You might remember the 1955 “Looney Tunes” cartoon “Scam Hotel.” Porky Pig rents a room for the bargain price of 10 cents a night from the ever-shady Daffy Duck. Porky soon learns why the room is so cheap; there’s an irritating mouse in the room. So, Daffy rents Porky a cat for $5. The cat scares off the mouse, but promptly takes over the bed. Daffy offers another solution: For $10 more, he rents out a dog to deal with the cat. The dog does the job but refuses to leave.
The predictable cycle continues: Porky pays out more for a lion to get rid of the dog, then an elephant to get rid of the lion. Each new animal is rented out to solve the problem created by the previous one. Finally, Porky comes full circle; for a small additional fee, he rents out a mouse from Daffy to get rid of the elephant.
The episode shows how a self-interested operator can manufacture a series of problems where each fix becomes more complicated and expensive, without actually improving the situation.
In the end, Porky is happy to live with the mouse that started the cycle because the alternatives are worse. The moral? When incentives reward perpetuating a problem, rather than resolving it, people get trapped in an ever-expanding loop of dependency, cost and frustration.
Canadian Jews are playing the role of Porky Pig to the Daffy Duck scams offered at all three levels of government. We are repeatedly offered and sold “solutions” to the problem of rising antisemitism that generate a lot of activity, but either leave the underlying problem untouched or make the problem worse. Politicians brag about how much they’re doing to confront antisemitism while the situation on the ground deteriorates.
Police reported incidents of hate-motivated crimes against Jews have increased from 296 in 2019 to over 920 in 2024.
Members of Canada’s Liberal Party promised Canadian Jews that they would respond by funding “diversity” and “anti-racism” initiatives on the premise that educating Canadians to accept diversity and embrace the notions of equity and inclusion would somehow make things better.
What we got was Laith Marouf, a so-called “anti-racism” consultant hired under the Department of Canadian Heritage’s Anti-Racism Program. In return for the $130,000 paid to him by the Canadian taxpayers, Marouf publicly referred to Jews as “loud-mouthed bags of human feces,” described Zionists as “white supremacists,” called for the destruction of Israel, expressed regret that more Americans were not killed during the Vietnam War, denounced Canada as a racist colonial society and repeatedly used slurs against Francophones.
In the wake of the Marouf scandal, the government created a new government official: a special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism.” Shortly thereafter, supposedly to even things out, the government created a special representative on combating Islamophobia. From this new government official, Canadian taxpayers receive a steady stream of invective against Israel’s reaction to the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, which led to the slaughter of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of 251 others.
Meanwhile, casual antisemitism becomes increasingly normalized; bookstores are daubed with paint and glue, coffee shops are vandalized, and the perpetrators get off with absolute discharges—technical findings of guilt with no convictions or penalties.
Here is another case in point: Terry Newman reported in the Dec. 13 edition of the National Post that the Liberal government paid $99,500 through the Department of Canadian Heritage to an organization calling itself Toronto Palestinian Families. The group describes itself as a “grassroots organization led by Palestinian families advocating for safe and inclusive spaces free from anti-Palestinian racism and other forms of inequity.” The funded proposal was titled “Combatting Anti-Semitism and Anti-Palestinian Racism for All.”
However, as Newman observed, “judging by the organization’s website, Toronto Palestinian Families’ purpose is political, pro-Palestinian activism, and it is inarguably anti-Zionist.”
This is not a marginal administrative error. It is a pattern: Antisemitism becomes framed as one prejudice among many, addressed through funding streams that empower groups ideologically hostile to Jewish self-determination and sold to the Jewish community as protection. At what point does the community stop accepting symbolic language and begin asking who is being empowered in its name?
At what point does the federal government look at its own role in legitimizing Jew-hatred through an unceasing bias against the State of Israel? The Liberals’ unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state outside a negotiated peace process, repeated vilification of Israel on a spurious accusation of “genocide” and threats to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, if he were to step onto Canadian soil send a clear message that the 95% of Canadian Jews who support Israel are second-class citizens.
What the Carney government refuses to understand is that Canada’s antisemitism problem won’t be fixed by passing laws. The problem comes from a culture within the government that classifies Jewish nationalism as illegitimate; Jewish security concerns as morally tainted; and antisemitism as a problem to be managed symbolically, rather than confronted honestly.
Canadian Jews are getting wise to the Hotel Scam routine. More than that, they have lost patience with poorly conceived Band-Aid laws and governments handing out grants to racists so they can supposedly fight racism. It’s time to end the hypocrisy and the empty posturing.
