"[It is] ironic [that DEI programs are] often structurally incapable of even seeing antisemitism, let alone addressing it."

"If your DEI lens only recognizes race-based disadvantage, and cannot grapple with religious, cultural, economic and national dimensions, then Jews -- who are the most targeted group in the country -- are effectively rendered invisible."

"Some of the research shows an inherent tension between DEI frameworks, and the ability to understand antisemitism."

"When DEI is framed almost exclusively around systemic barriers defined by race, it cannot grapple with how antisemitism operates along religious, cultural, economic and national lines."

"The result is that antisemitism is frequently not mentioned at all in institutional DEI policies, or, when it is, the national dimension of Jewish identity is explicitly excluded."

Rhonda Lenton, former president, York University

 

"That 25 percent [one in four Jews seriously considering leaving Canada] is not people packing suitcases; it's a measure of lost trust. They are questioning whether Canada is still living up to its commitments on multiculturalism and minority rights."

"When that many members of a historically successful minority are thinking in those terms, it's not just a 'Jewish problem'. It's a warning light for every minority in this country."

"We're finding that strong negative attitudes toward Israel's very right to exist have bred a great deal of antisemitism in recent years. They're different focal points -- Jews on the one hand, Israel on the other -- but they have become closely linked forms of antipathy."

Sociologist Robert Brym, University of Toronto 

Israel’s Ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed, looks at bullet holes fired at the Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto Synagogue in Vaughan, March 12, 2026. Photo by Peter J. Thompson /National Post

 

According to the Canadian Jewish Barometer 2026, representing a new national survey through a medium compiled by former president of York University Rhonda Lenton and University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym, non-Jewish Canadians hold less favourable views of Jews at present than was the case two years earlier, while attitudes toward Israel have become far less favourable over the same time frame. The authors of this new national survey conclude that the greatest exacerbating factor is the diversity, inclusion and equity programs that have succeeded in eroding sensibilities. 

 

The web-based survey undertook to question 3,062 Canadian adults from mid-January to mid-February of 2026. Oversampling polls of Jews, Muslims and Quebecers drawn from a Leger Opinion Panel, made for detailed subgroup analysis. Positive sentiment toward Jews was found to have dropped in comparison to a similar 2024 survey; agreement with negatively-worded statements about Jews rose by roughly five percent on average, considered to be statistically significant.

 

Non-Jewish Canadians with the most favourable view of Jews fell by eight percentage points in the two- year period, while those with slightly positive views dropped by 15 points. Leading the authors to deduce  that the 'golden age' of Canadian Jewry -- from the 1960s to the early 2020s -- giving way to a hostile environment. The Barometer notes that Jews suffer more police-recorded hate crimes per capita than any other ethnic, racial or religious group in Canada, since the Israel-Hamas war.

 

Rising incidents of hostility have caused a psychological toll within the Jewish community In 2024, 63 percent of Jews felt less safe in Canada than they did five years earlier and by 2026 that figure leapt to 88 percent, where close to seven in ten Jewish parents are concerned over their children's safety in school. Fear, discomfort and discussions over emigration represent newly measurable trends, with one in four Jews seriously considering leaving Canada.

 

The prevailing atmosphere is that non-Jewish Canadians are markedly more critical of Israel; strong and moderate support declining, while weak support, outright opposition and uncertainty have all gained traction. More Canadians describe their view of Israel as unfavourable than favourable, with a majority stating their opinion that the Gaza campaign represents 'genocide'. 

 

Universities and other organizations must retool how DEI is operationalized to identify where anti-Jewish bias is being inadvertently baked into policy, according to Ms. Lenton. Perhaps the best, most effective place to start the process, is government itself with its 'progressive' dedication to DEI. The Barometer indicates that more hours of classroom teaching of the Holocaust correlates with slightly more positive attitudes toward Jews, but that effect is slight. Many non-Jewish respondents in Quebec particularly, under-estimate the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.   

"A program designed to be inclusive ends up being exclusive of the group that experiences the highest rate of hate crimes in the country. The only 'good Jew' in many DEI framings, is a Jew without any national ambitions for the Jewish people."

"That's includes revisiting definitions metrics and recommended strategies [to identify where anti-Jewish bias is baked into policy] and making sure that Jews are recognized as a vulnerable minority in all the dimensions in which they are targeted."

Robert Brym

  

"Whether justified based on available surveys or not, the perception itself is politically significant. For many Canadians, antisemitism is no longer viewed solely as a domestic prejudice inherited from Europe’s past, but increasingly as a problem linked to contemporary demographic and concomitant cultural change. In short, more immigration from Muslim countries. The constant and massive anti-Israel demonstrations that have rocked Toronto and Montreal have left a broad, distinctly visual impression."

"Perhaps the most revealing demographic pattern in the survey was the connection between antisemitic attitudes and dissatisfaction with Canada itself. Respondents who viewed Canada negatively were significantly more likely to feel negatively towards Jews than those who expressed confidence in the country and its institutions."

