Among 768 candidates in the snap provincial elections, which Ontario Premier Doug Ford called for Feb. 27—well ahead of slated June 2026 elections—and for which early voting opened on Feb. 20 in the morning, five of the more prominent are Jews, spanning a wide political spectrum.
Incumbents Michael Kerzner (York Centre) and Andrea Khanjin (Barrie-Innisfil) and Michelle Cooper (Eglinton-Lawrence) are of the center-right Progressive Conservative Party, while Lee Weiss Vassor (Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas) is of the libertarian-right New Blue Party and Jason Cherniak (Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill) is a center-left Liberal.
A Progressive Conservative, the Ontario premier enjoyed a majority government with 79 seats when he called the election. Left-learning New Democrats (led by Marit Stiles) had 28 seats, the Liberal Party (led by Bonnie Crombie) had nine, the Green Party had two and six seats were independent. Jim Karahalios, who leads New Blue, does not have a seat.
The Progressive Conservatives lead with 33% of the vote share, followed by the Liberals (23%), New Democrats (17%), Independents (7%) and 19% undecided, per a recent Abacus poll. JNS sought comment from the five Jewish candidates, and two responded to questions.
Cherniak, the Liberal candidate and a lawyer, is running in a district about an hour-and-a-half north of Toronto. A former communications director (2008) and co-chair (2011 to 2013) of the Liberal Friends of Israel, Cherniak was a member of a committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress and attended the World Jewish Congress meeting in 2009 as part of the body’s delegation.
He told JNS that Progressive Conservatives and Liberals “both have the right goals in mind when it comes to antisemitism.” The Liberal Party leader, Crombie, whom Cherniak has known for a decade, has “been a supporter” of the Jewish community, according to Cherniak.
He told JNS that he aims to push for “bubble legislation” that would bar protests near schools or houses of worship.
“In our community, parents are concerned about what’s going to happen when kids go to school. We worry when we see protests going on,” he said. “We wonder whether they’re going to be peaceful protests or not, because we know they’re not always peaceful.”
“There is a general sense of uncertainty and concern about what’s happening right now, and you wonder what Jewish life will be like in Ontario,” he told JNS. He added that the party leader supports police action against hate crimes.
“When it’s obviously intimidation, then the police need to step in, because that’s effectively hate speech,” he said.
“When I hear politicians asked about antisemitism, their answer is to talk about antisemitism and Islamophobia, and it sort of bothers me, because it’s not two sides of the same coin,” he told JNS. “They’re two very different things, and I think people, all politicians, need to understand that antisemitism has its own meaning. It has its own history.”
“There are some very serious issues that relate to antisemitism and that don’t relate to other forms of racism and discrimination,” he added. “I want to help them understand that.”
Weiss Vassor, of the New Blue Party, is an engineer and project manager and an active member of the Adas Israel Congregation, an Orthodox synagogue in Hamilton who, she says, participates regularly in events and fundraisers.
A member of the parent teacher association at the local Hebrew day school, Weiss Vassor joined New Blue because she believed that Progressive Conservatives lost their way as conservatives, beginning with lockdowns during the pandemic.
Her current party stands against “woke ideology” in elementary schools, over-taxation and overspending, she thinks, and it aims to address affordability.
As an immigrant from Israel, she told JNS that antisemitism and anti-Israel hatred “resonates very strongly” with her. “If we look at what’s happening on the university campuses, there’s certainly a lot more that the province could be doing to protect us, and to protect the Jewish communities,” she said.
“If there is a hate crime in Toronto, there’s a shooting at a Jewish school in Toronto, if there’s a violent protest at a cafe in Toronto, the province should be the leader in this, condemning it and then showing people what the ramifications are of it,” she added.
The New Blue is reportedly the only party to include in its platform that it “supports defunding any organization receiving public funding that supports boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) or other campaigns targeting Israel, its economy or local Jewish communities and/or Jewish organizations.”
‘More urgent law enforcement’
Avi Benlolo, founding chair and CEO of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative, told JNS that safety concerns, especially those related to Jew-hatred in schools and on the street, are the major issues for Jewish voters in the upcoming election.
