In the many summers my family spent in Quebec, at the farm owned by my wife’s uncle Morris and his wife Louise, I could see Canada in its best light. Morris, who grew up in the old Jewish ghetto of Le Plateau-Mont-Royal in Montreal, always expressed gratitude to Canada, a country that birthed his own success and provided security his Polish forebears never enjoyed. “Canada,” he would say, almost tearfully, “is a very good country.”
Morris died not too long ago, but I am glad he is not experiencing what is happening now. Of course, Montreal Jews experienced prejudice before: beatings on the streets by local toughs, boycotts of Jewish businesses and quotas at McGill. For much of the first half of the last century, the country’s politics were in large part dominated by the antisemitic three-time prime minister MacKenzie King, one of the most hostile western leaders to Jewish immigration before the Holocaust.
Today sadly all too much now reprises the 1930s, with governments standing by as rioters deface Jewish institutions across the country. Some of this comes from political extremists, but a key driver has been poorly vetted immigrants from countries with very different traditions. In what is the fourth-largest Jewish country (after Israel, the United States and France), 82 per cent of Canadian Jews feel less safe today than before the October 7 pogrom.
The Jews of Canada have been abandoned by the very forces — the Liberal party, the big cities and the universities — which once nurtured them. The Liberals’ tilt away from Israel parallels rising antisemitism within Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s partners in the NDP. The new drift was epitomized by Trudeau’s pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he dared show up on the country’s tarmac. Such an action, he claimed, would show “just who we are as Canadians.”
There’s another word better suited for this: betrayal. We see some of this in the U.S. Democratic party but, for the most part, President Joe Biden and congressional leaders have restrained the anti-Zionist left. Oddly many American Jews expect president-elect Donald Trump to be far tougher on Islamic terrorists, expel foreign students breaking the law and protect besieged Jewish communities. Most Jews may dislike Trump for his crudity and nativistic leanings, but they supported him more than any GOP candidate since 2012, with huge margins among the Orthodox.
Canada’s Jews have also been shifting towards the Conservatives. Former prime minister Stephen Harper has long been well-regarded, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, likely the next prime minister, has been outspoken in his support of both Israel and the security of Canadian Jews. As in the U.S., it’s the left that torments the Jews, not the right.
Canada’s Jews need new allies because they are losing the demographic battle, and inevitably some electoral influence. The Muslim share of the population has more than doubled since 2000 to roughly five per cent in 2021. Meanwhile the Jewish population of roughly 326,000 accounted for under one per cent in 2016. As Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly admitted, citing her own district’s demographics, numbers matter.
Quebec has long sought to lure French-speaking North Africans to make up for a diminishing workforce. Nationally, Canada’s broken immigration system does little to screen migrants, which has led observers to conclude the country is a haven for terrorists, war criminals and other undesirables. Jews in Canada, notes analyst David Mendelson, a Montreal native, are finding out how things can unfold in the multicultural utopia of an increasingly post-Christian Canada.
Read the rest of this piece at National Post.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Can Pac Swire via Flickr under CC 2.0 License
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