NP View: What Jewish Canadians need to hear from Mark Carney

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at the Global Progress Action Summit in the Concert Hall at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto on May 9, 2026. Photo by Nick Kozak /For Postmedia News

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Since 2022, the number of police-reported hate crimes targeting Jews has increased 75 per cent in Canada, while antisemitic incidents, as tracked by B’nai Brith, shot up 145 per cent. In that time, we have heard a lot of empty words from politicians and numerous legislative proposals that offer little substance. That needs to change.

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According to sources within the Conservative party, Prime Minister Mark Carney is expected to make an announcement on Monday about how his government will tackle antisemitism. This should include a full-throated denunciation of the sources of anti-Jewish hate, a strong commitment to uphold the laws of the land and solid plans to reform immigration and exorcise the rot in our education system.

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We do not need to hear that attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions is “not who we are as Canadians,” as former prime minister Justin Trudeau was fond of saying; or that they are “fundamental violations of the Canadian way of life,” as Carney has said. We now know that this is who many Canadians are — and something needs to be done about it.

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Carney must recognize that there are no quick fixes. The antisemitism roiling this country was not merely lingering beneath the surface, waiting for an event like Hamas’s October 7 massacre to bubble to the surface. It has been metastasizing for years on university campuses.

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In 2002, a riot broke out at Concordia University over a planned talk by Benjamin Netanyahu. Anti-Israel students forcibly entered the building where he was supposed to speak, breaking a glass window and ultimately shutting down the event.

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Back then, this sort of violent anti-Israel activism was largely confined to universities. But those students graduated, as did generations of others indoctrinated in anti-Zionist and extremist left-wing dogma.

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They entered the workforce, became professors, bureaucrats and politicians. They co-opted our institutions with a far left worldview that sees every issue as one of oppressors versus the oppressed.

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This caused Canada to backslide from a country striving toward colour-blindness, to one that seems to encourage racial tension. And it should come as no surprise that the race most impacted by this change is the Jews, who have faced hate and persecution throughout most of recorded history.

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Since the turn of the century, we have also witnessed Islamist terror groups adopt the language of western “progressives” and unite in a common struggle against their one shared enemy: the world’s only Jewish state and the liberal values it represents in a very illiberal part of the world.

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As the Post’s Jesse Kline writes elsewhere on this page, even so-called mainstream Muslim organizations openly profess their admiration for the Muslim Brotherhood, a jihadist organization, and invite known antisemites to speak at conferences.

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At the same time, this country has seen an influx of newcomers from countries that don’t necessarily share Canadian values.

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During the 2017 Conservative leadership race, Kellie Leitch was branded as a racist for proposing that new immigrants should be screened for anti-Canadian values. Yet her proposal now looks downright prophetic.