia, and citizenship as a completed project.

Source: Making immigrants into settlers: settler colonial common sense in Canadian citizenship guides

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ICYMI – Snow: CBC’s progressive bias revealed: What 6 years of corrections by the public broadcaster show

2026/08/11 Leave a comment

Appreciate this data-based approach. Interesting finding and also interesting that political party bias only formed about five percent of total:

…The data can help us understand the subjects where the CBC most frequently issues corrections, especially when it comes to the broadcaster leaning in a consistent ideological direction. CBC has often been accused of ideological bias against both the Conservative Party and conservatives more broadly. As such, I sought to determine how often partisanship or ideology appeared in CBC’s corrections.

In total, only 10 of the 209 correction notices involved Liberals or Conservatives, or liberalism or conservatism more broadly. Two were minor technical corrections for which partisanship or ideology was incidental. Of the remaining eight, two concerned Liberals and six concerned conservatives. Strikingly, all eight errors ran in the same political direction.

One of the two Liberal-related corrections involved a prematurely celebratory headline that initially declaredCanada was “finally getting” a national food program when the Liberal government had merely announced one it hoped to introduce later that year. The other put words in the mouth of a prominent Conservative when a CBC fact-check video falsely said that former Conservative cabinet minister Stockwell Day and others had blamed the Liberal government for changes to Poilievre’s riding boundaries. The source material contained no such accusation. CBC’s correctionomitted that context, leaving Day unnamed and admitting only that the video had wrongly said “some” blamed the Liberal government.

The remaining six corrections followed the same pattern: all involved reporting that portrayed conservatives unfavourably. The errors were as follows:

  • Reporting that Conservative officials had physically pushed the assistant of floor-crossing MP Chris D’Entremont, when they had pushed open a door.
  • Imprecisely linking alleged pressure by India on Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner to her decision to leave Patrick Brown’s leadership campaign, without initially noting that she denied being pressured.
  • Challenging a Conservative housing affordability video using average mortgage costs, even though the claim was based on median income and total homeownership costs.
  • Quoting a professor’s distorted characterization of Charlie Kirk’s remarks about black women and gay people, without describing what Kirk had actually said.
  • Publishing quotes from a Facebook post by Conservative MP Rachael Harder in a way CBC later called “potentially misleading” with insufficient context.
  • As noted above, publishing a story from an election worker that generalized hateful attitudes to conservative parties and voters more broadly.

Most of the corrections were modest, and, taken together, eight cases hardly prove systemic bias. But the political tilt of the reporting was uniform: one error favoured the Liberals, and the other seven portrayed conservatives unfavourably….

Source: CBC’s progressive bias revealed: What 6 years of corrections by the public broadcaster show

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ICYMI – Urback: The CAF’s new public ‘prayer ban’ is not an attack on religious freedom

2026/08/11 Leave a comment

Agree:

…To be clear: This directive does not affect how members of the CAF can pray and worship on their own time. The policy also explicitly carves out exceptions for funerals, recognizing that a funeral is considered to be “family-led event that honours the family’s wishes.” It also notes that chaplains are not restricted “during private conservations (counselling), within faith-specific gatherings, or in their spiritual roles.” The new restriction is only when chaplains are speaking at public military ceremonies, where they are acting as representatives of the CAF (and thus the government), and not simply as faith leaders. 

The change is thus less an “attack on freedom of religion” of the individual than it is a move to further secularize the government. That is a good thing; religious freedom in a democracy should mean the ability to practice one’s spiritual beliefs as desired, as well as freedom from religion imposed by the government and by others. In other words, people should be able to pray and observe however they want, as long as it does not meaningfully affect others. …

Another way the CAF could have attempted to achieve religious neutrality (or greater religious neutrality) would have been to mimic what political organizations do in the U.S. Democratic and Republican conventions, for example, are opened or closed with prayers from a variety of faith leaders, including priests, imams, rabbis and so on. But this method would have inevitably left out one or more faith groups, and would also have turned public CAF ceremonies into extended prayer sessions that force members to entertain religious practice that has nothing to do with their service. Removing public religious expression is the better alternative, especially since it imposes no restriction on members’ private prayers. It is hardly the egregious affront to religious freedom that Conservatives are making it out to be, but rather, a sensible (if still a bit incoherent) step for a secular government.

Source: The CAF’s new public ‘prayer ban’ is not an attack on religious freedom

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ICYMI: Une action collective accusant l’Université McGill d’avoir toléré de l’antisémitisme autorisée

2026/08/11 Leave a comment

When institutions fail, court challenges expected:

La Cour supérieure du Québec vient de donner le feu vert à une action collective intentée contre l’Université McGill. La poursuite allègue que, depuis l’attaque du Hamas en Israël le 7 octobre 2023, les étudiants juifs y ont subi du harcèlement de toutes sortes et qu’il régnait sur son campus montréalais un climat toxique et insécurisant.

Selon la demande en justice, l’Université a failli à ses obligations de protéger ses étudiants juifs et de leur assurer un environnement propice à leur éducation. Il est donc réclamé en leur nom une réduction de leurs droits de scolarité ainsi que cinq millions de dollars en dommages punitifs.

Selon la décision rendue cette semaine par la juge Dominique Poulin, cette action collective mérite d’être entendue.

Les faits allégués dans la procédure — plus particulièrement ceux concernant les discours antisémites et antisionistes tenus sur le campus universitaire — sont préoccupants et permettent de montrer que l’action a des chances de succès au terme d’un procès, écrit la magistrate.