Sago, Public Square, The Hub  

 

 

 

Marginalized, Equity-Deserving Academia

"The training is intended to further your personal journey of learning and action, regardless of  how knowledgeable or experienced you are, so attendance is mandatory irrespective of previous training or academic field of specialization."

"[By session's end, participants will understand their own] unconscious bias [and] reflect on and understand how power, privilege and meritocracy lead to inequities."

University of Saskatchewan

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | sssss1gmel and Alexandr Baranov/iStock/Getty Images

"Mandatory Unconscious bias and anti-racism training" is a course at the University of Saskatchewan, one that reflects how most other Canadian universities view their mandate as institutes of higher learning, having undergone a radical alteration in academia from the original purpose of intellectual knowledge-gathering to social engineering, while still purporting to be fulfilling society's needs to produce highly cerebral-equipped graduates in their chosen fields of professional study.

 

The course in question was labelled with the official title of Anti-Racism/Anti-Oppression and Unconscious Bias Faculty Development Session. Hiring committees of the university faculty are particularly urged to participate. Course materials inform participants to expect that they  will be given training around "systemic racism" of the university environment, coupled with the manner in which they have benefited from unearned racial privileges simply by being white, male and (shudder) cisgender. 

Michael Plaxton, a University of Saskatchewan faculty member, whose expertise is based in criminal law and statutory interpretation, spoke of the course as a "mandatory DEI boot camp", a "forced march of self-discovery". Two readings comprise the course; 1) White settler colonialism and the myth of meritocracy, composed by Indigenous activist Sheelah MacLean which details how white Saskatchewanians owe their prosperity to "150 years of racist, sexist and homophobic colonial practices".

The administration building of the University of Saskatchewan is photographed in Saskatoon. Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Heywood Yu

"The myth that Canadian society is created on individual work ethic ignores how racially dominant groups gain access to social and political power", reads the course.

 

The second course reading is comprised of a chapter from the 2022 book Confronting Institutionalized Racism in Higher Education, the chapter interviewing five "racialized" Canadian university faculty, concluding the entire system is set up to benefit white people: "Racialized faculty are expected to have accomplished more, yet their tenure and promotion files are always scrutinized through certain deficit-driven lenses of presumed incompetence". 

"Anti-racism" linked to everything from grant funding to hiring, to promotion hinges at Canadian institutions on the embrace of the doctrine of "anti-racism" with a candidate's willingness to accept the  tenets of "equity, diversity and inclusion", their key to humble admission as a penitent striving to correct a wrong while pursuing higher education. An analysis by the Aristotle Foundation found almost all Canadian academic job postings contain a "diversity requirement in the form of a mandatory diversity survey where the applicant is required to divulge various racial and sexual identities".

Alternately, in some instances a position can be explicitly limited to select demographics, such as confined to Black, Indigenous or female applicants. Research funding has succumbed to the standard practice of acknowledging and ascertaining the racial or sexual diversity of applicants. Criticism of these new guidelines pointed out that the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada requires applicants to list identity characteristics of prioritized research assistants.

 

Traditional Canadian guidelines on racial tolerance advocated for the most part, for race to be considered an irrelevance. Anti-racism on the other hand, is based on the premise that any equality of outcome is predicated on a racist system to be remedied by special treatment for groups considered marginalized or "equity-deserving". In the process, needless to say, being straight, white, and intellectually exceptional reflects an outlier, an undeserving racist to be punished in the aggregate.

 

Similar to most institutionalized anti-racism strategies, the University of Saskatchewan's DEI Framework for Action has "equity" as its goal, as opposed to equality. It defines itself as "taking the range of human attributes and qualities into account and providing each individual with what they need to be successful". 

Anyone naturally genetically endowed with superior intelligence and the will to maximize their academic credentials is just plain out of luck of they're white, straight and representationally mainstream.

 

Aristotle Foundation

"A growing number of high-profile cases suggest that diversity workshops and their supporting materials regularly promote questionable claims—particularly about the overarching, malicious character of the majority population."

"Similarly, hostility toward those who challenge DEI claims is part of the pattern."

"In Canada, students who challenge claims have been punished or expelled; employees have been suspended."

"One whistleblower who leaked DEI training session material maligning the majority population lost his employment."

Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy

"Anti-Palestinian Racism" at York University, Hotbed of Anti-Israel Racism

"[York University pledges to take] proactive steps to fight racial inequity [which cannot be done unless administrators actively commit to isolate and destroy the Zionist] settler colonial project."

"The struggle for Palestinian self-determination will support the liberation of all humans and non-humans [sic] from colonial oppression." 

"It is the systematic and structural denial of the Palestinian right to self-determination and national liberation, and the collective existence of the Palestinian people, while upholding Zionism."

"Zionism is a settler colonial project and ethno-religious ideology in service of a system of Western imperialism that upholds global white supremacy."

"Academic freedom allows us to comment and critique on historically and philosophically relevant topics in context and allows for the pursuit of truth and fulfillment of university objectives."

