As Canada responds weakly to rising anti-Jewish hate, special antisemitism envoy resigns

Deborah Lyons grew “despondent and despairing” over having to fight for action against the hatred.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The ongoing weak response of the Canadian government and other leaders to a rising tide of Jew hatred led its antisemitism envoy to resign earlier this month, before her term ended.

Deborah Lyons, the country’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, told the Canadian Jewish News that she was “exhausted” after almost two years of “waking up every day to a fight” to get her countrymen to act against rampant Jew hatred.

Government officials, politicians, religious and business leaders all “disappointed” Lyons, she said, after she took on her position just a week after the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which sparked the war in Gaza and an explosion of global antisemitism, including in Canada.

“I… often become quite despondent and despairing about the fact that it was hard to get people to … speak with conviction about what we were seeing happening here on Canadian soil,” she said, referring to the “growing hatred” Canada’s Jewish citizens were experiencing.

There were a record-breaking 6,219 hate incidents committed against Jews in 2024 in Canada, according to an April report by B’nai Brith Canada, ranging from antisemitic graffiti to hate-filled rallies to damaging synagogues and restaurants, and shootings three different times at a Jewish girls’ school.

In a general report on hate crimes released last week, Statistics Canada said that 68% of all crimes motivated by religion targeted Jews, who are less than 1% of the population.

According to Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs CEO Noah Shack, “Numbers don’t paint the full picture. They reflect only a fraction of what Jewish Canadians experience every day. The daily reality is families wondering if it’s safe to walk to synagogue, school buses being checked for explosives, and students being bullied and harassed for being Jewish.”

School has been a particularly fraught place for Canadian kids of all ages.

Parents have spoken about even young children being blamed by their teachers for the war in Gaza, being called such epithets as “half-human” or “baby-killers.”

The University of Toronto has been a particular hotbed of antisemitism since the war in Gaza began.

According to a recently published Anti-Defamation League report on global antisemitism, almost all Canadian Jews — 98% — said antisemitism is a “serious or somewhat serious problem” in their country.

Lyons herself, who is not Jewish, has come under attack as well, she said.

“I faced a lot of hate out there myself… a lot of nasty words and in some cases actions,” she said, referring to losing colleagues and friends over the way she was doing her job.

Her uphill battle to gain justice for Jewish victims has given her “an exceptional understanding of where we are weakening as a society,” not only in Canada but “the Western world,” Lyons noted.

The 75-year-old former Canadian envoy to Israel believes that the solution primarily lies with the government.

It is “critical,” she said, to get the federal, provincial, and municipal levels of government “to work together on the issue of growing hate,” whether in the areas of law enforcement, legislation or training in order to recognize antisemitism when it occurs.

Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister and Lyons’ predecessor as antisemitism envoy, criticized Ottawa’s inaction to date.

The “explosion” in antisemitism has been met with “silence, denial, acquiescence, support, and justification,” he told Fox News Digital Wednesday.

“The government can’t just virtue signal or be performative—it needs to act,” he said. “I’m sure it was difficult for [Lyons] … to see the government not moving as quickly, effectively or decisively as the mandate required.”