"Freedom of speech is not an unlimited right. It carries corresponding responsibilities toward others in the university community, and conduct that interferes with the ability of others to speak or participate in lawful university activities falls outside its protection."

"First, the misconception that protest rights exist without corresponding responsibilities. The frequent narrative is that protestors are sanctioned because they are protesting not because of their conduct. Nothing could be further from the truth. The protected right is peaceful protest, not violence or the threat of violence, both of which must be met with zero tolerance."

"Second is the misconception that discriminatory, intimidating and harassing words and conduct are protected. The University has both a legal and institutional responsibility to protect students, faculty and staff from intimidation, discrimination and harassment."

External Metropolitan University review 

 

"Promoting dialogue is not neutral."

"As Zionism continues to collapse, 'dialogue' initiatives have already become an intentional strategy of pro-Israel activists who are seeking to normalize Israel during an unprecedented period of its belatedly recognized abnormality as a modern settler colonial -- and thus, genocidal state".

Professor Joshua Sealy-Harrington, Windsor law school 

Students make their way around the renamed Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), formerly known as Ryerson University in Toronto. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette 

 

Critical Race Theory/DEI informs Professor Sealy-Harrington of the jaundiced view he must take, as a 'progressive', enlightened liberal of the very existence of the State of Israel. That Jews are indigenous to the Middle East, a history that predates the emergence of Islam by thousands of years, and that Israel is Judea reborn on its ancestral land, is an easily-dismissed reality that historical records attest to. Reality and history are both inconveniences in the analytical conclusions of Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, sturdily embraced throughout the academic world and certainly in Canadian universities.

 

And it is faculty of the ilk of Professor Sealy-Harrington whose unreconstructed views of Jews and their proper place in the world who teach their politicized view of history and reality, corrupted into a twisted version that fits their visceral, instinctual antisemitic pathology to university students in the ongoing process of producing other academics among the greater university-educated population who will carry on their hateful fiction denigrating the Jewish state and by extension diaspora Jews with the contempt thought fitting to their appearance within polite society.

 

The outward manifestation of this concerted verbal-political pogrom, building a consensus of agreement among the willing and those previously inducted into the Jew-hate pathology is open condemnation and isolation of Jewish students at Canadian universities, alongside their stricken Jewish professors whose ability to defend themselves against the larger numbers of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students and faculty whom the past several decades has seen swelling their presence through open invitation of Canada's Liberal-led governments from immigrants, refugees and migrants emanating from traditional Jew-hating cultures in North Africa and the Middle East.

reported classroom statements that minimize the Holocaust, describe academic power as rooted in “Jewish supremacism”, and imply that violence against Jewish children is acceptable if their parents are perceived to support Israel

the use of red inverted triangles, a symbol used to mark targets, posted over photos of Jewish student leaders

spoiled milk thrown at Jewish students and spitting directed at others

a lecturer who no longer wears a Star of David necklace for fear of physical assault

Shabbat dinners that now require security risk assessments

redefining Zionism “exclusively through pejorative or demonizing frameworks that leave little room for the perspectives of Jews for whom Zionism forms part of their identity”

Michael Geist 

TMU RCC 2024Feb by Aknell4, via Wikimedia Commons

  

Toronto Metropolitan University, faced with criticism that it is one of the worst Canadian universities that tolerates and oversees a disruptive, antisemitic atmosphere that focuses on slandering Israel and permits an ongoing harassment and persecution campaign led by Students for Justice in Palestine that targets Jewish students, with university staff on board with the campaign that makes teaching life for Jewish faculty one of heads-down and in both cases imposing an atmosphere of enforced withdrawal from many aspects of university life, commissioned an external review.

 

That review, purportedly to inform the university administration just where, when and how they failed to rise to the occasion of ensuring that all of its faculty, staff and student body felt equally respected, their dignity upheld, the atmosphere in which they worked and studied would be conducive to their learning experience that would lead to a future within the greater company of the Canadian identity. Former Justice Mary Lou Benotto and Margot Finley were commissioned to examine the manner of the university's management of an infamously increasing campus conflict.

 

That conflict encompasses the conflicting presence of politically-directed antagonists that drew Jewish students and faculty in conflict with Palestinians over the legitimacy of Israel and the respected place of Canadian Jews in the world of academia where leftist-progressivism has changed the character of universities from institutions of higher learning with its focus on exposure to the nuances of history, culture, traditions and experience in science, the humanities, Canada's legal system, and the arts. These verities of exposure to a sound education were subverted to political leftism superimposed over all else.

 

To the extent that Jewish faculty and staff withdrawing from campus life, leery of presenting themselves publicly as Jewish, to speak in public about Israel or growing antisemitism impacting their profession and their lives. Of students feeling the discomfort of being singled out because of their inheritance as examples of colonial Zionist oppressors. The effect of which was to make these students want to make themselves invisible to the larger critical mass of the student body and the professoriate that often singled them out for inappropriate comments during classes. 

 

On receipt of the review, the university has decided to strike a committee to study the report. None of what is contained in the report can conceivably be regarded as new information never before seen or heard about by an aware administration. Sufficiently aware that it recognized a need to do something, and that something at first hand was to commission the very review that validated all the wrongs already known of. The university that found it quite appropriate to slough off criticism by claiming the atmosphere that strictured Jewish staff and students was not of its making, must now face the reality that its lack of action made it possible. 

