Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke to invited Jewish leaders at a Toronto synagogue on Monday and did not meet the moment, the editorial board writes.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Mark Carney knows how to give a speech. He can diagnose a problem, as he showed at Davos in January. He can cut through great complexity to essential truths, even when doing so means accepting a degree of political risk.
He did none of that in his professorial address on antisemitism at a Toronto synagogue on Monday. He did not diagnose the problem. He offered sympathy, but no answers, apart from creating an advisory council that he first announced four months ago. Some urgency. The council’s first assignment is to look for the “drivers” of antisemitism – as if they are not in plain sight. He was anything but courageous.
Carney calls on Canadians to reject antisemitism that is testing country’s values
What should he have said? That the problem is antizionism, a complete, anything-goes rejection of, and demonizing of, Israel’s existence. And that antizionism is manifesting itself on Canada’s streets and university campuses, in a complete, anything-goes rejection, and demonizing of, Jews.
This is where the Prime Minister’s courage failed him. Taking on the antizionists – the core of the problem – was not something this Liberal prime minister was prepared to do. He went into a synagogue before an invitation-only audience of 170 Jewish leaders and did not meet the moment. He didn’t mention Israel, despite his prepared remarks doing so – once. He was unable or unwilling to articulate what is behind the “scourge of antisemitism” that he rightly condemned.
A strong approach would have been to call out the protests of which nearly 1,000 have occurred in Toronto alone in the past 30 months taking over streets, sidewalks, highway overpasses, the train station, shopping malls and even leaching into Jewish neighbourhoods.
Justin Trudeau, Mr. Carney’s predecessor, did so in a speech in March, 2025. “Antisemites singing the praises of Hamas and Hezbollah while waving their flags on the streets of our cities is not normal.” Mr. Trudeau was on his way out of office, but he still put his finger on the problem.
Of course people have the right to protest, within the bounds of the Criminal Code and local bylaws. But a prime minister has the right and obligation to criticize when those protests – including calls to “globalize the intifada” – are laying down the tinder for hatred and ostracism and outright violence. He should have spoken forcefully on this subject long ago, on the floor of the House of Commons. And taken on the so-called progressives who deploy the language of human rights while turning a blind eye to the hostile environment they are helping create for Jews in Canada.
Again, Mr. Trudeau in his speech last year called out the “deafening indifference toward or even rationalization of antisemitism in everyday life.” Mr. Carney made only the most oblique of references.
The truth that Carney avoided saying: Israel has become the International Jew
A strong approach from Mr. Carney would have been to say: “I stand with Israel as a Jewish homeland, even as I reserve the right to criticize its government.” Mr. Trudeau, though hardly bursting with action on antisemitism, did make this important statement: “The term Zionist increasingly being tossed around as a pejorative, in spite of the fact that it simply means believing in the right of the Jewish people, like all people, to determine their own future, is not normal. No one should ever be afraid to call themselves a Zionist,” he said, adding with emphasis: “I am a Zionist.”
For an international leader of stature who has uttered similar words, Mr. Carney could have looked to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said his country “suffers damage to its own soul” when criticism of Israel “becomes a pretext for hatred of Jews.”
Why does Mr. Carney’s failure to speak such words matter? Because the problem, to repeat, is that those who treat Israel as a pariah state by extension treat Jewish-Canadians as pariahs, unless they renounce Zionism. The price of freedom of conscience and safety for Jews, in other words, is set by their enemies. It’s intolerable and shameful, and the Prime Minister should have stood up to it by saying, as his predecessor did, “I am a Zionist.”
It was good that Mr. Carney went to a synagogue and addressed antisemitism. Importantly, he said Canada’s “civic compact” was failing Jews. But he did not articulate, never mind confront, the nature of that failure. He should have said: “If you oppose Israel’s existence, if you demonize Jewish-Canadians, you are wrong, you are hateful and I stand against you.“
