Leaving Canada

The place is no longer what anyone recognises:

Reporting on antisemitism for the Post, I often told people, felt like whack-a-mole. One day, I’d cover Jewish union members led by people boasting the October 7 attacks illustrated the “power of resistance” and, the next, university students suing schools for “poisoned” learning environments. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve referenced synagogue shootings, Jewish children bullied in schools and empty promises like, “There is no place in our country for hate or antisemitism.”

However, there was ample room. Since October 7, I have seen antisemitism so many times that I’ve become desensitized to it. At street protests, I saw terror group paraphernalia and hook-nosed cartoons of Jews splashed on billboards. In my ears I heard chants demanding Jews “Go back to Poland!” and public pledges of support for designated terror groups. Discriminating against Jews became mainstream. Anti-Zionism became a voguish belief as Canada broke antisemitism records year after bleak year. …

In the span of my lifetime, we went from a country where the middle class could own a home near a city and have children before the age of 30 to living in 500-square-foot apartments ringing the suburbs. My parents, in their third decade, owned a 2,500-square-foot home with a front and backyard. My cousin, in his mid-30s, lives in a two-bedroom apartment with three children: both he and his wife have what once were middle-class jobs.

In the span of three decades since my childhood, Canada became one of the most expensive places on earth, while America remained far more attainable. Driving these differences are a few things: Canadians are bunched up in just a handful of cities and our biggest provinces have the most restrictive building codes.

Our economy has struggled to keep pace as life’s become more expensive. Despite humble bragging about our superior decorum and international standing compared to America, in the last decade our gross domestic product (GDP) has stagnated as theirs continues to climb. Our economy has languished as America invests more in its workforce and poaches our highest earners, coaxed by deeper labour markets and better tax brackets.

Despite the hype of Canada’s immigration website crashing following Trump’s election, the rate of Americans seeking permanent residency in Canada has declined in consecutive years of the latest Trump administration, as have American temporary foreign worker applications. Meanwhile, thousands of Canadians are scanning their own personal horizons and coming to the same conclusion. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, over 125,000 people left Canada for America in 2022, a 70 per cent increase from a decade earlier. The pain is felt most among highest earners: the Bank of Canada found that roughly 40 per cent of the top 1 per cent of Canadians have flocked south, alongside between a third and half of those of the following nine percentiles. …

“We do not welcome the world’s hatreds,” Carney told Jewish attendees at a Toronto synagogue in early June. “When you come to Canada, you bring your faith, your tradition, your language, your story. You leave behind your animosities.”

Carney’s speech was murky, a fine misting of pleasantries that obscured what his actual plans were. There was no mention of Zionism or the febrile passion among pockets of Canadians that the Jewish state cease to exist. The central question Carney let sit in the haze that June night was one that Jews across the country want clearly articulated: who is driving this surge of antisemitism and what can be done about it. …

But over a quarter (28 per cent) of Canadian Muslim respondents in Brym’s study agreed that Jews were “largely to blame for the negative consequences of globalization” and over a third (34 per cent) said Jews “talk too much about the Holocaust.” They are also far more likely to believe in conspiracies of Jewish control of banks and media, in line with the views expressed by their co-religionists across Europe.

While the size of the Canadian Jewish community has inched slowly upward since my birth, Muslim immigration has skyrocketed, growing from less than 100,000 in 1981 to over 1.75 million in 2021. In barely four decades, Canadians Muslims went from representing half a per cent of the country to nearly 5 per cent. Regardless of Carney’s wishes, the views and baggage of many immigrants from Pakistan and Lebanon and Syria and Afghanistan have been planted in Canadian soil. …

Canadian Jews have become endangered because Canadian values have become endangered. A national insecurity has descended across the country, triggered by leaders questioning whether there is something worth preserving, whether the next generation should be proud of the heritage being passed down.

Entrenching the multicultural legacy of his father, Justin Trudeau articulated the miasma of nothingness modern Canadianness ought to embody. “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,’’ he told the New York Times a decade ago. He spoke of generic values “openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice,” which made Canada “the first postnational state.’’

