Jon Liedtke discusses his latest Backbones, Not Microphones: Ottawa Brags of Buying Smoke Detectors While Sanctuaries Burn, with 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis about the Canadian government’s response to rising Canadian antisemitism following a prime ministerial speech. Liedtke condemns a new anti-hate advisory council as public relations theater, explains rising Jew-Hate nationally is out of control, and lambastes recent immigration failures that systemically exacerbated ongoing national issues.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: All right, we love Jon Liedtke because he gives us a unique take on the stories that are unfolding every single day. Good morning, Jon.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Okay, the Prime Minister was in town at a synagogue in Toronto on Monday night to talk about antisemitism. As far as I’m concerned, a little too little and a lot late. You advocate for Jewish organizations in Canada. Last year, B’nai Brith documented 6,800 antisemitic incidents, a 145% increase, equaling more than 18 incidents per day. Now, Stats Canada says that 70% of police-reported religious hate crimes were committed against Jews in Canada, despite Jews making up just 1% of the population. So that is astronomical. I don’t know where the Prime Minister has been. I don’t know where the police in Toronto have been, because that seems to be where it’s happening the most. So, the synagogue was packed last night. There were vivid descriptions of bullet holes and security guards. But you claim it didn’t really focus on key drivers. What are they, and what did he miss?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, they didn’t at all, Gene. I mean, look, you can’t put out a raging fire if you’re legally terrified of uttering the word oxygen, or flat out refusing to use water or fire suppressant. The entire speech was rhetorical cowardice wrapped in excellent linguistic gymnastics. But if you just look at what he did, Carney switched into French just to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, having to change the language to explain that the toxic double standards levied against Israel are, in fact, antisemitic, and that our government under Trudeau adopted this definition years ago. It’s like he was trying to whisper the truth past the Anglo-English speaker partisan ears. But then, when he decided to, you know, go back into things, he refused to draw a hard moral line against the targeting of the Jewish community that has endured since October the 7th, ignoring completely anti-Zionism, not addressing the word itself. These are the core culprits driven by a well-documented triple alliance that we’ve talked about before: the Marxist, fascist, Islamist alliance. But he’s pivoting to frantic defensive qualifications to assure everyone that aggressively criticizing Israel is still totally cool and Canadian—he said that in English. This wasn’t a speech to protect Jewish Canadians. It felt like a banker’s explanatory spreadsheet disguised as moral leadership. It was frustrating, to say the least.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Now, he has launched this new Faith Advisory Council to combat hate. Um now, you’re claiming yeah, okay, but all the wrong people are on it.
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, I mean, if you look at what this council is right now, it is just, quite frankly, unbelievable. It’s pure public relations theater. The Feds looked at independent watchdog bodies, whether it be the antisemitism envoy or the Islamophobia envoy—literal entities funded specifically, designed to stand outside of the glass and shout when power misbehaves. But they just decided those people were too loud, so they dissolved them. But instead of building a better watchdog, they’ve built a mirror: an internal advisory council staffed entirely by backbenchers, chaired by a sitting cabinet minister, and overseen by a senator, a Liberal-affiliated, housed within the PMO orbit. It’s a structural panic room that should have been directed by David Fincher, starring Jodie Foster as a 2.0. The whole apparatus designed to stage-manage optics, control narratives, and filter out the embarrassing information before the public ever gets to see it. It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of letting the criminal suspect chair the internal police investigation and calling it accountability.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. As I said, you’ve advocated for Jewish groups in the past, and I know that you’ve sat across from our former Prime Minister, Katie Perry’s boyfriend—I can’t say his name—and you pressed him on what the federal government was actually doing about antisemitism. Well, we have a new Prime Minister, a new administration, same party. Is there a disconnect between their script and reality? Is there anything new and different and better with Carney?
