Two months ago, I wrote about gunfire that hit the doors of several Toronto-area synagogues, including the Shaarei Shomayim, the synagogue where I was married. That round of violence led many to affirm yet again that supportive words alone could no longer meet the moment. My Hub Canada op-ed notes that last week, a Senate committee delivered its answer: a 73-page report with 22 recommendations, including a Digital Safety Commission, expanded hate-crime units, and the reinstatement of the Special Envoy on Combatting Antisemitism. These are serious proposals. But a report documenting antisemitism in Canada that cannot name the full problem cannot solve it.
The committee heard that antisemitism today travels through two channels: Jews targeted for being Jewish, and Jews targeted for being Zionists. When more than nine in 10 Canadian Jews support the right of the Jewish people to have their own independent state in their ancestral homeland, the targeting is the same act. As one witness testified, the word “Jew” has simply been replaced by “Zionist” while the imagery and ideas remain largely the same.
Zionism, for most Jews, is not a political preference. It is the answer to a two-thousand-year-old question: where is a Jew safe? Expulsions, pogroms, ghettoes, and the Holocaust provide devastating evidence that a stateless people cannot rely on the protection of any other. The religious foundation predates the modern political movement by millennia, with Zion sitting at the centre of Jewish prayer and texts. To demand that a Canadian Jew disavow Zionism is not to ask them to surrender a policy view, but rather to repudiate a tradition older than Canada itself and a lesson that generations paid for in blood.
The discrimination that follows from refusing that demand is documented across the report. Witnesses described visibly Jewish students warning that no campus was safe, union members shouted down at conventions, academics concealing their political beliefs, and medical professionals boycotted by colleagues.
The Senate report’s discouraging response is to call “excessive focus on defining antisemitism” counterproductive and to treat the definitional debates as a distraction. But for the community whose experience the report documents, recommendations that do not address the definitional questions are destined to fail. If “Jew” has been replaced by “Zionist,” contemporary antisemitism must address it.
The committee’s approach is the latest in a now-familiar pattern of denial that has shadowed every phase of Canada’s response to rising antisemitism. At first, denial that the problem existed at all, with data points contested as exaggerated. When the numbers became impossible to dismiss, the denial migrated to uniqueness: antisemitism acknowledged but framed as “all hate matters,” with the very act of singling it out cast as suspect.
With the violence now beyond dispute and Jewish Canadians facing shootings, firebombings, and protests in their own neighbourhoods, the denial has shifted again, this time to whether the targeting of Jews as Zionists is antisemitism at all. The Senate report is a denial in parliamentary committee form: not outright rejection but quiet refusal to confront the community’s central concern by labelling it a distraction.
Part of this failure traces back to a witness problem the committee created for itself by platforming voices that are still in the first stage of denial. Indeed, one of five hearing days was given over to an organization representing under 1 percent of Canadian Jews, with one witness stating that organizations supporting Israel “should be destroyed.” The result was distortion, not balance.
The deepest irony lies in what the report says it wants to restore. Deborah Lyons, the previous Special Envoy on Combatting Antisemitism, understood the problem the Senate does not. Her handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism exists because anti-Zionist language was being used to launder antisemitism, and Canadian institutions, police, educators, and civil servants needed a working framework to distinguish legitimate, protected criticism of Israeli government policy from hate.
The handbook is explicit that Canadians can criticize the Israeli government at length and stay on the right side of the antisemitism line. But deploying double standards, contesting the country’s right to exist, or treating its Jewish supporters as legitimate targets of violence or political exclusion is another matter. The House Justice Committee reached the same conclusion in 2024. The Senate now recommends restoring Lyons’s office while declining the analytical work that made it useful.
For months, Jewish Canadians have argued that words are not enough. Neither, it turns out, is a report that documents the problem and declines to name half of it.
