Chris Selley: At a synagogue, Carney tells the wrong people to abandon their ethnic rivalries

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks against antisemitism in front of members of the Jewish community and law enforcement leaders at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto on Monday, June 1, 2026. Photo by Peter Power/Postmedia

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The most extraordinarily limp, ineffectual line in Mark Carney’s comprehensively limp, ineffectual address on the growing scourge of antisemitism in Canada, delivered Monday afternoon at a synagogue in Toronto, might have been this: “When you come to Canada, you bring your faith, your tradition, your language, your story. You leave behind your wars and your animosities.”

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Where do you even to begin with that?

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Two-and-a-half years ago, Hamas committed a pogrom in southern Israel, killing more than 800 civilians as well hundreds of others, and taking more than 250 hostages (dozens of which were later killed). Hamas leaders are smart enough to know hell would then rain down on them — and more to the point, on innocent Gazans living above their precious tunnels. Perhaps they underestimated just how much hell. But a fair number of Jews, both in Israel and the United States — and presumably Canada, although I’m not aware of any comparable polling — believe Israel went “too far” in its response in Gaza: 39 per cent in the U.S., the Pew Research Center found in September 2025.

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You shouldn’t harass people in their homes or businesses, as “pro-Palestinian” supporters have taken to doing, no matter what the polls say. My point is simply to underscore what’s at the root of it: Not politics, but pure, crystalline antisemitism. Canadian and American Jews can’t vote against Benjamin Netanyahu.

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The precise equivalent would be for Jewish Canadians to march through Arab and Muslim neighbourhoods waving Israeli flags in protest over what happened on October 7, 2003. But of course, Jewish Canadians don’t do that sort of thing. (Nor do the vast majority of Muslim Canadians, of course. One of the most frustrating things about watching police escort horrible people around Jewish neighbourhoods, protesting the residents’ Jewishness, is how few protesters there are. Police seem to have no problem telling counter-protesters to go away in order to keep the peace. Why not the protesters themselves?)

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But here we are. Western Jews who have to take it on the chin for Hamas’s pogrom against Jews, and an Israeli response over which they have no control whatsoever.

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So, it was a hell of a thing to say to a synagogue audience, surely, that all Canadians are to “leave behind your wars and animosities,” without naming the relatively few absolute cretins who are trying to ruin it for everyone — none of whom were in attendance.

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It’s extraordinary to me that Carney’s speechwriters can’t get past this obnoxious trope of stating aspiration as fact: “When you come to Canada … you leave behind your wars and your animosities” is just a more complicated version of “there is no place for antisemitism in Canada.” If there were no place for antisemitism, if everyone was leaving behind their wars and animosities, there wouldn’t be a problem.

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Also, what Carney stated as fact has never been true. It’s not true in any pluralistic society. And while I suppose it’s a lovely idea in theory, it doesn’t need to be true to maintain social harmony.

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Canada has been a very successful adventure in diversity. All in all, we have probably endured less than our fair share of ethnic and religious strife. But there has been plenty of strife nevertheless, and I’m sorry to report that much of it came from the “old world.”