The Canadian Liberal government giveth and it taketh away.
Ottawa voted on Tuesday to consider whether to recognize a Palestinian state on the same day as the Canadian government announced new funding for securing Jewish communities.
Some of the $48 million infusion into the Security Infrastructure Program “will help protect Jewish nonprofit organizations, community centers and religious institutions from the growing threat of hate-motivated crimes,” stated the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a major advocacy group.
Michael Teper, vice president of the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation in Toronto, told JNS that the timing of the announcement was a politically motivated “diversion” and “smoke screen” to draw attention away from the ruling party’s unfriendly stances on Israel.
In addition to the vote on potentially recognizing a Palestinian state, the Liberal government abstained from a U.N. vote earlier this month that called for the Old City of Jerusalem to boot out the Jews. Canada broke with a longstanding policy of bipartisan support for Israel in abstaining rather than voting against the resolution, which passed 124-14 with 43 abstentions. On Sept. 10, Mélanie Joly, the Canadian foreign affairs minister, announced that the country had suspended some 30 existing permits for arms sales to Israel.
“They’re trying to tell the Jews, ‘Here’s quite a bit of cash. We hope you enjoy it. Now stop complaining about us. Shouldn’t you be grateful? Now, we’re trying to buy your votes, and buy your allegiance and try to fool you,’” Teper told JNS.
Teper allowed that cameras and guards can help deter attacks or lead to arrests but said that those precautions couldn’t stop “mobs of haters” that often come in the hundreds in front of Canadian Jewish institutions and businesses.
“The problem is that it doesn’t matter whether you have $65 million or $165 million. It’s very difficult to make a public space defensible for the Jews anymore,” he told JNS. “I don’t think throwing money at us is going to solve the problem. The problem is that there’s a cultural—and I regret to say it, perhaps even a demographic—shift in the population of Toronto that has made it virtually impossible to be safe for any money.”
The action plan on fighting hate, which the Canadian government released on Sept. 24, contains, “major improvements to the Security Infrastructure Program, which has provided funding for security infrastructure maintenance and improvements to workplaces, community centers and places of worship of at-risk communities,” according to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. (SIP is now the Canada Community Security Program.)
Canadian police reported in July that antisemitic hate crimes were up 71% from 2022 to 2023 and up 172% since 2020, with Jews accounting for some 70% of religiously motivated hate crimes in 2023.
“With the Jewish High Holidays and the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre mere days away, this is a timely announcement,” stated Shimon Koffler Fogel, the CIJA president and CEO.
‘Everybody hires Joe Schmo security’
Aaron Hadida runs the security agency Magen Herut, and he and his team are often hired to help secure synagogues, special events, high-profile speakers and town halls. He is currently working with a major Toronto synagogue on implementing a series of security protocols and plans, all without government funding.
“We all need to up our security,” he told JNS. “Synagogues are an easy target.”
“Everybody hires Joe Schmo security. They have no idea what their training is. All they know is they possess a security license,” Hadida added. “He’s either a 62-year-old or a 21-year-old. He’s getting $22 an hour.”
Hadida told JNS that he and his team have been hired to retrain some such guards. “I have to tell them not to be on their phones,” he said. “These are things I have to tell people guarding 300 kids under age 10 in a Jewish school.”
The security agency head agrees with Teper that the Canadian Liberals, who averted a snap election on Wednesday by dodging a no-confidence vote in Parliament, are trying to buy Jewish support.
“The Liberals have got a very serious problem in the public opinion polls. So how do they get the Jewish community back on side? Throw some money at them,” Hadida said. “Too little too late. The shootings, the firebombings, the protests and people removing their mezuzahs, everything.”
‘Turned down’
Not every application for government funding to secure Jewish institutions is granted. The National Post reported in January that many synagogues were turned down.
Rabbi Mendel Kaplan is the shaliach (“emissary”) at Chabad Flamingo in the Toronto area, which had its glass doors smashed in 2018 by a vandal just months after its application for federal security funding was turned down.
“I remember publicly saying, ‘Had only we been able to get some sort of security funding to make sure that this could be deterred or prevented,’” he told JNS. “Anybody else could still be turned down, just like I was.”
Kaplan is also suspicious about the timing of the announcement.
“I’m going to imagine that right now, the federal government knows that the Jewish community is profoundly unhappy,” he told JNS. “They’re going to go out of their way now, pre-election moves, to kind of make sure that they’re pleasing the community, right? That’s my guess.”
But the Canadian government has been “appalling, shocking” in the way it’s treated Israel and the Jewish community, according to Kaplan.
“The level and intensity of antisemitism that has exploded on our streets is not accidental. I can’t say the Liberal government has fomented or caused this,” he said.
However, he added, “they have certainly allowed it to fester.”
It’s important, he said, to give hakarat hatov (“gratitude”), “but it doesn’t gloss over what’s done. The people who commit these acts of violence against the Jewish community have been emboldened.”
