Step🪜and 🐓

Disturbing. Did this Liberal MP really just deny that forced labour practices are taking place in China? This is a documented problem. Why is this MP carrying water for the Chinese regime?

Just a reminder that we were assured by crack journalist Samira Mohyeddin that this woman was an obvious Zionist plant.

When DEI Cannot See Jews I was reading the article “Canada’s Polite Pogrom” in The Atlantic this morning. Its title struck me as both severe and, for many Canadian Jews, painfully descriptive of the climate we are being asked to endure. In the article, Ted Rosenberg, a professor of geriatric medicine at the University of British Columbia, explains why he resigned after three decades teaching medicine. The immediate backdrop was an environment in which conspiratorial tropes about Jews controlling wars or harvesting organs circulated openly. The university did nothing of consequence. But Rosenberg’s resignation was not, at least as he tells it, simply about the offensiveness of the remarks themselves. It was about something more structurally revealing: the very system ostensibly designed to address discrimination proved incapable of recognizing the discrimination before it. What stood out to me most was not the underlying conduct itself. Tragically, incidents of this kind no longer feel like isolated aberrations. What stood out was the institutional response, or more precisely, the now familiar failure of institutional response. You see, this is where the issue crystallizes. Rosenberg was referred to a DEI process that, by its own logic, did not appear to apprehend Jews as a group capable of experiencing targeted harm. At that point, the issue ceases to be merely institutional. It becomes analytical. Under Canadian law, the relevant doctrine is not especially obscure. Discrimination analysis does not turn principally on motive. It turns on effects. The question is whether a rule, practice, policy, or institutional response produces a disproportionate adverse impact on a protected group. Intent may matter evidentially, but it is not dispositive (e.g., see Fraser). The Supreme Court of Canada has made this clear in its equality rights jurisprudence: a seemingly neutral approach can still violate section 15 of the Charter or parallel human rights protections if it disproportionately burdens members of a protected group and reinforces or perpetuates their disadvantage. Jews are a protected group on the basis of religion and, yes, ethnicity. Israelis may also engage protection on the basis of ethnic or national origin. None of that is conceptually difficult in law. So the question becomes very straightforward. When discourse within an institution traffics in classic antisemitic tropes, and when the institutional response is indifference, deflection, or procedural evasion, does that environment impose a disproportionate and adverse impact on Jews? It is difficult to argue that it does not. Rosenberg’s account suggests that the DEI framework he encountered could not even register the issue. Because the operating logic of the framework had placed Jews outside its line of sight from the outset. This is the deeper problem. Although discrimination law in Canada is effects-based, some contemporary equity frameworks operate on a more fixed, Westernized, identity-based logic. When that logic draws its lines in a way that leaves certain protected groups insufficiently accounted for, the legal analysis developed through years of stare decisis never meaningfully begins. The result is a persistent blind spot that can produce discriminatory outcomes while the institution continues to speak in the language of inclusion, diversity, and equity. That is a structural problem. Universities are public institutions in Canada. They do not stand outside the constitutional order. They too are bound by rights-based norms, and they too should be called to account when their internal frameworks cease to protect the very minorities they are purportedly designed to defend. Pluralism depends on institutions capable of recognizing harm across all protected groups, including Jews. A framework that cannot see a protected group cannot protect it. At that point, it becomes unfit for purpose and should be replaced.

The decision to withdraw charges against Mai Abdulhadi, an individual who performed a Nazi salute and called for a “Final Solution” against Jews is nothing short of outrageous. Let’s stop pretending this is complicated. Invoking the “Final Solution” is a direct reference to the Holocaust. It is a call for genocide. The Nazi salute is not symbolic speech. It is the open glorification of an ideology responsible for industrial-scale murder. And yet, here in Montréal, that conduct now appears to come without consequence. This is not happening in a vacuum. Jewish schools have been shot at. Synagogues have been targeted. Jewish businesses have been attacked. Families are looking over their shoulders in neighbourhoods where they have lived peacefully for generations. The situation in this city is deteriorating. Rapidly. And decisions like this do not calm tensions, they inflame them. They tell extremists that the line is moving, that what was once unthinkable is now tolerable, and that even explicit calls for violence against Jews may be brushed aside. What exactly is the threshold now? What more needs to be said, or done, before authorities are willing to act? Jewish Montrealers are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for the most basic guarantee any society owes its citizens: that open incitement to our destruction will be taken seriously and met with consequences. Right now, that guarantee feels like it is slipping away. This is a test for our institutions. A test of whether we still have the moral clarity to recognize hatred when it is shouted in plain terms. So far, we are failing it. And the cost of that failure will not be theoretical.