 

TMU students join pro-Palestine demonstrations in Toronto for International Day of Action

(SAMMY KOGAN/THE EYEOPENER)

 

"The Benotto report does not declare that TMU has constructively dismissed anyone. That was not its mandate. But that is precisely why TMU's lawyers should be reading it very carefully. The report supplies evidence. Testimony. Institutional admissions. And it supplies something employers rarely receive before litigation begins: a warning."

"A constructive dismissal lawsuit would ultimately require a court to decide whether the circumstances amounted to a fundamental breach of the employment relationship."

"There is a profound difference between an employee saying 'I disagree with what is happening here' and an employee saying, 'I can no longer safely identify who I am or be safe in this environment'."

"The first is workplace disagreement. The second is a workplace crisis."

Howard Levitt, Ontario labour lawyer, Levitt LLP 

Students were injured when an off-campus gathering organized by a Jewish group at Toronto Metropolitan University was broken into by anti-Israel protesters on Nov. 5, 2025. Photo by Ernest Doroszuk / Postmedia/File

 

"I will tell anyone, with great sorrow, anyone in the Jewish community, not to have their children apply to TMU. Can you imagine that? I love this university and I've worked here for [over a decade]."

"It's given me my entire professional life. Now I tell friends not to let their children go here because they'll be harassed and mistreated and bullied and potentially assaulted."

"And I say Send them to McGill, or Western, or U of T, or to the U.S. or somewhere else'. They are all better."

Unnamed tenured Toronto Metropolitan University professor  

If, as the anonymous and obviously disturbed professor states, those other Canadian universities where attendance for Jewish students is preferential to that of the former Ryerson Collegiate Institute -- now Toronto Metropolitan University -- that improvement would be strictly marginal. The truth is all academic institutions in Canada, to greater or lesser degree have been  hijacked by Critical Race Theoried-DEI constructs of social progressivism. They all host student bodies and faculty hostile to Israel and dismissive of Jewish identity that equates with Zionism. Selecting any one of them is holding to a low standard of approval. 

"Some administrators and University leaders expressed concern that certain faculty members may be encouraging, incentivizing, or intensifying student activism in ways they viewed as inappropriate or inconsistent with professional boundaries."

"[This review] was also given multiple examples of statements reportedly made in classrooms, faculty-led seminars and educational spaces that many Jewish participants experienced as antisemitic, dehumanizing, or normalizing hostility toward Jewish people."

"Administrators, some faculty, Jewish student and faculty representatives, and event organizers frequently described conduct they experienced as crossing from protest into intimidation, harassment, or attempts to silence participation."

"Interviewees in this group pointed to repeated event disruptions, aggressive confrontations, social media targeting, doxxing, hostile language, and personal accusations directed at identifiable individuals."

TMU Report 

Former Ontario Appeal Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto has recently released her report on the simmering antisemitism that has turned Toronto Metropolitan University into a hellhole for Jewish students and faculty members. The report lists such incidents taking place as that of Jewish students being spat on, sour milk thrown at them; intimidation, harassment, threats. Leaving them living in trepidation over attending the university in pursuing their academic education within the confines of a university failing to come to grips with antisemitism's scourge of the civil social contract. 

 

Some of the statements sufficiently notable to be included in the Benotto review included denial of or minimizing the Holocaust (that Adolf Hitler was guilty of 'discrimination', not conducting a genocide). Statements such as "academic power is rooted in Jewish supremacism" which needs to be "rooted out of academia", as well as holding discussions relating to "how much violence we are willing to engage in". 

 

The inmates that have contrived control of the asylum just happen to be students and faculty members of Palestinian Arab, Muslim origin, bolstered by a large contingent of pro-Palestinian participants whose intrinsic hatred of Jews has given them a common denominator of identification of the world's conflicts summed up by volunteering Israel and diaspora Jews living in the world community as the cause and focus of world strife. Yet the report makes note that these same vectors of rampant antisemitism expressed fear, exclusion and marginalization; so very typical of the permanent self-imposed state of victimization of Palestinians.

On Feb. 23, an unidentified person threw an open carton of past-dated milk at a group of Jews and Israelis participating in a student tabling event at Toronto Metropolitan University for Students Supporting Israel in partnership with StandWithUs Canada. Photo by Handout/Ethan

 

"Several described grief and trauma connected to events in Gaza, frustration with institutional neutrality, and concern that criticism of Israel was too readily conflated with antisemitism", notes the report. This is the fixed mindset of Palestinians with their visceral hatred that is so uniquely communicated like the disease it is, to others receptive of the message of Jew-as-agent of evil. Wherever Palestinians settle in through their scattering out of the Territories, they simmer and fester and violently lash out in aggravated frustration over their lot as the world's permanent victims. This is the reason that no country in the Middle East allows them space. But the West does, out of pity for their plaintive mewlings.

 

At the university, that pattern played itself out, with senior university administrators followed, filmed, verbally abused, and violently assaulted. "Protesters repeatedly followed the University President to the parking garage and surrounded his vehicle and then posted a video of the event with disparaging remarks", noted the report. Senior university administrators, including the president vice-provost and chief financial officers were featured in posters placed around the university campus along with the phrase: "Wanted for Genocide".

 

The Benotto review was initially an investigation into several incidents -- where in September of 2025 Students for Justice in Palestine disrupted a Democracy Forum event featuring AI Minister Evan Solomon, shouting "war criminal" and "baby killer", causing the event's cancellation. It is the very Liberal government of which Solomon is a Minister that contrived their entry as immigrants, refugees and migrants into Canada. Two months later the same group pushed and shoved into an off-campus meeting of a Students Supporting Israel speaking event featuring an IDF serviceman, forcing that meeting also to be cancelled. 

