Matt Gurney: The gutless abandonment of Jewish Canadians will get much worse

Giving them the protection they deserve and have a right to expect is simply too inconvenient and controversial.

A bullet hole at a GTA synagogue.

By: Matt Gurney

Gunfire struck two synagogues in the Toronto area again over the weekend, bringing the total for the last week to three. Ho hum, just our new, awful normal. Since the October 7 attack two years ago, Jewish synagogues, Jewish community centres, Jewish schools and daycares and businesses owned by Jews or in some way (meaningful or otherwise) linked to Israel have been targeted. Sometimes by protests. Sometimes by vandalism. And sometimes by outright destructive and violent acts, such as the latest shootings or previous fire bombings. Sometimes entire neighbourhoods have been targeted, simply because many Jews live there.

And it all left me, in a way that may strike readers as strange, thinking of my friend, the late Christie Blatchford. Not because Blatch would have enjoyed any of this. She would’ve been appalled. But because I think she would’ve had a valuable perspective. Indeed, she’d seen it before.

Over her long career she covered many stories. But I’ve always thought that she did some of her best work discussing how law enforcement completely abandoned the residents of the Ontario town of Caledonia during a protracted and at times violent dispute between local residents and a nearby Indigenous community over proposed property developments. She wrote many columns about it and eventually wrote a book, aptly named Helpless, that described how the Ontario Provincial Police, hamstrung by politicians terrified of any kind of violent flare-up between the Indigenous protesters and local residents, stopped enforcing the law for fear of inflaming the situation. Instead of calming things down, this simply emboldened the criminal element. And things, very predictably, got much, much worse.

I have long held that the abandonment of Caledonia was a too-often ignored moment in Canadian history, and it should have, but didn’t, forever ruined the reputation of the affable Dalton McGuinty, the then-premier who oversaw the betrayal of law, order, and his own citizens. What I didn’t know then, and know now, is that McGuinty wasn’t notable for his failure or cowardice. He was simply ahead of the curve.

This column isn’t really about Caledonia and what happened there; I would simply encourage any of you to pick up a copy of Helpless if you haven’t already. It was some of my late friend’s best work. The pathetic story, though, is something I have found myself thinking about quite a lot recently. This isn’t the only time we’ve seen this streak of craven gutlessness run through Canadian policing and politics. The rail blockades of early 2020, the convoy in Ottawa and at the border crossings in 2022, and now the repeated and increasingly violent targeting of Jewish institutions, and by extension the entire Jewish community, all fit a pattern.

The actual preservation of law and order, to be blunt, is not a priority of the Canadian political class. Avoiding awkward conflicts, particularly those that cut through identity politics, is the priority. And the hell with anything else. Or anyone else.

Let’s be blunt about this. Canadian police, particularly in Toronto and Montreal, enabled the violence that is being directed against Jewish sites by their extremely obvious refusal to enforce the law at nearly any point during the protests that sprung up after October 7 and Israel’s resultant war against Hamas in Gaza. Jewish Canadians are now, to their misfortune, reaping what our police and politicians sowed.

I want to be very clear about something. I do not accuse the protest movements in general, or all who participated, of any immoral or unlawful act. Protesting the war is fine. Protesting Israeli policy is fine. And I understand and accept that most of the protesters behaved lawfully and appropriately and in full accordance with their democratic rights.

But some of them didn’t. And this was obvious from the beginning. The protest movement always involved a degree of illegal action, well beyond the occasional rule-flouting or -breaking that protests often involve. Trespassing and vandalism and threats and intimidation were part of these protests from the very beginning.

I do not believe that the presence of a criminal element within the broader protest discredits the protest itself or the cause it represents, and I’ve long said as much, but a refusal to engage with that criminal element absolutely discredits law enforcement in general and invites further bad behaviour.

Seriously. Are we really going to pretend that police turning a blind eye to lawbreaking doesn’t have downstream effects? That it does not encourage and embolden those who are willing and able to take things further than just chanting slogans and waving flags?