La réplique musclée d’Israël aux événements d’octobre 2023 et ses bombardements sans relâche sur la bande de Gaza ont mené à de nombreuses manifestations en 2023 et en 2024 sur le campus de l’Université McGill, ainsi qu’à l’installation d’un campement propalestinien….

Source: Une action collective accusant l’Université McGill d’avoir toléré de l’antisémitisme autorisée

The Superior Court of Quebec has just given the green light to a class action brought against McGill University. The lawsuit alleges that, since the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, Jewish students have suffered harassment of all kinds and that a toxic and insecure climate reigned on its Montreal campus.

According to the lawsuit, the University has failed in its obligations to protect its Jewish students and provide them with an environment conducive to their education. It is therefore claimed on their behalf a reduction in their tuition fees as well as five million dollars in punitive damages.

According to the decision rendered this week by Judge Dominique Poulin, this class action deserves to be heard.

The facts alleged in the proceedings – especially those concerning anti-Semitic and anti-Sionist speeches held on the university campus – are worrying and show that the action has a chance of success at the end of a trial, writes the magistrate.

Israel’s muscular response to the events of October 2023 and its relentless bombing of the Gaza Strip led to numerous demonstrations in 2023 and 2024 on the McGill University campus, as well as the installation of a pro-Palestinian camp….

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

ICYMI – Geist: Canada’s Campus Antisemitism Crisis: National Survey Finds Antisemitism Nearly Everywhere and University Responses Nowhere

2026/08/11 Leave a comment

Understandably, this report has received considerable coverage and commentary. One of the better commentaries IMO:

…The report itself stops short of formal recommendations, concluding instead that academic leadership must take greater responsibility and that the findings should be used immediately by leadership in higher education institutions to examine their policies and practices. The recommendations came separately from the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics (NECA), a non-partisan group of more than 400 Jewish and non-Jewish academics from 54 institutions of which I am a member, which released ten recommendations alongside the report. The list will sound familiar to anyone who has followed this issue: applying existing policies to protect students targeted for any aspect of their Jewish identity including Zionism, institutional neutrality policies that apply across the institution, adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism together with the Canadian Handbook, a centralized and transparent incident reporting system with annual campus climate assessments, and a special advisor on antisemitism on every campus.

What has been missing is not knowledge of what to do, but the will to do it. Indeed, the release carries its own illustration of the problem: the survey was commissioned by former Special Envoy Deborah Lyons before the government eliminated her role, leaving the government to release the most comprehensive evidence yet of a systemic antisemitism problem on campus just months after creating a leadership void that has yet to be filled and a new anti-hate council that has yet to act.

I have been an academic for nearly 30 years, working in an environment where inclusion and safe spaces for all students to be their best were unquestioned priorities. Backed by a supportive University president, dean, and advisor on antisemitism, I still believe that to be the case. But this survey confirms that the vast majority of Jewish students encounter antisemitism on campus. If this were any other group — 95% of Indigenous students reporting discrimination or 70% of BIPOC students reporting mental health harm — this would be viewed as a major crisis requiring immediate action. But when 95% of Jewish students report encountering antisemitism, 70% report harm to their mental health, a majority hide their identity, and students report threats of violence and Holocaust denial, the response from some quarters is to ignore or take issue with the survey data.

The bottom line is that hundreds of Jewish students from campuses across the country report antisemitic conduct on campus that is stunning in scope and harm. Every university president in Canada should be investigating how much of the data reflects their own campus experience and committing to change through the NECA recommendations. Every faculty member should be examining whether the discriminatory conduct occurs in their class. And every faculty and student union should be working to fully protect their Jewish members. Years of willingness to tolerate or excuse the antisemitic reality – a Jewish exception – suggests this is unlikely to happen. But now no one can say they didn’t know what was happening.

Source: Canada’s Campus Antisemitism Crisis: National Survey Finds Antisemitism Nearly Everywhere and University Responses Nowhere

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Colby Cosh: Supreme Court to decide which comes first — Crown oath or Sikh faith

2026/08/10 2 Comments

Commentary more nuanced than the header:

…Over the remainder of the 19th century, the great hero of world atheism, Charles Bradlaugh, fought successfully in England for the principle that oaths could be replaced by “affirmations,” allowing unbelievers a loophole into political life and all secular professions. This option is in fact available under the Alberta Legal Profession Act, and was given to Wirring, but the difference in wording between “swear” and “affirm” didn’t seem to assuage his religious feelings. The core problem seems to be the notion of “allegiance,” but at common law all citizens were understood to owe allegiance to the sovereign, as part of a reciprocal obligation, whether we like it or not. Maybe this is some of the meat left on the bone that the Supreme Court apparently hopes to gnaw; I don’t know that anyone expected them to give leave to an appeal of Wirringat all.

Source: Colby Cosh: Supreme Court to decide which comes first — Crown oath or Sikh faith

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Lederman: The delay for a Palestinian theatre artist’s visa is a shame

2026/08/10 2 Comments

Indeed:

…The Cultch attracted protests earlier this year for mounting Soldiers of Tomorrow, written and performed by Israeli-Canadian Itai Erdal who served in the IDF (and is strongly opposed to the Israeli occupation). Ms. Redfern stood her ground then, and she’s moving heaven and Earth now to bring The Horse of Jenin to Canada. She understands the important role art can play in understanding human catastrophes. 

This moment demands this kind of theatre, whether you agree with the artist or not. Any concern that this play about a boy and a sculpture will serve as some sort of Trojan horse for a political message would be absurd. That message is everywhere, anyway. Canadian audiences should be able to hear it from, well, the horse’s mouth. 

Source: The delay for a Palestinian theatre artist’s visa is a shame

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