 

The report's introduction notes "The Review is based on the foundational principle that universities are meant to foster inquiry, debate, and democratic engagement". The report made it clear that those behind the pro-Palestinian/anti-Jewish protests were so vehemently incensed with the  university, with the presence of Jews in any capacity, that no debate and discussion could ever be possible. 

 

"TMU effectively permitted a 'heckler's veto' whereby the threat of disruption determines who is permitted to speak." The review morphed into "a broader institutional issue: a deeply polarized campus environment shaped by the aftermath of October 7, 2023, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Review concludes that the two incidents under review were symptoms of a deteriorating campus climate that, absent decisive institutional action are likely to recur". The university, pointed out former Justice Mary Lou Benotto, has the tools required within its Code of Conduct. The solution lies in a "consistent and principled" enforcement.

 

In response to a recent report, Toronto Metropolitan University president Mohamed Lachemi announced the launch of a task force on campus expression, antisemitism and community safety. (Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press)

"Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea."

"These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America [as usual], but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful."

U.S. President Donald J. Trump 

Chinese President Xi Jinping made a rare visit to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong Un, where the two moved closer to improving economic ties despite North Korea strengthening its relationship with Russia. Still from video, CBC News

 

Mr. Trump's great good friend saw to it that Pyongyang test-fired a ballistic missile recently over the Sea of Japan, warning it was prepared to respond to the annual joint military exercises shared by the United States and South Korea as practise runs in preparation for a potentially possible attack by North Korea on the South. All of the region has been made nervously expectant by the obvious militancy of Kim Jong Un, leading North Korea on a military and nuclear arms trajectory that traditional U.S. allies like South Korea, the Philippines, Japan and others view as threatening, along with that of Beijing, North Korea's 'big brother'.

 

There is also no secret about an alliance between Russia, North Korea, China and Iran. Much less the fact that Russia's war on Ukraine has been aided by the presence of North Korean troops. All four of those countries are anything but friends of the Democratic West. And while the U.S. military views Russia, North Korea and China as volatile military enemies, and is at war, directed by their president, with Iran, this tangled version of friends and allies versus military belligerents and adversaries of all that the West values is as puzzling as it is nonsensical.

 

A museum in North Korea honors soldiers who have fought for Russia

 

 The U.S. president wrote on his Truth Social site that he had ordered the Pentagon to scale back "inappropriate and hostile" military drills with South Korea, mere hours prior to the drills taking place. The exercises, according to South Korean officials, proceeded as planned. South Korea officials, in fact, expressed the hope that the personal relationship Mr. Trump speaks of with the South's political nemesis could yield a resumption of talks, and with that, some forward movement in reconciliation between the two Koreas.

 

While U.S. allies in East Asia cringe over displays of weapons' technical capabilities forever moving forward and displayed with militant pride by Pyongyang, along with the hermit nation's growing alignment with Vladimir Putin's territorially aggressive agenda, not to mention North Korea's historical mentorship by China, the annual drills offered a notional reassurance of having the support of the United States should the situation of military threats continue to accelerate.

 

"I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, 'No thanks!'." That disinclination to become embroiled in a conflict outside their own internal interest zone appears to have sealed and delivered a verdict that Mr. Trump has applied elsewhere, when allies have failed to join America's spontaneous military decisions with no outreach before conflict has been launched with the heads of governments later expected to lend themselves to the American enterprise of war.

 

U.S. army soldiers are seen during joint military exercises with South Korea in Yeoncheon, South Korea, in March 2025. (Ahn Young-joon/The Associated Press)

 

The normal 11-day Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, designed to prepare the region for a potential war with North Korea, proceeded, though to "substantially reduced" impetus. That, reflecting the fact that when Mr. Trump decided he no longer wished the United States under his rule to continue with the drills, it was too late to cancel them, but Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was ordered to reduce them.

 

Seoul's presidential office assured the press that it remained in "close coordination" over the exercises with Washington, expressing the "hopes that the friendly relationship between the leaders of the United States and North Korea will lead to meaningful dialogue". That's called diplomacy. Or looking on the bright side of things as expressed by Monty Python, in a skit somewhat resembling his tongue-in-cheek, sardonic episodes of portraying human lunacy.

 

There are some 28,500 American troops stationed in South Korea as a show of support for the country's defences since the 1950-53 armistice that ended the Korean War. Tellingly, American commitments to security in East Asia now appear fairly wobbly given U.S. President Trump's repeated criticism of what was once universally thought of as rock-solid alliances.

 

South Korean soldiers watching a joint live-fire exercise with the U.S. Army in Pocheon, South Korea, last year.   SeongJoon Cho / Bloomberg via Getty Images file

 

"Let’s be clear about the eight men for whom the University of Alberta maintains named endowments. They fought for the Waffen-SS, an armed wing of the Nazi Party which was declared a criminal organization at the Nuremberg trials because of its role in war crimes. Their division was implicated in brutal wartime massacres of civilians, including one atrocity in which Polish women and children were locked inside buildings and burned alive."

"It should publish a complete list of all endowments honouring a Waffen-SS member, together with a timeline for resolving them. It should pursue renaming, seek legal variations where necessary, and return to court if required. The university must make clear that those who fought in service of the Nazis have no place of honour at a Canadian university."

Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, Bernie Farber, Edmonton Journal 

Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler inspects volunteers of the Ukrainian Waffen SS division during the Second World War. Library and Archives Canada is now reviewing whether to release the names of alleged Nazi war criminals who fled to Canada after the war. (File photo)

 

 The Waffen SS Galicia comprised of Ukrainian volunteers and overseen by Nazi SS groups were implicated in WWII war crimes; Jewish groups as well as the Polish government denounced the Ukrainian volunteer group for its part in murdering civilians, as well as for massacres it was involved with. The Nazis made use of the division in Slovakia to crush a national uprising; another condemnation for war crimes committed by the group. 

 

In the wake of receiving a legal permission to proceed with dissolving a research trust in the name of Ukrainian SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka who received accolades in Parliament during a visit to Canada by Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2023 when a standing ovation honoured the misconception that he was a war hero by Western standards by fighting against the Soviet occupation of Ukraine, at a time when Russia was viewed as an ally alongside the U.K., U.S. and Canada, the University of Alberta announced it would go no further in expunging Ukraine-centred research funding.

 

Yaroslav Hunka (giving a thumbs up) during applause in the Canadian Parliament, September 22, 2023. Photo: YouTube/CBC News: The National

 

The university planned to retain eight other endowments involved with Waffen-SS soldiers, claiming it would be too costly in time and legal fees to seek court approval for termination of the endowments. Researchers with the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. a Toronto-based Holocaust research organization, totaled a list of 12 endowments at the University of Alberta with a value to the university of $2.2 million in funding, linked to Nazi-allied individuals during WWII in Ukraine. 

 

"This is dirty money and it's unconscionable they are continuing with this. It's beyond despicable", 84-year-old Andy Reti, a child survivor of the Holocaust stated in condemnation of the university's position. An alternative, he felt reasonable was that the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the university should donate the endowment funding of he Waffen-SS to the Salvation Army so that something positive could result from the untenably tainted funds. 

 

Senior director at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jaime Kierzner-Roberts, stated that her group had called on a number of occasions for the university to divest all of the Nazi-linked endowments, including one named for Peter Savaryn, another SS-Waffen member, who had in time become chancellor of the university. In 2023, however, the office of the Governor General expressed its deep regret for having awarded the Order of Canada to Savaryn in 1987. In the event, at revelations of his wartime activities and connections, in consequence of which the Order was revoked. 

 

In its remediation defence, the University of Alberta revealed its intention to spend $100,000 to "deepen scholarship and education about the Galicia Division and other complex and difficult aspects of 20th-century history". None of which can expunge the reality that the university had accepted funds from the estate of Volodymyr Kubijovyc, a Nazi collaborator who had helped create the Waffen-SS Galicia, and was as well an advocate for ethnic cleansing to create an independent Ukraine without the presence of Jews or Poles.

 

Parade of recruits of the Waffen SS “Galicia” Division in Lviv. In the foreground is the head of the Military Administration, Col. Bisanz. July 18, 1943. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

 

Members of the Waffen SS Galicia are regarded as heroes -- who had fought against Soviet forces -- among nationalist Ukrainian Canadians. In summer day camps for Ukrainian children in Canada, this kind of folkhero history is taught to the campers, where they can also view commemorative statuary celebrating Waffen-SS WWII members for their courageous heroism in confronting and killing Red Army servicemen. Criticism of these heroes, they aver, represents Russian misinformation.

 

Critics of the volunteer SS battalion point out that in volunteering themselves to fight with the Nazis, Ukrainians were essentially freeing  up German soldiers to enable them to be redirected to fighting against the British, Canadian,and American soldiers, at that time advancing toward Berlin. Following the end of the war, the International Military Tribunal declared the SS a criminal organization, with the inclusion of Waffen-SS units. 

 

Ukrainians dressed in SS Galicia Division uniforms march past graves during a re-burial ceremony at the SS Galicia Division cemetery near the village of Chervone, Ukraine, in 2013. Photo by Efrem Lukatsky/AP/File

  

"It's been 21 years since I attended the first 'Israeli Apartheid Week' at the University of Toronto. Since then, I have been on the front lines witnessing countless demonstrations, anti-Israel speakers and even the now infamous 'boycott, divestment and sanctions' campaigns promulgating hate against the Jewish state and Jewish students. The situation has only gotten worse for our children."

"Who would have thought that the Palestinian flag would make an acceptable appearance at some graduation ceremonies this past spring?"

"The consequences of these sobering statistics are transforming how Jewish students live and learn as they and their parents worry for their safety, given the report's finding that 22 percent have experienced some sort of physical violence."

Avi Abraham Benlolo, CEO, The Abraham Global Peace Initiative 

Arab Israelis make up: 22% of Israel's population   David Jacobs, X

 

Jewish-Canadian students are preparing to return to their university studies for the 2026 school year. The past three years, since October 7, 2023, academic attendance has taught Jewish students, all the way from elementary school, up to high school and post-secondary institutions that they are very special indeed. They are the only minority group in Canada that has been exposed to raw hate, from their teachers, through an altered curriculum, and from their non-Jewish classmates. School trustees rather than focus on academic performance and excellence in the role of schools in teaching a new Canadian generation have been involved in identity politics. School administrations wanly reject antisemitism, but not without pairing it with 'Islamophobia'.

 

What no one seems to want to mention is that these waves of torrid hate toward Jews long kept under wraps within the civilized society Canada once prided itself on being, has been unleashed by Palestinian students with support from the larger Canadian Muslim population involved in the slander of Israel and the none-too-subtle harassment of Canada's Jewish population, with an especial focus on the most vulnerable; the children of Canada's Jewish community. A community dwarfed in size by the presence of a much larger Muslim population which over the last decade has grown enormously through immigration, refugee intake and acceptance of illegal migrants. 