National icons were shuffled off stage during his years in office, boxed up and crated off, never to see the light of day again. Statues of Sir John A. Macdonald, our closest thing to a founding father, were graffitied and destroyed from coast to coast. Egerton Ryerson, the former namesake of Ryerson University (today Toronto Metropolitan), was toppled. Nothing about our history was sacred in the vortex of our swirling postnational moment. The poppy, a rare national symbol honouring Canadian veterans, founditself in the crosshairs when Don Cherry was disappeared for saying he didn’t see many Canadian newcomers wearing one and showing solidarity.

The threadbare identity weaved under Trudeau’s leadership culminated in 2021, after misreadings of ground-penetrating radar seemingly mistook geologic anomalies for Indigenous mass graves. Trudeau placed a teddy bear in a pastoral Saskatchewan field, beneath which no remains were ever found. Indeed, no bones were located anywhere despite countless alleged burial sites emerging. Trudeau ordered flags lowered for more than five months, the longest period in Canadian history.

It was a fitting and ultimate act of virtue signaling, deepening self-doubt across the country. Calls mounted to cancel Canada Day celebrations. “Muted” was the word on people’s lips as Canadians were informed of our fraught history, of our mistreatment of minorities, that our flag was steeped  in white supremacy. That force continues today: in June, a statue of Samuel de Champlain, a French explorer who once was viewed as a figure of “national unity,” was removed in an Ontario town.

Canadianness in the last decade felt hollow and reactionary; a petty patriotism trumpeted in response to American bullying, not an eternal flame that burns brighter in times of crisis. Out of the depths of our national insecurity, Canada regained its footing courtesy of Trump’s return to the White House in 2024.

 Canadian nationalism under the threat of tariffs became a corporate marketing bonanza rivalling Pride Month. Companies raced and bent over backwards to signal they were on board. Maple Leaf Foods, overnight, became “Proudly Canadian.” So did Crave, the streaming platform whose value proposition rests entirely on its access to American-made HBO.

Driving through rolling Pennsylvania farmland and upstate New York this July, we saw a sense of pride where flags draped porches and people took off their hats during the national anthem. Americans also toppled statues during the past decade, largely Confederate military figures and explorer Christopher Columbus, but the deeper self-loathing seems confined to the progressive fringe.

The level of pride I witnessed from the heart of diverse big cities to rural communities was something unrecognizable in Canada. The nationwide celebrations of 250 years of independence were everywhere: we couldn’t escape the flags, stickers, hats, air shows, bumper stickers, fireworks and pro-America graffiti murals. My wife and I want to be in a place where people are proud of their history, who feel their country is a force for good in the world, no matter how imperfect it looks to our modern eyes. …

I met many of these people sitting shiva for my grandfather in June. I lost count of the number of people who came up, offered their condolences and were soon volleying questions about how to get to America. People with established careers and retirees. Old Jews and young Jews. They were fearful of the direction Canada is heading and saw across their own lifetimes the country become unrecognizable; to be a Jew, a rapidly vanishing minority, in a country that couldn’t articulate how to protect them. …

One close family member flew a Canadian flag in front of his house as long as I can remember growing up. Patriotism in Canada, especially in cities and suburbs, I’ve found to be a rare sight. He was the lone house on his street that kept the red-and-white up until the early winds of winter blew in around October. He was Canada-proud and didn’t need a trade war or the Olympics to stir his pride.

It felt perpetual. Timeless. Every April, he would unfurl a new, crisp flag above his garage. Months in the Toronto sun and rain and wind slowly eroded these flags, and every year was an occasion to take down the old weathered one and replace it with a fresh one.

But the spring after October 7, he didn’t replace it with one right out of the box; he hoisted up the old tattered one. He felt Canadian Jews had been let down by the government, scapegoated and left to fend for themselves as antisemitism became tolerated and ignored. “It’s symbolic to me of Canada right now,” he confided to his wife when she asked him at the time why his tradition had suddenly changed.

As the scenes unspooled, I realized the Canada I saw then was better, far better, than the one I currently inhabit today …

But I just don’t see any better alternative at this point.

The writer's feelings are not vague.

Now, I see a country of apathetic and reactionary bobbleheads who still believe that Canada stands head and shoulders above everyone and that conflicts exist in faraway places.

No one will think back even as far as their childhoods to a culture of high-trust, prosperity, and community.

Those days are gone.