When I shared some of these thoughts on social media over the weekend, a polite correspondent pushed back and said that what I was proposing or calling for sounded like some kind of authoritarian crackdown. I honoured my usual rule for discussing the Middle East on social media: I don’t argue with people. There’s no win condition for me there. But in the safe space of my own column, I’ll say that I think that is actually exactly wrong. I don’t think any kind of sweeping or Draconian crackdown against the protests as a whole was needed, called for, or even practically possible. But I do think a very early and consistent willingness by the police to arrest the people who were actually breaking the law, and to do so publicly and quickly and without hesitation or delay, would’ve had a salutary effect for everyone. Our Jewish community would have understood that law enforcement was prepared to intercede on their behalf. And the protesters would have had a very early and clear demonstration of where the limits of protesting actually lie in a free and democratic society.

But the cops didn’t, so we didn’t get either of those things. In fact, we sent the exact opposite of both of those messages. Canada’s Jewish community figured out real quick that they were on their own, and I know for a fact that a great many of them are making their own preparations accordingly, in ways that would likely not be to the pleasure of the police or government. And for the hardline element buried within the protest movements, they also noted the inability and unwillingness of the police to do anything about it and began governing themselves accordingly.

I don’t blame the police for this entirely. They certainly deserve some of the criticism, but I actually think this is a situation where the police inaction is downstream of bigger problems. And I worry this is the all-too-typical example of what happens in a democracy where you have too many different stakeholders involved in trying to solve a problem, and what you’re left with is a scenario where no one actually needs fear being specifically blamed for failure.

Or, at least, they fear something else more. The politicians do not want any ugly scenes of police wading into protests with tear gas or riot shields. So they put out the message to just kind of take things a little bit easy. The Crown prosecutors, for their part, are already overworked in a court system with massive backlogs, and they’re motivated to deal with anyone who actually does get arrested in the quickest and most expedited way. The cops, meanwhile, know that the politicians aren’t going to have their back if things do turn ugly and that anyone they actually arrest is probably just going to get some kind of slap on the wrist or a discharge from the Crown. So they aren’t really in a hurry to make any arrests. They just sort of keep an eye on things, and hope the law-breaking stays below a threshold that will actually force them to do something.

And because of this, what ends up happening is that after some synagogue gets shot up or set on fire, everybody shows up at the press conferences to deplore the latest act of violence and reiterate that they stand with the Jewish community and all the usual warmed-over clichés that get trotted out at moments like this. But no one actually really cares to fix the problem, because their personal and institutional incentives encourage them to do nothing in particular. They already have what they need more than they need safe streets and secure Jewish holy sites: they have an excuse.

And all the while, the violence continues. It escalates. It gets worse. Hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens, members of a vulnerable religious minority with a history of genocidal persecution, live in renewed fear. Jewish kids go to school under police guard. Their temples get shot up and burnt in the night. And Canadian politicians and police leaders and Crown attorneys shake their heads and deplore all of it and offer their version of those American “thoughts and prayers” clichés that get trotted out after every inevitable school shooting.

And nothing changes. Because fixing this problem is hard, and blaming someone else for it very, very easy.

We all know where this goes in the end. The kind of people who get off on shooting up synagogues or throwing Molotov cocktails at them in the night will eventually get bored. They’re going to develop a desire to do more and to go further. And sooner or later, Canada will have its own version of the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia. Jewish Canadians, who probably have absolutely no particular tie to Israel and certainly no responsibility for Israeli security policy, will get knifed or burnt or torn open by gunfire, and in the aftermath of that dark day all the politicians and other civic leaders who spent the last two years more focused on deflecting blame than protecting Canadian Jews will rush to the nearest microphone to condemn the whole thing and ask aloud how this could have ever happened.

Until and unless we can figure out a way to change this, our Jewish friends will continue to live in terror. They deserve so much better than this. But I can no longer look them in the eye and tell them to expect it. Giving them the protection they deserve and have a right to expect is simply too inconvenient and controversial. Sorry, friends. To state the obvious, you’re on your own.

All I can say is that it’s happened before, and my friend wrote a book about it. The title might be a little on the nose these days for Canadian Jews, but perhaps they’ll take some cold comfort in not being the first group that the state wrote off because our political, justice and police leadership concluded it was too politically controversial and awkward to actually protect them.

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