The shooting outside the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville on the eve of Yom Kippur should not have come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the government’s own threat assessments. For the past year, CSIS’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre has been sounding the alarm, warning that a violent attack targeting the Canadian Jewish community was a realistic possibility. Indeed, the ITAC warnings predicted that the most likely scenario was a lone actor with a simple weapon at an easily accessible target fuelled by the normalization of antisemitism. On Sunday night, a 29-year-old former soldier fired repeatedly at the synagogue with congregants inside, with only a brave police officer averting a potential massacre.

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