Mark Carney's awful speech might make antisemitism worse ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

Mark Carney's awful speech might make antisemitism worse

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked into a Toronto synagogue with the worst antisemitism numbers in Canada's postwar history behind him, and he walked out having given a speech that manages the remarkable feat of making things worse.

He did say that more than two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes in Canada last year were aimed at a community that is one percent of the population. He did mention bullets fired at Jewish schools, firebombs at synagogues, Jewish patients harassed in hospitals, Jewish students chased out of campus common spaces, Holocaust memorials desecrated, parents weighing whether a Jewish day school is safe and observant Jews thinking twice about a kippah on the subway. This is to his credit.

Then he spent the rest of the speech making sure none of it would change.

Listen to the whole address and you will learn that Canada has an antisemitism problem without ever learning where it comes from. The hate, in Carney's telling, simply materialized. There is no October 7th in this speech. There is no anti-Zionism, no campus encampment, no "globalize the intifada," no marching mob outside a Jewish neighborhood, no name attached to a single one of the people firing the bullets and throwing the firebombs. The antisemites are like the weather — they arrive like a cold front, and the job of government is to hand out umbrellas. So that is what he offered: more money for guards and barriers, all of it already announced, plus a brand-new council whose marching orders are to study, research, collect data, and measure.

The community has been living the data for two and a half years at its own front doors. It does not need a federal body to assess the scale of the problem. It needs the problem stopped, and on that subject Carney had nothing — no zero-tolerance standard for campuses, no commitment to prosecute, none of the 22 recommendations the Senate's own committee handed him this spring. The council that is supposed to fix this replaced the antisemitism envoy positions his government eliminated in February, contains exactly one Jewish member, and seats among its membership the lawyer who sued the University of Alberta for daring to clear an encampment. This is the body asked to defend Jews from antisemitism.

The part that should make every Zionist's stomach turn is the way he handled Israel, which is to say the way he refused to. No one can seriously deny that anti-Zionism is what fuels most of today's antisemitism. Yet Israel earned exactly one sentence in the prepared text — a note that the antisemitism guidelines still permit criticism of the Jewish state. Yay. Compare that to Justin Trudeau a year earlier, who at least said the words "no one in Canada should ever be afraid to call themselves a Zionist. I am a Zionist." Carney could not bring himself to defend Israel even once.

What he did instead is worse than silence. The civic principle at the heart of the speech is that "no Canadian going about their daily life should be held responsible for the actions of any government, wherever they may be." To ask that Jews not be blamed for Israel's actions is to say that Israel's actions are blameworthy, and that the only mistake the mob is making is sending the bill to the wrong address. He did not defend the Jewish state against the libel. He accepted the libel and pleaded for Canadian Jews to be spared the consequences.

The same surrender runs through his theory of where the hatred came from. Antisemitism, he suggested, is a foreign quarrel that immigrants must leave behind at the dock — "you leave behind your wars and your animosities" — and the covenant "requires that we do not transpose foreign conflicts onto each other." So the problem is not the ideology that teaches that the Jewish state is a colonial crime to be resisted by any means. The problem is that some people brought a faraway argument to Canada, and the solution is for everyone to calm down about a distant war. That diagnosis lands as squarely on the Jew who loves Israel as on the Arab who hates it.

This is what it looks like when a leader seems to say every right word and means none of the consequences. Carney named the wounds and protected the people inflicting them by refusing to name them. He promised Jews safety and built it on the demand that they distance themselves from the one country on earth that exists to keep them safe.

How, in the end, are Jews any safer? Outside of more security in some Jewish spaces, there was nothing said to fight antisemitism to begin with.

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