"We propose that the department advocate for a more transparent and effective University process for handling complaints and violations of the code of conduct, including reparatory justice and/or grounds for suspension or removal for individuals who violate the code of conduct and community safety standards."

Department of Politics Palestine Solidarity Committee document

Students at York University drop a banner calling for a walk out in solidarity with Gazans. Credit: Palestine Solidarity Collective/Instagram

"[York University is becoming a landscape of] surveillance, fear, intimidation and repression [for anyone advocating] Palestinian liberation. [Faculty members] should not be pressured to condemn Hamas."

"More students have expressed or reported feeling that the university has become an unsafe environment."

"[Any defence of Israel must be viewed as] anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, and anti-Arab."

York University faculty committee, Department of Politics

York University in Toronto has devoted itself to the loving care of the sensibilities and sensitivities of their Palestinian students, amidst a larger concern at the university over the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who have attempted mightily over the last 70 years and more to  uproot the presence of Jews and the State of Israel, labelling them as 'occupiers' on their own historical, well- documented ancestral land which the Arab migrants from Syria, Jordan and Egypt, purloining the ancient Roman-occupation-era designation of 'Palestine' -- as a province of Jews for administrative purposes -- for their very own, extend that 'ownership' to the land Israel sits on, as well.

These are the Palestinians who declare themselves descendant of history's Philistines and in the sense that the word is used today philosophically , they certainly are, in character if not in historical context. The fairly recent trend in immigration, refugee acceptance and illegal migration that has gifted Canada with a large Arab/Muslim population has resulted in the Palestinian propaganda machine working diligently to defame Israel and frame Canadian Jews as undesirables. And whereas Jews in Canada have never undertaken a campaign to discredit and isolate that Arab/Muslim population, the latter has been labouring overtime to succeed in doing just that to the much smaller Jewish-Canadian population.

Antisemitism and the pejoratives usually applied to Jews anywhere are not new, but the rigour with which this campaign of several years' standing -- accelerated after the Hamas terrorist incursion into Israel with its horrendous savagery imposed upon civilians and still-ongoing retention as hostages of Israeli children, women and the elderly -- speaks volumes of the group-characteristics of a violent people who cloak themselves in the guise of victims of Israeli/Jewish 'genocide'.

The large and growing presence of this discordant blight upon Canada's traditional intake of immigrants from around the world has drawn out the latent antisemitism in Canadian society to a formidable degree causing Canadian Jews to feel uprooted psychologically yet again by the preponderance of prejudice and racial/religious/ethnic/cultural winds of suspicion and hate they see being played out in street demonstrations, extolling the 'human rights' of Palestinian terrorists to 'resist' an 'occupation' that resulted from Palestinian violence against Jews.

Verbal contortions and the invention of 'truths' that re-write history and reality are grasped gratefully by those comfortable with their own brand of antisemitism, layered over with the sanctimony of a sudden love affair for Palestinians, felt to be justified by their aggressive historical and cultural inaccuracies from a hymnal not that different from the one conventional/traditional antisemites sing from. The convenience of citing Critical Race Theory, and the comfort of snuggling into Diversity, Equality and Inclusion gives additional impetus to the smug who declare themselves defenders of human rights while denying Israel's right of existence.

A "recommendations report" dated April 5 from the political committee devoted to the defense of Palestinians, within the Department of Politics at York University proposed Israel cannot be defended since its very existence is "anti-Palestinian", "Islamophobic" and "anti-Arab". Henceforth they declared, any acknowledgement of the very existence of Israel represents evidence of "anti-Palestinian racism". It is not, needless to say, racist to declare the existence of Israel forbidden.The Department of Politics Palestine Solidarity Committee issued its 9-page document with great self-congratulation.

While it is the beleaguered Jewish students suffering isolation, threats and fear of violence, this committee engages in the kind of contorted hyperbole that conflates fear and  isolation not to the threatened Jewish students but to the Palestinian students who are the source of the threats against their Jewish student counterparts. The committee approved a faculty mandate a month following the Hamas assault on southern Israel to draft "a departmental definition of anti-Palestinian racism". 

As to the sacred principles of academic freedom and free speech, it is made abundantly clear that anyone supporting Israel, working with Israeli academics or having any connection however slight to Israel, is not similarly entitled to free speech. The purpose of the document is to advocate "severing ties with Zionist departments and institutions", and to impose a complete commercial boycott on anything that can be construed as having a link to Israel. Even recommending the boycott of Aroma and Starbucks coffee companies, both headquartered in the US, with no Israeli ownership or management.

The document makes it clear to the Department of Politics at York University that York's crisis of "anti-Palestinian racism" cannot be fought without the issuance of a departmental statement endorsing a boycott of Israel in support of "the struggle for Palestinian liberation".

 

The document by a York University Department of Politics committee makes it clear that the principles of “academic freedom” and “free speech” should not apply to anybody supportive of Israel or having any peripheral connection to Israel whatsoever. Photo by Tyler Anderson/National Post