 

For three years and counting, Jewish students and Jewish faculty members of universities across Canada have had to cope with campus encampments dedicated to validating, supporting and mounting campaigns addressed to maligning, belittling, isolating the presence of Jews on campus as dread and unforgivable 'Zionists' who support the right of Jews to favour and defend the Jewish homeland of Israel, the Jewish state reborn on its ancient ancestral geographic footprint in the Middle East. 

 

A sign is seen urging the university's pension plan to divest from companies that do business with Israel, at the encampment set up at the University of Toronto in May 2024. Photo by Jesse Kline/National Post

• A professor wrote that we need to kill all Zionists, that she had worked with them and saw how evil they were.
• I was told by a professor, in class, in the middle of the lecture, that Jews belong in Poland and need to go back.
• I faced extreme pressure from other student organizations to release a statement against Zionism in my position as president of the (redacted) student union, and had my name placed on a list circulating on and off campus as a 'known Zionist'.
• Professor assigned us to listen to a podcast that discussed how Zionism was similar to Nazism, which was  unrelated to the course.
• I was harassed online ... She went as far as spamming my art page for five days straight, sending me radical reels, calling my elderly family 'killers'.
• Residents at my on-campus residence started rumours about me that I am a child killer, white supremacist, racist, and Zionist, all because these people found out that I was Jewish.
• Jews were described as greedy for money in a lecture.
• In a course that had nothing to do with Israel, my professor spent three weeks talking about Gaza and the creation of the State of Israel. He never mentioned the Holocaust as a precursor to its founding, repeatedly calling the state a 'Zionist political project'.
• When discussing characters in a book, my professor described one character by saying that 'based on his last name, he is clearly Jewish and probably has a hooked nose'.
• Working in my labs, I have had people refuse to work with me due to my Jewish identity and purposely try to mess up my data.
• Several faculty members in my program minimized the Holocaust or used it to condemn the Israeli response immediately after October 7.
• Shortly after October 7, I told my PhD supervisor that I did not feel safe on campus and she replied: 'Well, you should see the other side'.
• A member of my anti-racism research lab at the university minimized the impact of the Holocaust while the other lab members remained silent. For example, she said: 'The Holocaust was not the first time gas chambers were used. They were first used against Indigenous peoples in Canada.' When I raised this with my research supervisor, now tenured, her reaction was to protect the student responsible. For example, she said: 'What happens in the lab stays in the lab'.

National Post Staff 

"Over the past few weeks, CAUT has become aware of a number of disturbing cases in which university administrations have limited or suppressed debate on controversial issues. Whether it is banning posters or noisy demonstrations, we believe such heavy-handed actions constitute a clear threat to the purpose of post-secondary education."
"Not surprisingly, the failures involve bitterly contentious issues. One is Middle East politics. Last month Carleton University and the University of Ottawa banned a student organization poster for Israeli Apartheid Week because the universities felt it too provocative. The poster, by noted political cartoonist Carlos Latuff, shows a stylized Israeli warplane firing a missile at a child holding a teddy bear and standing on ground emblazoned with the word “Gaza.” York University has gone even farther, invoking a noise policy to justify handing club suspensions and fines to student organizations that held counter-protests for and against Israeli government policies."
"In invoking the need to be “respectful” and “civil” and to avoid “provo­cation,” too many universities are suppres­sing free speech and freedom of expression. Some universities are even stretching to invoke hu­man rights’ codes to justify suppression when these codes typically address the right to be free from discrimination in employment and in access to services and accommodations and are not meant to silence cam­pus discussion and debate."
"Our institutions must remember the integrity of their central mission, which is so aptly described in the University of Toronto’s statement of institutional purpose: that “within the unique university context, the most crucial of all human rights are the rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom and freedom of research,” and affirms that “these rights are meaningless unless they entail the right to raise deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished beliefs of society at large and of the university itself.”"
"The statement concludes: “It is this human right to radical, critical teaching and research with which the University has a duty above all to be concerned; for there is no one else, no other institution and no other office, in our modern liberal democracy, which is the custodian of this most precious and vulnerable right of the liberated human spirit.” "

The Canadian Association of University Teachers 

 

 

President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, third from right, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Pete Hoekstra, U.S. Ambassador to Canada, listen on the sidelines of the G7 Summit, Monday, June 16, 2025, in Kananaskis, Canada. | Mark Schiefelbein/AP

I'm disappointed that I came to Canada — a Canada that it is very, very difficult to find Canadians who are passionate about the American-Canadian relationship."

You ran a campaign where it was anti-American, elbows up, me too. You know, that was an anti-American campaign. That has continued. That's disappointing.

 “This Canadian government, It is so nice of them to put out a national emergency that the U.S. ambassador is again speaking. Watch out!”

“I’ve got suggestions that I think can get it restarted but it’s not going to be easy.” 

“Here, I’ll just get myself in trouble. I go around the country and people will say, ‘Pete, you just don’t understand why we’re so mad about the 51st state.’ Yeah, you’re right. I don’t.”

“I’m sorry. That does not happen in the United States of America. You do not come into America and start running political ads — government-funded political ads — and expect that there will be no consequences or reaction from the United States of America and the Trump administration.”

“As far as we can tell, it has never happened in America before. And if Canada wants to insert itself and create a new precedent that you’re going to participate in our electoral politics through advertising targeting the president of the United States and his policies … I would suggest that you seriously consider whether that is the best way to try to achieve your objectives in the United States of America.”

