B’nai Brith Canada, which traces its history back more than 150 years, said that for the third year in a row, it recorded the largest number of incidents of Jew-hatred in the country.
Richard Robertson, director of research and advocacy at the group, said in a press conference at Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Monday that its annual audit of incidents of Jew-hatred in Canada found in 2025 that the 6,800 incidents that year were up 9.4% from the 6,219 in 2024. The 2025 statistic was the largest since B’nai Brith began issuing the annual report in 1982, Roberston said.
“Though the figures contained in the 2025 audit are astonishing, we cannot allow antisemitism to be rendered into mere statistics that we grow numb to,” he told reporters. “Each incident documented in the audit meant pain, suffering and anguish for a human being, a fellow Canadian.”
Simon Wolle, CEO of B’nai Brith, told JNS that the findings reflect a “troubling and continued shift in antisemitism from society’s fringes to the mainstream.”
“We are seeing hate normalized in public discourse and everyday environments,” Wolle said. “Online, extremist radicalization is translating into real-world harms with increasing frequency. Global conflicts are fueling domestic targeting of Jewish communities, rising hostility in schools, campuses and workplaces.”
The B’nai Brith data isn’t just a numbers increase, according to Wolle.
“It is a dramatic change in the nature and scale of antisemitism in this country,” he told JNS. “Incremental responses will not meet this moment. Canada needs a systemic, visible and immediate plan to restore safety and confidence.”
At the press conference, Robertson cited several examples of incidents, including a Jew told that the person “should have been gassed along with their ancestors at Auschwitz,” a Jewish man assaulted in front of his children at a park and Nazi imagery scrawled at a schoolyard.
“Antisemitism has become so ubiquitous in our society that the word ‘Jew’ is now commonly used as a slur to disparage and malign non‑Jews,” Robertson said. “Jewishness itself has become derogatory in contemporary Canada.”
He broke the 6,800 incidents down into categories—6,491 instances of antisemitic harassment, 299 examples of vandalism that included Jew-hatred and 10 incidents of antisemitic violence.
There were also increases last year in the number of times that people called for Jews to be exterminated and to be removed from Canada, according to B’nai Brith stats.
“Though shocking, the numbers contained in the 2025 audit are not surprising,” Robertson said at the press conference. “This is what happens when elected leaders at all levels fail to heed the warning signs, decline to act and enable a permissive environment.”
“If they are incapable of leading us through this crisis, we as a collective must compel change,” he said.
B’nai Brith proposed ways that governments across the country ought to act, including coordinated, security-focused and enforcement-heavy measures at all levels to confront Jew-hatred.
The federal government should create a national, emergency task force on Jew-hatred, treat violent attacks on Jewish institutions as domestic terrorism and deploy more national security resources to protect synagogues, schools and Jewish‑owned businesses, according to the Jewish nonprofit.
It urged Canadian provinces and territories to fund immediate security protection and set up dedicated hate‑crime prosecution units, and it said that municipalities should ban events that incite hate or glorify terrorism, enforce laws against hate and intimidation in public spaces strictly and prioritize policing and rewards to protect Jewish neighborhoods and institutions.
“These are not a magic antidote to the antisemitism plaguing our country, but they provide tangible solutions that can form the basis of our national response,” Robertson said at the press conference. “They must be actuated upon immediately.”
Robertson told JNS that B’nai Brith also wants the Canadian government to list Muslim Brotherhood chapters as terror entities, ban al-Quds rallies from public-owned spaces and have hate crimes “properly prosecuted.”
“We are in a paradigm moment when it comes to fighting antisemitism,” he told JNS. “It’s becoming so normalized and so ubiquitous in our society that if we don’t get a handle on it, it will be cause for real concern and could have a catastrophic effect on the vitality of Canada’s Jewish community.”
Robertson told JNS that there is a need for “clarity in messaging when it comes to hate.”
“The lack of clarity and consistency in messaging from our leaders has allowed this permissive environment to fester,” he said. “We need to demand better from our government” that has “failed to address hate sufficiently.”
“They must be held accountable at the ballot box,” he said.
Robertson told the JNS that B’nai Brith’s data came from police reports, the nonprofit’s research and hate crimes reported to the organization.
“There is actually an increasing concern that certain incidents of antisemitism are not being reported because of fear and because of the normalization of antisemitism,” he told JNS. “We can only capture what we are able to obtain in what is reported to us.”
“When it comes to hate generally, there is historically under‑reporting, especially by marginalized or vulnerable communities,” he said. “This is something that we are constantly working to overcome.”
According to B’nai Brith, incidents of Jew-hatred are up 145.6% since 2022.
Many self-described “anti-Zionists” are employing classic tropes that have traditionally been used to dehumanize Jewish people, Robertson said at the press conference.
On social media, Holocaust denial has also gone viral, including with artificial intelligence, which is used to create false representations of historical events, per the nonprofit.
Wolle, CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, stated that Jew-hatred has become “normalized” and that the new report “must be understood as a wake-up call.”
“Hate and extremism are a threat to Canadian democracy and civil society, not only to the Jewish community,” he stated.
Wolle told JNS that he has a message for Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister.
“This is no longer a single community issue,” he said of the reported Jew-hatred. “It is a national stability issue that demonstrates a systemic problem.”
Jewish Canadians are the “early warning system,” he told JNS. “History shows that when hate goes unchecked, it does not stop with Jews. Instead, it spreads and destabilizes entire societies.”
“The question is not whether we can respond. It is whether we are willing to act at the scale required. Prime Minister Carney has an opportunity, right now, to define his leadership on this issue by treating antisemitism as a national priority, enforcing the law meaningfully and restoring public confidence that Canada will not tolerate hate.”
The annual audit has been recognized as Canada’s most authoritative, independent survey of antisemitic incidents, and policymakers, journalists, academics and law enforcement agencies regularly cite it, according to B’nai Brith.
