Host Gene Valaitis and guest Jon Liedtke discuss the 2025 B’nai Brith report detailing a record 6,800 anti-Semitic incidents in Canada. Liedtke argues this reflects a “failure of will” by the Trudeau government, criticizing the merger of special envoy roles into an advisory council as a “liquidation” of safety.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene: Canada is in the throes of a national crisis of anti-Semitism. It’s all according to B’nai Brith Canada’s Human Rights Report; it’s the annual audit of anti-Semitic incidents. Now this is off the Richter scale. During 2025, B’nai Brith Canada documented 6,800 incidents of anti-Semitism. That is the equivalent to 18.6 on average every single day, and it’s the highest volume recorded in the annual audit since it began back in 1982. Jon Liedtke is a writer with the Kvech and Release podcast and advocates for Jewish groups across Canada. 6,800 incidents, Jon. 18 a day. Now, why do you say this is a failure of will rather than just a lack of resources?
Jon: Well, Gene, we’ve got to be clear about it. 6,800 is not a resource gap. We are drowning in this country in anti-hate task forces, and workshops, and diversity consultants, and land acknowledgments, and how much money is paid to people making six figures to file reports and fix things. This is a failure of will, pure and simple. We have the Criminal Code. We have the Charter. We have bills. What is missing is spines of politicians to use them. When you’re hitting 18 incidents a day, that’s not a glitch in software; it’s a feature of the operating system. This government looked at the math and has decided that enforcing the law against racialized minority community elements is just too politically expensive for their brand, full stop. They’ve got the tools; they don’t have the guts. It’s like they performed a seppuku on themselves.
Gene: Now, you’ve been pretty vocal about the Prime Minister’s move this past February to scrap the standalone special envoy post in favor of this new advisory council. Now, you call it a boardroom write-off, so explain to people here in the Niagara region why merging these two offices feels like a liquidation of Jewish safety.
Jon: This is a classic Canada Corp logic being laid out by the banker CEO. In February, he did exactly what needed to be done when a division of a corp is underperforming: he liquidated the asset to move on. By folding the special envoy of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia—there were two of them—into one generic advisory council that’s what, supposed to enforce the law? That’s called government. He’s effectively just burying the specific crisis that we all know exists in a merger. This is a liquidation of safety. When everyone is responsible for general equality, nobody is responsible for the Jewish kid being harassed in a Niagara classroom or a Jewish family walking down the streets in St. Catharines. He’s diversified the political risk so the Jewish problem doesn’t show up as red ink loss on the balance sheet. This is a shell game.
Gene: You know, your neck of the woods, Windsor, has a deep history of leaders like David Croll and Herb Gray—I remember Herb Gray—men who defined the social contract by walking with the vulnerable. So, with the Liberals losing Windsor West to the Conservatives for the first time in 60 years, has that party officially walked away from that legacy?
Jon: Yeah, I mean, this was the Liberals’ opportunity to reclaim Windsor West. The NDP took it after Herb passed away, but when Brian Masse lost this seat down here by a very few votes to a completely unknown, it showed how upset the people were with the status quo. But yeah, this is personal for me. Herb Gray, one of the longest, if not the longest-serving member of Parliament; David Croll, Mayor of Windsor at the time in World War II when he found out that Jewish men were being told that they couldn’t enlist because they weren’t wanted in the army, in the Canadian Forces, he went and gave up his mayorship, enlisted personally, ensured that he served, went off to war, and then came back and resumed his role as Mayor. These were leaders of not only just the Jewish community in Canada, but the Canadian community. But the Liberal Party has decided that legacy asset is not worth the maintenance cost. They have not lost a seat, they have not lost a region; they have walked away from their souls. The Herb Gray shield has been officially boarded up and put behind some kind of a placard the way that we do with statues in this country.
Gene: You know, we’re seeing new laws like Bill 101 in Ontario that is centralizing boards under CEOs, and Bill 166 auditing university hate policies. Now, you call this an administrative siege. So, are these laws actually protecting students, or is the state just trying to manage its own liability?