"Canadians staying home, that's their business, you know. I don't like it, but if that's what they want to do, it's fine. They want to ban American alcohol. That's fine."

"There are reasons why the president and some of his team referred to Canada as being mean and nasty to deal with, OK, because of some of those steps."

U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra  

The U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra speaks during an event at the Halifax Chamber of Commerce in Halifax on Sept. 18. (Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press)

 

"I don’t do ‘diplomatic speak’ very well. I think when they listen to what I have to say, they know exactly what my viewpoint is. And they may disagree with it, but at least they understand where I’m coming from and where the United States of America is coming from.”

"It’s not about me, OK. Donald Trump did not tell me to go to Canada and become liked. Matter of fact, I think he would have said ‘If you go to Canada and you’re liked, it probably means that you’re not doing your job.’"

"I’m not running a campaign here for Pete Hoekstra. And I wouldn’t even try to, because the media made up their mind long before I got here about what they were going to say about a Trump ambassador to Canada." 

"That’s fine. You’re a sovereign country. Your defense relationship and stance with the United States, that is a decision you make."

"We’re going to fix the energy issue for the United States of America.We’re open to doing it together. Canada has to decide whether that’s what they want."

U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra  

U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra walks to a Fourth of July party at Lornado, the residence of the ambassador from the United States, in Ottawa, on July 4, 2025. | Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP

 

In his relentless campaign to convince Canadians that the trade impasse between Canada and the United States and the ongoing threats of tariff punishments meted out by an irascible American president, are really deserving of Canadian appreciation for the position of the United States in righting a 'wrong' long done the economic behemoth by other countries' penchant for traditionally depending on the good nature of Americans to continue milking them while failing to adequately compensate America for dependence on its singular power to keep the world safe, and being content with their trade agreements that invariably it is charged by Mr. Trump, cheat the U.S. out of its due with huge trade imbalances, Pete Hoekstra has made one charged statement too many for Canadians to digest.

 

Just the contratemps over the Gordie Howe International Bridge alone was enough to make Canadians howl with fury with the formal announcement from Mr. Hoekstra's statement:  "Today we welcome the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge to traffic between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, adding new capacity to one of the busiest and most economically significant border crossings between the United States and Canada. President Trump made the opening possible and has consistently prioritized a safer, more secure, and more prosperous North America."

 

In fact, Donald J. Trump refused to allow the bridge to open until Canada succumbed to his demands: "The original Deal on the Bridge, which was terribly negotiated by a previous Administration, no longer stands. We changed the terms of the Deal so that the United States of America now gets 50% of the Profit." The original agreement was between Michigan and Canada, that the total cost of the Bridge was to be paid by Canada, with tolls thereafter going to pay off Canada's debt, after which any toll profit would be shared 50% with Michigan, as well as offering the state half-ownership of the bridge.

 

The $6.4 billion Canada paid for the bridge construction made no impression on Mr. Trump, claiming that Canada 'owed' the U.S. profits realized from tolls. Only when Canada agreed to the extortionist demands made by Mr. Trump would he permit the bridge to be opened. So much for the magnanimity of performance in making 'the opening possible', mentioned in the Ambassadorial report. As for a 'more prosperous North America', that should be rectified to a more prosperous America; Canada and Mexico, part of the continent of North America are being beggared by Mr. Trump's unappeasable appetite for tariffs. 

 

 

Top: They wore red and plaid, they carried signs and flags, they chanted “elbows up”. Hundreds gathered in Nathan Phillips Square to protest President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about Canada becoming the 51st state at Toronto City Hall in Toronto. March 22, 2025. Bottom: A sign is placed in front of the American whiskey section at a B.C. Liquor Store before top selling American made products are to be removed from shelves as a demonstration for media in Vancouver, B.C., Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025. | Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images; Ethan Cairns/The Canadian Press via AP

 

Little wonder than that over 120,000 Canadians signed a petition of removal for U.S. Ambassador Peter Hoekstra, whose insulting, demeaning, patronizing and controlling messaging has managed to offend all of Canada's provincial premiers and the Canadian public. Leading many Canadians who would normally vacation in the United States, to cancel any such plans for the foreseeable future. Most premiers' moves to remove U.S. alcohol from provincial liquor shops had the support of the greater public, while infuriating the Trump administration. The whopping tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, softwood and vehicles have led to the loss of tens of thousands of Canadian manufacturing jobs.

 

Mr. Hoekstra's volatile tenure has brought to Canada first-hand the implacable volatility of the American president in in-your-face entitlements amidst Canada put-downs, top of which is the occasional reference to Canada as the 51st U.S. state. Little wonder that the petition  accuses Mr. Hoekstra of normalizing "the Trump administration's threats to annex Canada as the 51st state". This is an effort led by ordinary Canadians, calling for Pete Hoekstra to be declared persona non grata. Once the petition has  been closed to further signatures by November, the document is set to be introduced to the House of Commons for a Parliamentary vote. 

 

The proposed agreement surrounding the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge connecting Windsor, Ont., to Detroit, was released amid escalated tariff threats by U.S. President Donald Trump. Still from video, CBC News

 

"The popular view of the Nakba presented by the Canadian Human Rights Museum falls short of the facts regarding events in Palestine following the U.N. partition vote of 1947."

"[Palestinian displacement was partly the result of] weak leadership and military unpreparedness [of the Arab nations who were at war with the newly founded nation of Israel]." 

