Matt Gurney: What kind of country needs many years to protect its citizens?

Don't answer that. Canada's Jews have already figured it out, to their sorrow.

To serve and protect … just, like, you know, not now.

By: Matt Gurney

The extent of Canadian justice system dysfunction, not to mention our shameful and ongoing neglect of the Jewish community, can now be neatly summarized in a timeline.

It’s ugly reading.

Last week, Ahmad Hassan Hajahmad was arrested by the Toronto Police Service and charged with “Participate in or Contribute to Activities of a Terrorist Group.” I’m going to quote quite liberally from the police statement about the arrest and charges here, because these are just allegations, Mr. Hajahmad is innocent until proven guilty, and getting the details right matters. So here’s how the police themselves describe the alleged crime: “It is alleged that on May 25 and September 7, 2024, the accused attended pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the Bay Street and Front Street West area, where he used amplification devices to make public statements that advocated for the detestation and harm against members of the Israeli and Jewish communities.” The investigation that followed those incidents is apparently what led to the unusual decision to charge Mr. Hajahmad with supporting, in some as-yet-unspecified way, Hamas.

Those are the facts of the alleged offence, as we know them. The Toronto Police Service statement also contained a timeline. Here are the key dates:

• May–September 2024: alleged offences occur

• March 7, 2025: police execute search warrants and seize Mr. Hajahmad’s electronic devices

• July 22, 2026: Mr. Hajahmad arrested and charged

Sooooo. Anyone else notice something about those dates? Mainly, the spread? The Toronto police, plus the unit of the RCMP dedicated to national security threats, needed 26 months from the time of an initial offence to arrest a guy they think was supporting a terror group and threatening Jews?! Really?

Really. And remember — Canadian courts are so notoriously slow and backlogged that we had to impose a hard limit for how long someone can wait before having serious charges heard, lest the case be thrown out. For a major crime like this, the Canadian definition of a sufficiently speedy trial is 30 months. Two and a half years. This could mean that, should Mr. Hajahmad be convicted, it’s possible that a full 56 months could pass between the time of the first alleged crime and the conviction.

It’s the latter two dates that really alarm me — the spread between the search warrant and the arrest. By the logic of the charges, there was evidence this guy supported a terror group 15 months before he was arrested for it. It’s not like he was unknown to police, either — Mr. Hajahmad was prominent at some of the protests in Toronto (he was literally using a megaphone in public, which seems like a joke but is just the literal description of what he was doing), and had also been charged with mischief after setting off a smoke device inside Union Station on News Year’s Day of 2025, months before the search warrants were issued. He was, of course, released after his arrest. It was another 19 months before he was arrested on the terror charge.

To recap: We have an accused terrorist, who was known to police and had in fact already been arrested once before being released, and we need over two years to bring the terror charge and re-arrest him. Wow! Great work, everyone.

Is there literally anyone in this country, especially in the police, court system or our politics, who’s prepared to step up and defend this insanity? Is there a single politician, Crown attorney or police leader who’d have the guts to go to a Jewish victim of criminal assault, harassment or intimidation and say that this was justice? That this was protection? That this was anything other than a disgrace?

If so, hey, there’s good news. It wouldn’t be hard to find some Jews to receive the message. Two more Jewish businesses were hit in Toronto over the weekend — one with a smashed window, the other by gunfire. No doubt my Jewish friends are hoping against hope that police might find someone and arrest them for this crime sometime between now and, uh, September 2028, which is apparently how long it takes.

I say the above with tongue somewhat in cheek. I know full well that no police leader, no Crown prosecutor, no judge and no elected official would dare defend this. They’d all agree it’s a major failure and, indeed, an embarrassment. I know this because I’ve talked to all those groups. They all agree on two things: that the status quo isn’t nearly good enough, and, it’s not their fault.

It’s someone else’s fault. And I should go talk to those other guys.

It’s pathetic. It’s a sick joke, all at the expense of our vulnerable Jewish community. It’s embarrassing. And it’s not at all surprising.

It doesn’t have to be this way, friends. A few years ago, shortly after — that’s the key phrase there, “shortly after” — the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, U.S. courts were sentencing participants. Obviously, events since make the fate of the Jan. 6 perpetrators hard to hold up as a case study of effective justice, but if only as a point of comparison, Texan Guy Reffitt was convicted of five charges related to the attack in March 2022. That’s 14 months to go from the crime to the conviction, or about half as long as it took Toronto to get from crime to a charge being laid. (Reffitt was ultimately handed an 87-month sentence before being pardoned by President Donald Trump on the day he retook office in 2025.)

Perhaps American justice isn’t to your liking? Let’s look across the sea to the United Kingdom. Last month, there was rioting across the United Kingdom targeting police officers after horrible footage was released showing a man bleeding to death in police custody after the man was stabbed; his cries for help to the police were ignored. It was a horrible disgrace, but for our purposes today, what actually caught my attention was the speed with which the British restored order. Southampton was one of the cities that saw disorder, and the courts there were handing out multi-year sentences for the mob violence within days — yes, days — of the crimes occurring.

Can you even imagine Canadian police or courts attempting to move in days? They’d break out in hives at the suggestion.

And that’s a major problem, because swift arrests and sentences are a known deterrent. The Line has been lamenting for years now that the failure of the police to intervene rapidly, decisively and publicly to root out the unlawful elements from within the broader post-Oct. 7 anti-Israel protests was a massive strategic error, and a major missed opportunity. A swift pruning out of criminal elements from a broader and legitimate protest is good for everyone — including the rest of the protesters. It sends a strong message that lawful protests are permitted but crimes won’t be tolerated, even and perhaps especially when they’re committed as part of an otherwise peaceful event.

Not intervening, or arresting someone and then immediately releasing them, sends the opposite message. Look at what’s happening in our streets. Look at these two more Jewish businesses, attacked in the dead of night. And tell me that you really don’t think that the inaction of our police and the appallingly delayed court processes we’ve now accepted as normal haven’t contributed to the sense of impunity that the perpetrators of these gutless acts must feel?

And spend a minute, as well, thinking of what your Jewish friends and neighbours have absorbed from all this. For almost three years, their schools, religious sites, businesses and their very neighbourhoods have been repeatedly targeted by criminals. People have been assaulted. And the Canadian state has demonstrated, clearly and unequivocally, that they’ll take years — years! — to step in to protect Jewish Canadians and public safety more broadly. Hell, I’m still not convinced that what little action we’ve seen to date hasn’t been driven mostly by fear of what America would do if anyone shot up their consulate again. That seemed to be what it took to kick officials here into something resembling action. (Oh, and not for nothing, but in the small handful of hours between when this column was written and before it was published, the U.S. Consulate was apparently shot at, again. So let’s see what happens on that one.)

All of this official cowardice and judicial dysfunction combines to send a message that I know for a fact that many Canadian Jews have received loud and clear. Something has gone very, very wrong in this country, and since we now have a federal government committed to building at speeds we haven’t seen in generations, let’s hope they save some energy for making sure we restore order and safety at a fair clip, too. Until and unless that happens, Canadian Jews will continue to do what they’re already doing — buying guns, or just leaving the country entirely. And I won’t blame them.

Oh, and Toronto readers? The two businesses targeted this weekend were Kiva’s bakeries. There are a few locations in the city. I’ve been to two of them, but I admit not in a while. That’s going to change this week. I hope you guys can join me in showing them some support. They might need years to get anything official. The least we can do is buy some of their food. And apologize.

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