Jon: These aren’t safety measures. This is just like when you download an app and you go to read the terms of service. I mean, the bills are one thing: liability management. Centralizing boards under CEOs, auditing policies—it won’t stop any hate. It just gives the state a paper trail to say, “Look, we did something, we followed some procedure”. It’s a paper shield. It’s an administrative siege that’s actually going on, though, against the Jewish community in this country. We have a government that is spending more time managing the optics of the crisis than caring about actually trying to fix it, let alone fixing it. They’ve traded the social contract for a legal disclaimer.
Gene: So what does this mean for the next election, which probably won’t be for three or four years? Is there any coming back for the Liberals, or have they permanently lost the, I guess we could say, the will to be at home for this community?
Jon: In the boardroom, Gene, once you de-list an asset, you don’t just bring it back the next quarter. The Liberal Party has run the numbers and they have decided—they looked at them and said the Jewish community is not necessary to hit their electoral targets. The Conservatives can pick up all the scraps. They swapped moral clarity for opportunity cost. And what does that mean for the next election? I think it means—I’ll pardon myself here—it means that we have entered the “find out” era of things, and I’m sure that you know that’s usually preceded by the “F around” era. This is going to be a roost that comes home for them. Conservatives haven’t just won the community; they’ve moved into the Liberal house HQ in this sense. Once a community realizes they’re being treated as a variable cost that can be cut as an asset underperforming, they don’t just switch their vote; they change their political DNA. This is a bankruptcy that can’t be recovered from, and it’s really truly shameful and it is concerning to say the least.
Gene: You know, a couple of my regulars—for example, the most opinionated woman in Canada, Sue-Ann Levy is on with me every Monday, and Peter Sherman, he’s on sick leave right now, he’s usually with me on Thursday—both she and her wife, and Sherman and his wife, have documented stories of so many Jewish people in Canada who are seriously thinking, or who have seriously thought, of just leaving Canada, period, and either moving back to Israel or moving somewhere else where they feel safer. And you know, when Sue-Ann Levy was in Israel, the people there who live permanently in Israel are very aware of anti-Semitism in Canada, and frankly, they can’t believe what’s going on here. Have you ever thought of that yourself?
Jon: It’s been a thought process that I’ve been having since October the 7th, quite frankly, as to whether or not this is the country that I thought would be a place that would always provide refuge and safety and security. And would the neighbors across the street be the ones to go and squander me and my family away in an attic if things actually came to the absolute worst? And I’ve been having misgivings about how solid and safe I thought that things were in the past. And you know, there’s an organization called Lektolsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma, right now that is trying to brand itself as a refuge for Jewish Canadians to seek, you know, safety in that promised land in the southern United States. It’s a really bad state that Canada is leading the world in anti-Semitism. We have such a small population comparatively—the Jewish population is 1% of the country—yet we’re dealing with this at the highest levels. And I don’t understand how a country with a Charter and the Liberal, the natural governing party of the country for gosh sakes, right, that likes to profess to be all the things for everyone to protect everyone, has just decided to turn their backs on this community. And it’s scary, Gene. It’s sad.
Gene: It is. And I hear the same comment over and over again. You know, we were supposed to never forget; right now is never forget.
Jon: Right now is, yeah. It’s never forget is never again is right now. We’re living through this. In response to the highest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, we in Canada and Jews across the world quite frankly have seen the highest incidence of Jew hate. But what people need to remember is that just while today it is the Jews, tomorrow it can be you. Do you think that your community is safe? Do you think that your community might one day be told by the government that “No, you don’t matter in a special way anymore in terms of your protection or your safety and we’re just going to look the other way, good luck fend for yourselves”? And you know what? If you decide that this country isn’t for you, well then you know, you can pack your bags and get out.
Gene: Nice job this morning, Jon. Appreciate the analysis.
Jon: Thank you so much.
Gene: Okay, there he goes. Jon Liedtke.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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