"[Arabized Jewish refugees who fled conflict in the 1940s were welcomed in Israel and assimilated, while Arab refugees were treated by Arab countries where they lived in refugee camps as] symbols of the heartlessness and murderous intent of the Jews."

"Jewish presence [in Iraq as example] was virtually extinguished in just a few years. Those who fled to Israel were eventually absorbed, given Israeli citizenship, and began to play important parts in Israeli life."

"There was neither desire nor expectation that they would return to Iraq, unlike the desires and expectations of the Palestine Arab refugees in 1948."

David Bercuson and Logan Jaspers, Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy  

Aristotle Foundation report

 

Authors David Bercuson and Logan Jaspers produced a study for the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, beginning with a detailed history of the causes and effects of the Israeli-Arab war of 1948 when the nascent Jewish state was attacked by the combined militaries of its Middle East neighbours, with the intention of destroying the state before it was entrenched, on the basis that land once consecrated to Islam could not host or revert to any other religious communities. Islam, on the other hand, expunged the ancient ancestral indigeneity of Jews in lands once their own long before Islam came into being.

 

With the re-creation of the State of Israel in 1948, hundreds of thousands of both Jews and Arabs were forced from their homes; in the case of Jews, living in Arab and Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East there was forcible exile, and expropriation of properties from lands Jews had lived in for millennia. The Arabs who called themselves Palestinians came mostly from Transjordan and Egypt in the last century seeking economic opportunities in the area that hosted Jewish, Christian and Muslim populations whose total numbers were relatively sparse. When the UN in 1947 wrestled with the concept of Partition apportioning a major share of the territory to Jordan, then dividing the 1/3 that was left for Jews and for Arabs, the Jewish Committee accepted, the Arabs did not.

 

The Aristotle Foundation report focuses on the detailed history, commissioned after the Human Rights museum based in Winnipeg had faced a storm of controversy over its decision to host and display an exhibit focused on the displacement of Arab Palestinians with the declaration of Israeli nationhood. That declaration inspired an instant response from Israel's neighbours, a military invasion meant to destroy the possibility that Jews could return to their heritage. Palestinians were promised by the leaders of the invading Arab armies they could return, once Israel's presence was demolished. 

Aristotle Foundation report

 

The Nakba exhibit, according to its critics, focuses on the plight of Palestinian refugees, totally ignoring and  failing to include a similar experience of 800,000 Jews forcibly evacuated from their homes in Muslim and Arab countries, displaced during the conflict. Arab refugees, the authors of the report, point out, were treated by the Arab countries they fled to as "symbols of the heartlessness and murderous intent of the Jews", creating a lasting disparity between how the communities of Arabs and the Jews each view their experience.

 

Years after the initial conflict which failed to dislodge Jews from their homeland, leading the Arab armies to nurse their wounded expectations by declaring their defeat a 'nakba' (catastrophe), 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes seeking refuge in various Arab nations. The reasons were various; some historians claim many fled in response to the violence Arab civilians faced. Jewish paramilitary forces were alleged to have killed some 100 villagers in the Palestinian village of Deir Hassin. There were Palestinian leaders who claimed the outflow of Arabs was an orchestrated project they had planned, as was a later return when Israel was destroyed.

 

The Nakba exhibit is a temporary one at the museum, to run for several months with the use of photos video testimonies, artworks and family heirlooms describing the plight of Palestinian refugees from the 1940s and carrying forward to the present. The fact that around 800,000 Jews were displaced from their homes in Arab and Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa is never mentioned. Nor is the  fact that Palestinian terrorists led by Gaza's Hamas leadership committed a sprawling atrocity against Israeli citizens in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, which led to the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

 

A coalition of civil society groups has called on Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture Marc Miller to retract his statement on viewing the exhibit that it was replete with "errors" that "must be rectified", arguing that any government interference in the museum's exhibits (paid for by the federal government) would be unacceptable. Chief executive Isha Khan of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights argues that the exhibit was designed  explicitly to feature Palestinian experiences, however controversial their personal accounts are.

  

The UN created an orderly plan for the partition of Palestine. The Jewish people accepted it, but the Palestinians refused to even consider the idea.

After 13 months of violence, 700,000 Arabs had fled or been expelled from Mandatory Palestine and Israel, while 800,000 Jews were forced to flee North Africa and the Middle East and settle in Israel between 1948 and the early 1970s.

Prior to 1947 there were major bouts of violence toward Jews in 1920 (the Nebi Musa Riots), 1921 (Jaffa Riots), 1929 (Hebron massacre plus attacks in Safed and Jerusalem), and 1936–1939 and 1945–1946 (Arab Revolts). In the period after 1930, as the Jews became more militarily active, Jews responded to attacks from Arab villages that were perceived as origins of attacks against Jews. Nevertheless, the record of violence after 1920 was overwhelmingly a record of Arab attacks against Jews.

During the civil war both sides carried out unsavoury acts, but Israelis always claimed a military reason for the removal of populations, either to bolster communication lines or stop regular attacks being launched from Arab population centres.

Jewish authorities actively encouraged Arab populations to remain in the new State of Israel but did not try to keep Arabs from fleeing if they so chose.

Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy 

 

People gathered outside the Canadian Museum for Human Rights on June 26 to protest the Nakba exhibit. (Rudi Pawlychyn/CBC)

 

"What then can we conclude from this brief history?"

"First, that the Arab refugees left for several complicated reasons, including weak leadership and military unpreparedness, but the root cause of their flight was the war itself."

"The Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Human Rights Museum] falls short of the  facts."

