By Howie Silbiger
Three Jews walked out of shul on Bathurst Street and someone opened fire at them from a vehicle. Police say it was an imitation gun. Who cares? The fact that Jews were leaving a synagogue, were visible and were targeted should scare the daylights out of Jews across the country.
That is worth remembering that Anthony Housefather, Canada’s Special Advisor on Jewish Community Relations and Antisemitism, told a Chanukah on the Hill crowd that Canada is the best country for Jews and for peace-loving and tolerant people. That may be the official Liberal line in Ottawa, and it may make people feel better in the room, but it is becoming harder and harder to sell to Jews who are watching their schools, synagogues, businesses, campuses and neighbourhoods turn into security conscious fortresses.
According to B’nai Brith Canada, there have already been 11 violent antijewish incidents recorded in Canada since January 1, surpassing the 10 violent incidents recorded in all of 2025. Last year was already a record year, with 6,800 antisemitic incidents recorded nationwide. This year is not even half done.
The latest incident involved three Jewish individuals who B’nai Brith says were shot at from a vehicle with a replica firearm as they exited Chasidei Bobov shul on Bathurst Street in Toronto. During the same week, B’nai Brith says there were multiple violent assaults targeting Jewish people in Toronto, part of what the organization is now calling a crisis that has spiralled out of control.
There was a time, not very long ago, when Canadian Jewish organizations were counting graffiti, posters, ugly slogans and broken windows, and those things were bad enough. Now the reality has changed; The target is not only the building anymore, but also the Jew walking out of the building, it is the Jew on the street, it is the Jew who looks Jewish enough for someone to notice.
This is the globalization of the intifada.
Canada did not suddenly arrive here. It drifted here through two and a half years of rallies that were allowed to block streets, campuses that allowed Jewish students to be harassed and intimidated, public Jewish events that needed police protection, and political leaders who kept issuing statements while the situation underneath them kept getting worse.
B’nai Brith’s CEO Simon Wolle said the attacks are a sign of an antijewish crisis that has spiralled out of control, adding that violence of this kind does not happen in a vacuum and follows from governments failing to act while antisemitism becomes more normalized and more dangerous. He is right, and the evidence is no longer hiding in the margins.
Canada’s Jewish community has been told repeatedly that it is safe, welcome, valued and protected. Jewish Canadians have been told that this country is different. They have been told that the institutions work, that police will handle it, that elected officials are listening, that hate has no place here, that this is not who we are. Meanwhile, Jewish schools have been shot at, synagogues have been threatened, Jewish businesses have been vandalized, Jewish students have been harassed, and now Jews are being targeted outside shuls.
At a certain point, the community must realize that the speeches are a substitute for protection. The issue is not whether officials condemn the next incident. They always will, most of the time inexplicably including Islamophobia, as if the two are somehow related.
The issue faced now is whether any of those condemnations have made the country safer for the next visibly Jewish person walking home from shul, the next Jewish kid going to school, the next Jewish student trying to cross a campus, or the next Jewish business owner wondering what will be waiting on the front window in the morning.
B’nai Brith says it took the unusual step of releasing advance figures from its 2026 audit because of the rapid pace of the escalation. Richard Robertson, the organization’s Director of Research and Advocacy, said Jewish Canadians are being terrorized and called again for a federal emergency task force to respond to antisemitism and implement policies to combat it.
That demand should not be controversial. It should not take another attack, another smashed window, another synagogue lockdown or another Jewish family deciding their children should hide their kippahs in public. If the country can mobilize instantly for every fashionable cause that crosses the political desk, it can mobilize for Jewish safety when Jews are being attacked in the street.
The old Canadian comfort line is wearing thin. Canada may still be one of the better countries in the world for Jews compared to places where Jewish life has already collapsed or been driven underground, but that is a painfully low bar, and it is not the same thing as saying the country is doing well. A country does not get credit for being better than the worst places on earth while its Jewish citizens are forced to live behind guards, cameras, locked doors and emergency alerts.
The violence is measurable, the pattern is visible, the excuses are exhausted. Jewish Canadians do not need another speech about Canadian values, they need a country that acts like those values still mean something.
Howie Silbiger is the host of The Howie Silbiger Show on truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on Israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Montreal Jewish News.