“The rising tide of antisemitism—we feel that it hasn’t been dealt with. Obviously, condemnations are not enough,” he said. “We need to see more action, much more strengthening of our local police services, our criminal laws and the way that we process hate crimes.”
The process by which offenders are charged, which “has to go through the attorney general of the province, and then it goes to police,” takes “far too long,” according to Benlolo. What is needed, he said, is “a restructuring of that to allow for hate crime charges to not be as prolonged and to be more immediate.”
“What I’m saying is initiate a number of policy changes that will help—that will basically help undermine antisemitism,” he said.
The second main Jewish concern, according to Benlolo, are universities, which are largely under provincial control or receive provincial funding.
“We haven’t seen sufficient action with respect to antisemitism on university campuses, and the province itself and its leaders threatening, as is the case now in the United States, to revoke funding and to change various policies concerning universities when it comes to this prolonged antisemitism,” he said.
Instead of pressing school boards, like the Toronto District School Board, to focus more on fighting Jew-hatred, the government has been “fairly frozen,” and has left it to the boards to police themselves, according to Benlolo. He added that some municipalities have been banning swastikas, which is a practice that he thinks ought to be more widespread.
“Standing up for Israel means standing up really for Canada and for freedom and democracy. We’d like to see much more in the area of sticking for allies, standing up for Israel and supporting the fight on our city streets—the Palestinian protests that are still raging on our streets, calling for genocide against the Jewish people and calling for the destruction of State of Israel and for supporting Hamas,” he said.
“They’re still not being addressed by our political leaders sufficiently, so we’d like to see more of that,” he added. “I would like to see a more urgent law enforcement that protects the Jewish community, so we need to see our officials just more strident in standing up with the Jewish community and also with their ally, the State of Israel.”
Dennis Pilon, professor and chair of politics at York University in Toronto, told JNS that as a general rule, “parties and politicians respond to groups that support them in turn, and try to avoid controversies with no electoral payoff,” meaning votes.
“Everybody is against discrimination and hate. That’s what we call a valence issue—one that everyone is in favour of,” like public healthcare in Canada, he said, but voters differ on how politicians ought to approach it.
“Yet how far they will take up an issue depends on a voter cost-benefit analysis,” Pilon said. “Here it is striking that the federal Conservatives have made this an issue with ads, saying they ‘stand with Israel,’ so I don’t know why the Ontario Progressive Conservatives would be different.”
‘Ride out the campaign’
Experts told JNS that it is surprising that more candidates weren’t interested in communicating with Jewish readers.
“Progressive Conservatives are incumbents and leading in most polls, and want to control narrative avoiding any chance of someone going off script and making salient an issue that is not core to their main message,” Renan Levine, an associate professor of political science at University of Toronto told JNS.
Levine added that party strategists learned their lesson from 2007, when they “turned a solid lead into a loss” after PC leader John Tory expressed support for funding faith-based schools.
“This risk aversion may be especially true where there are not many Jewish voters in a riding or the Jewish candidate doesn’t have a name like Levine or Goldberg,” he said. (A “riding” is an election district.)
Pilon, of York University, told JNS that “usually parties are keen to parade diversity candidates of all sorts before the electorate and media, so I can’t imagine why the Progressive Conservatives would be avoiding this.”
“One thing I’ve learned is that one should never rule out administrative failure before going on to assuming a deliberate strategy,” he said. “Elections are busy times and things fall off the desk a lot. On the other hand, maybe they don’t want a focus here, but I can’t imagine how it would hurt them, given the electorates they typically draw from.”
Christopher Cochrane, associate professor and chair of political science at University of Toronto, told JNS that “I think that the Conservative strategy is to just basically ride out the campaign and win an election. So no candidates debates, no candidate messaging.”
“More to do with that they don’t want to chance somebody saying the wrong thing in the media,” he said. “I think the Conservatives figure that if nothing is said and no one talks about this election again until the voting day, they’ve got it in the bag.”
“My hunch is that they’re probably by default supportive of the challenges that the Canadian Jewish community has faced, with antisemitism and the attacks on schools and so on,” he said. “But I suspect also that they’re weary of really stepping in anything on any issue that could conceivably, even imaginably help an opposition party.”