David Bercuson and Logan Jaspers, Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy 

"It's hard to imagine why an unelected senator should be travelling anywhere outside of the country on taxpayers' dime, so Gagne billing taxpayers almost $1million to fly around the world is completely unacceptable."

"Prime Minister Mark Carney needs to hold Gagne accountable and make sure senators aren't globe-trotting on the taxpayer credit card." 

Franco Terrazzano, Canadian Taxpayers Federation 

 

"Despite their current prevalence in Canada, research has consistently shown that corporate welfare is largely wasteful and generally fails to achieve its stated goals."

Alex Whalen, director, Atlantic Canada Prosperity Initiative, Fraser Institute

 

"[According to a newly published study by the Fraser Institute, corporate subsidies are unfair to businesses that don't receive them, with research showing] there is little connection between sustained, widespread economic growth or job creation and corporate subsidies."

"[Several studies offer various conclusions around the] wasteful nature [of corporate subsidies, including the incentive for firms to lobby government instead of delivering better services]."

Fraser Institute

Senate Speaker Raymonde Gagné    Courtesy of the Senate of Canada

 

Between 2007 and 2015, according to data, spending on subsidies to Canadian businesses (corporate welfare) increased from $22.2 billion to $25.1 billion; 23.8 percent. That increase rose to 44.2 percent from 2014 to 2019. By 2024 the figure was $87.7 billion, tripling and more, the 2015 figure. "Corporate welfare" is defined by the Fraser Institute as payments from government to private businesses intended to achieve specific objectives that are not payments for goods or services rendered". Rather they are paid with an economic objective; to boost a particular industry or to achieve job growth.

 

When accounting for inflation and population, the study found that spending on subsidies increased in every province and at the federal level between 2015 and 2024. Years that coincide with the ruling governing tenure of the Liberal Party, first under PM Justin Trudeau, no economic wizard he, and followed by the former Governor of the Bank of England, internationally renowned economic wizard, who left the Exchequer in a bit of a ruinous state. 

 

Mr. Carney's recent sovereign wealth fund, the Canada Strong Fund, patterned on the one he installed in Britain and generally viewed as a failure, faces criticism from Conservative thinkers for its role in helping the government of Canada to hand out more "corporate welfare", from a fund that as it happens, operates with government-borrowed money. 

 

 

 

In other areas where government appointees have felt entitled to lavish taxpayer funds on personal vanity travels, Canada's recent-past Governor General Mary Simon led the way on entitlements. From rather too-ample clothing allowances, to out-of-this world costs of on-board travel sumptuous catering and reservations at sky-high pricey hotel accommodations, Mary Simon taught the Canadian public just how grand entitlements were for her.

"Taxpayers caught the governor general billing us thousands on absurdly extravagant and expensive trips that she should never have taken in the first place."

"Taxpayers forced the governor general to cut spending following a scandal that included multiple committee testimonies and reports calling for spending restraint. But the governor general hiked travel costs once she thought taxpayers and members of Parliament weren’t looking."

"Now it’s time for MPs to take responsibility and cut wasteful spending at Rideau Hall."

Franco Terrazzano, CTF federal director 

Now it's Raymonde Gagne's turn; she and her entourage billed taxpayers $875,677 on  14 international trips since May of 2023 when she was appointed speaker of the Senate by former PM Justin Trudeau. Since records fail to include costs of her more recent trips to Chile, Tunisia and the Netherlands, total costs of her international trips will total much higher. 

 

Records for her most recent trip of a "courtesy call" by Senator Gagne to Horii Iwao, state minister for Foreign affairs, Japan, turned out to be a 45 minute visit. Yet her entourage included three fellow senators along with two Parliamentary staff and Madam Gagne's husband. That trip alone was $107,594. "If Gagne wants to make a courtesy call to a Japanese politician, then she should pick up the phone instead of billing taxpayers six figures. In what world is it acceptable for an unelected senator to bill taxpayers thousands of dollars for meals and receptions?" queried Franco Terrazzano.

King Charles III receives Canada's Speaker of the Senate Raymonde Gagné during an audience at Buckingham Palace on March 12, 2025. Photo by Aaron Chown /Getty Images

 

A trip to Spain and the United Kingdom including an audience with King Charles III, cost a total of $105,156; the entourage including three other senators, Gagne's spouse, and two staffers in March of 2025. Senator Gagne and seven others took a trip in 2024 to New Zealand for "business calls" in Rotorus, Christchurch and Wellington, for a total cost of $118,965. Senator Gagne posed for a photograph with the mayor of Rotorus Lakes, a popular tourist destination.

 

Senator Gagne, who speaks of her love of travelling, took in Switzerland, France, the United States, Belgium, Brazil Romania, the Czech Republic and South Africa. She had visited 30 counties and almost every continent.  

"A friend encouraged me to travel and I decided to visit the Galapagos Islands with her. As a biology teacher, I have always been fascinated by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. I had read his book and attended exhibitions on the subject. This trip was an important step for me because I felt the need to keep exploring. I couldn't stay stagnant. It was a pivotal moment, [after the death of her first husband]."

"My current partner also likes to travel, and we have explored India and Japan together. These are countries that are completely different from what we are used to. I cherish those experiences." 

Speaker of the Senate Raymonde Gagne

 

"If senators aren't going to represent anyone but themselves then they need to not represent anyone for a lot less money."

Franco Terrazzano, Canadian Taxpayers Federation 

The Canadian delegation at Rotorua Lakes Council, including HW Tania Tapsell, Mayor. Photo by Office of the Clerk