By Howie Silbiger
Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Toronto this week and admitted what Canadian Jews have known for a long time. Canada is failing its Jewish community.
The words were welcome. The timing was ugly.
Barely two days later, Toronto Police announced four more arrests in what they are calling suspected hate motivated assaults with a weapon against visibly Jewish people in North York. The victims were not politicians or public figures, they were Jews walking in Jewish neighbourhoods and standing outside a synagogue.
That is the part Ottawa still does not seem to understand. This is not an abstract policy problem. This is not another item for a government roundtable. Jewish Canadians are being targeted where they live, where they pray, where they send their children to school and where they walk down the street.
According to Toronto Police, the incidents happened on April 30 near Bathurst Street and Lawrence Avenue West, and on May 7 near Bathurst Street and Highway 401 outside Congregation Chasidei Bobov synagogue. In both cases, visibly Jewish victims were allegedly shot at from a vehicle with an imitation firearm, described by police as an Orbeez type gun or gel blaster. The injuries may have been minor, but the message was clear.
Police are now saying the attacks were not random. They believe members of the Jewish community were deliberately targeted, and that the incidents were organized and planned. There has been a bad habit in this country of softening anti Jewish violence when the weapon is not deadly, the damage is not catastrophic, or the victims are lucky enough to walk away.
A gel gun outside a synagogue is not harmless. A fake firearm fired at Jews is not a prank. When visibly Jewish people are attacked outside a shul, they do not have the luxury of stopping to determine whether the weapon is real, fake, loaded, modified, or just meant to scare them. The fear is the point.
Five people have now been charged in connection with the two incidents. The first arrest was made in May, when police charged 18 year old Ruslan Novruzov of Vaughan. On June 3, police announced four additional arrests, including 20 year old Luka Chokheli of Toronto, 23 year old Alishahin Isayev of Toronto, a 16 year old male from Toronto, and a 17 year old female from Thornhill. Two other suspects, both believed to be youths, remain outstanding.
This is the Jew hatred in Canada to which Ottawa has decided that the solution for, is to form another council.
Carney announced a new federal advisory council to combat antisemitism and hate, along with new measures that include more funding for security and legislative proposals. He also said antisemitism in Canada has reached levels not seen since the Second World War. According to government data cited by Reuters, roughly 70 percent of religion based hate crimes reported in Canada in 2024 targeted Jews, even though Jews make up about one percent of the population.
That number should have ended the debate a long time ago.
Instead, Canadian Jews have spent the last two and a half years watching elected officials discover the crisis slowly, carefully and usually after the damage has already been done. Synagogues have been attacked. Jewish schools have been shot at. Jewish businesses have been vandalized. Students have been intimidated on campuses. Jewish neighbourhoods have seen protests move from political demonstration to open harassment.
And through it all, governments have talked. They have condemned, consulted and promised to listen. They have announced plans, panels, strategies, frameworks and conversations.
Meanwhile, Jews are still being attacked, and the police are still announcing arrests.
That is the failure. Not that Ottawa said the wrong thing this week. Carney’s words were stronger than what Jewish Canadians have been used to hearing from the federal government. The failure is that it took this long for the obvious to become official, and even now, the response still feels like government trying to manage the optics of a crisis it allowed to grow.
Jewish Canadians do not need another lecture on resilience. They have been plenty resilient. They need consequences. They need laws enforced. They need police supported. They need prosecutors to treat anti Jewish violence as a serious threat to public safety, not a temporary social tension. They need political leaders to stop pretending that every act of Jew hatred is complicated by Middle East politics.
There is nothing complicated about shooting at visibly Jewish people outside a synagogue. There is nothing nuanced about targeting Jews in the street.
Ottawa can talk. It can announce. It can consult. It can promise that this time it really understands, But in Toronto, police say Jews were deliberately targeted.
That is the story. And until this country starts acting like that is intolerable, all the speeches in the world will not make Jewish Canadians safer.
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
