By Joseph Marshall and Howie Silbiger
Jews are the only religious group in Canada that needs security guards standing outside their houses of worship. Jews are the only community that sends their children to schools that operate behind controlled entry systems, cameras, reinforced doors and sometimes armed guards. Jewish parents drop their kids off at buildings that increasingly look like embassies rather than classrooms. They think about things most Canadians never have to consider. Will the synagogue be vandalized tonight? Will the school receive a threat tomorrow? Will the next protest in the city turn into something dangerous? Will my child survive the day?
And when the federal government responds to this situation, its answer is almost always the same. Another press conference. Another funding announcement. Another cheque. Today the Liberal government once again announced more money for the Security Infrastructure Program, the federal fund that helps synagogues, Jewish schools and community centres install cameras, hire guards and fortify their buildings.
Politicians will frame this as leadership. It is not leadership. It is an admission that the government has no intention of confronting the root of the problem. Ottawa’s message to Canadian Jews increasingly sounds like this: protect yourselves and we will help pay for the locks. Security funding may be necessary, but it is not a solution. It simply helps Jewish communities survive while the problem gets worse.
And the problem has been getting worse for years.
Canada has watched massive protests fill its streets where people openly chant slogans calling for violence against Jews and the destruction of Israel. The chants are not subtle. Calls for intifada. Calls for death. Rhetoric that would never be tolerated if it were directed at any other religious community somehow gets excused as political activism when Jews are the target. These demonstrations have taken place again and again in cities across the country while politicians wring their hands and issue carefully worded statements.
The hostility spills outward. Synagogues are vandalized. Jewish schools receive threats. Jewish students report harassment on campuses. Jewish businesses are targeted. In some cases synagogues have even been shot at. And still the government behaves as if the main problem is a lack of education rather than a growing culture of open hostility toward Jews.
What makes this even harder for many Canadian Jews to swallow is the long list of signals coming from the Liberal government itself.
This is the same government that stood and applauded a man in Parliament who later turned out to have served in a Nazi military unit. It is the same government that handed more than one hundred thousand dollars in federal funding to activist Laith Marouf while he posted vicious anti Jewish rhetoric online. And it is the same government that formally recognized a Palestinian state in 2025, a major shift in Canadian policy that many Jews viewed as rewarding the very movements that have helped fuel hostility against them.
Taken one by one these moments might be dismissed as mistakes or political miscalculations. Taken together they tell a very different story. They tell the story of a government that has slowly drifted away from the Jewish community while pretending that security grants are a substitute for real leadership. Money cannot solve this problem, you cannot subsidize your way out of hatred.
If Canada is serious about confronting Jew hatred, then the government must begin by enforcing the laws that already exist. Protests that cross the line into threats and intimidation must have consequences. Universities must stop tolerating harassment of Jewish students under the banner of activism. Police and prosecutors must treat incitement against Jews the same way they would treat it if it targeted any other minority.
Political leaders must also stop pretending that this is just another hate crime statistic. Jews are consistently the most targeted religious minority in Canada. If any other religious community required guards just to pray, it would be treated as a national crisis. Instead, Jews are told that the answer is more cameras, more guards and thicker doors.
Canada should be better than that. Jewish life should not have to exist behind reinforced walls while politicians congratulate themselves for funding the bricks.
Security guards may protect the doors, but they do not solve the hatred outside them.
Leave a Reply