Jon Liedtke: No, the disconnect is so massive, Gene, you could park the Ever Given container ship in it sideways like it was the Suez Canal. I’ve stood in these press scrums, I’ve looked Trudeau dead in the eye, I’ve been after press scrums and had private conversations, and I asked him: what are you doing and what are you prepared to do about this domestic tide of hatred? And the response back then was the blueprint that Carney gave at the speech yesterday: a breathless recitation of past budget announcements, grant programs, committee formations. They’re treating what they’ve done as a success story rather than speed bumps on the road to the worst domestic Jew-hate in modern Canadian history. But this is the thing with this Liberal government: they love to stand in front of burning buildings to hold flashy pressers and brag about how much they spent on the smoke detectors. But you can’t count advisory boards as victories when the very literal synagogue you are using as a backdrop requires permanent, heavily armed security perimeters just to let the community inside the doors. It’s obscene, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: You know, up until well, not just a couple of years ago, up until about maybe five or six years ago, Canada had a cross-partisan consensus on immigration. Thanks to, again, Katie Perry’s boyfriend, that has completely fractured. So, what broke, Jon, and what’s been the shift in Canadian values?
Jon Liedtke: Ideological blindness broke it, Gene, plain and simple. For decades, yeah, we had a golden, bulletproof consensus on immigration, the envy of the Western world. But Canadians didn’t just wake up one morning with a sudden, collective fit of xenophobia, and to paint this off as that is to do a disservice to us all. What happened was, is the Feds treated our national infrastructure as if it possessed infinite elasticity, opening the floodgates for temporary foreign workers, for international students, without meaningful conversations about where will these human beings live, sleep, work. They ran population volumes through ideological lenses, completely ignoring what was going on around us. And we just didn’t have the infrastructure to absorb those numbers while our hospitals were already being overrun during COVID and our housing stocks were rapidly depleting. And the math didn’t math, and it caught up to the ideology. The system seized, the government broke the consensus by turning a managed policy into a very visible national crisis.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Well, the part of the crisis that continues to upset me are these protests in cities right across Canada where I hear “Death to Canada, Death to Israel,” and the cops stand around and do little about it. Now, of late, some charges have finally been laid in the Toronto area. But this is a massive bureaucratic failure where Ottawa literally lost track of data, and even the Immigration Minister, Miller, at a committee hearing back in December said, “We’re not exactly sure where all these people are.”
Jon Liedtke: It’s—this is an administrative train wreck of historic proportions. I mean, we found out last year, the year before, Stats Canada, Immigration Department, and the Housing Ministry all operated as three independent, uncommunicated fiefdoms that refused to share data. Because our system doesn’t track actual exit data, their internal software assumed that the second that a temporary visa expired, that person magically teleported out of the country like they were in Star Trek. Mean, they lost track of a million people, Gene. A million people were missing! But when they were finally called out about it by the independent bank economists, the public reaction was absolute, jaw-dropping shock. And the fallout is devastating because, as you know, that structural damage is now baked into our economy, and we have to figure out how we’re going to get out of it. But when you leave entire metropolises out of your baseline equations by who you’re bringing in, you’re not just mismanaging files, you are systemically manufacturing the acute housing and rental shortage by accident.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. You know, I mentioned off the top the B’nai Brith documenting 6,800 antisemitic incidents in Canada, which is a 145% increase. So, I mean, you know, currently, the strategies aren’t working. What needs to be done?
Jon Liedtke: Well, I think what we need is a backbone, Gene, not just microphones, and I mean no offense to our broadcasters that we’re all friends with. The government has too many microphones. The entire federal response wasn’t a proactive stand; it was reactive damage control because the facts are out there and people can see it. Canadian Jews have been begging for basic physical security and meaningful law enforcement for years now. And the Feds, though, feel like they’ve done enough, but realized they needed to soothe public sentiment, so they threw a presser to change the comms strategy. But this is just Trudeau Leadership 2.0: spend millions to convince the voters that “we’re right and it’s you who are wrong, so we’ll just shake up the comms strat.” But this isn’t a PR problem; this is a fundamental rule of law problem. Unwatered-down leadership would mean using the legal tools that we have on the books, instructing the Justice Department to aggressively prosecute hate crimes without reservation, and immediately start to have this national conversation about what it means when members of our community—whether they be our own members of the community or invited guests into our community—are continually breaking laws on our streets, and how we react to it. We need to stop treating systemic rot with band-aids, and we just need to enforce the law. This isn’t hard.
Gene Valaitis: Great take this morning, Jon. Appreciate you.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: There he goes, Jon Liedtke. And it is a very serious problem. And as I have stated, I’ve got an opinion on just about everything. That was—that speech last night, way too late, way too little. And I don’t know if this new Faith Advisory Council is really going to make a difference. Like Jon said, enforce the law. Pretty simple.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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