Torontonians have questions.

“Why can’t our young people afford a place to live?”

“Why is the TTC constantly breaking down?”

“Why is it no longer safe for our kids?”

For three years, Mayor Olivia Chow has been dodging the question.

She’s proven it over the last month of mayoral debates. It’s what she does. She dodges the questions.

She was asked point blank by rival candidate Brad Bradford during Tuesday’s Toronto Scarborough debate, “Mayor Chow, why did you choose not to sit on the police board?” She simply would not answer the question.

Many Torontonians might even support her decision not to sit on the police board. Many want to understand the reasoning behind it. She won’t give them a simple answer.

With only two candidates left in the mayoral debate, there’s not much room for Chow to hide. She is being forced to go toe-to-toe with Bradford, and the contrast is remarkable.

While Bradford glances at his notes from time to time, he is present and engaged in the room. He thinks on his feet and is trying to have an actual discussion about the city.

Chow, meanwhile, is stuttering, misspeaking, and mumbling her way through the prepared remarks and cannot answer any question of substance.

On Tuesday night, when asked how she would pay for an initiative, she began rambling about ideas she had in the ’90s while she was working in Ottawa.

At the Daily Bread Food Bank last month, when asked if Toronto should move to food stamps, the mayor didn’t even know what food stamps were.

Repeatedly, on almost any serious issue, she will not answer yes or no. “Throw out a pitch at the baseball game?” she’s your mayor. “Will you commit to a number on tax increases?” No response.

So it raises the question: why is Mayor Chow dodging all the questions?

The first explanation might simply be incompetence. In some instances, like food stamps, it’s reasonable to think she doesn’t know what’s going on.

In others, like the police board or the data centre question that was also put to her on Tuesday, she probably does know her answer. She likely just doesn’t want to say the answers out loud. She knows those answers will likely alienate a significant portion of her constituency.

This is the trouble, if that’s the case, a massive subset of Olivia Chow’s supporters are being mislead. It is not a big ask for the mayor to be honest about her policies. A massive part of her NDP supporter base hates data centres. She won’t give an answer. Torontonians deserve a clear answer. Do data centres belong in Toronto? Yes or no?

Leadership is about making tough decisions, not waffling in the middle.

Bradford knows some of his answers wouldn’t be popular with everyone, but at least he had the integrity to say: this is what I stand for, we might disagree on it, but I stand up for what I believe in.

There was one question that Chow could answer this week. It came in Monday’s debate, when both candidates were asked to finish the sentence: “Toronto is a city where…”

Bradford gave an answer. He said, off the cuff and under pressure, “Toronto is a city where you can raise a family, build a business, and unlock your full potential.”

Mayor Chow, on the other hand, said: “Toronto… It’s a city where… you can find the… most dynamic street festival ever… in… in… the world… Street festival! Taste of everything everywhere…”

It’s a good laugh but not enough is being said about what these answers say about the philosophies of these two candidates.

This, perhaps, is the real heart of the Toronto mayoral debate. It deserves more attention as a storyline.

Brad Bradford genuinely believes that Toronto should be a place where you can raise a family, open a business, and be prosperous. He believes that Torontonians can have a good, happy, meaningful life. The boring stuff. The essential stuff. Because that is what life is all about.

Mayor Chow, on the other hand, just wants to have fun. Her priority is street festivals. She likes to dance. She doesn’t seem to concern herself much with whether or not you can live in the city, whether or not it’s affordable for your children to live there. She doesn’t concern herself with whether or not you’re able to open and operate a business. She’s happy to fix transit during the FIFA world cup, but then abandon any findings as soon as the party leaves town. She just wants to dress up and dance around. It’s a disaster. She’s a disaster.

While she’s dancing, she just dances around and dodges the vital questions.

Chow will read off her notes, and when she makes a mistake, she looks to the back of the room for help and casts a death stare at her poor staff, who must be melting down by this point. Three years have not been kind to this mayor’s cognition. She practically never gets to the heart of the important issues.

Finally, on Tuesday evening, Bradford said it best himself: “She doesn’t want to answer the question. She’s never going to answer the question. She doesn’t take your safety seriously.”



Tasha Kheiriddin is running for TDSB Trustee in Ward 7 (Toronto St Paul's, University Rosedale and Toronto Centre) at a time when Jewish students and families in Toronto's public schools need a strong advocate. She co-chairs the parent council at her daughter's school, so she already knows what families face and how much it matters when parents have a real voice. She is committed to academic achievement, safe and inclusive schools for all, meaningful parent engagement, and accountable leadership at the board. As a longtime columnist and commentator, she has never shied away from hard issues. That was clear in August, when she wrote in the National Post about the rise of antisemitism in Canada. She warned that hatred toward Jews has become more visible and more accepted, and argued that leaders must name it and confront it. Since October 7, Jewish students across the TDSB have faced harassment and exclusion with too little response from the people meant to protect them. Tasha's moral clarity is exactly what the board needs. She understands that "safe and inclusive for all" has to include Jewish students, and that antisemitism deserves the same seriousness as any other form of hate. A vote for Tasha Kheiriddin is a vote for a trustee who will stand up for Jewish families and hold the board to account. You can get more information, order a lawn sign, or make a donation at https://www.votetasha.ca and follow her on Instagram and Facebook at @tasha4trustee

An Ode to Eric Lombardi

Running to be premier may always have been a cheeky ambition, but we can learn a lot from Mr. Eric Lombardi.

If you’ve been generous enough to spend some time reading my analysis, firstly, thank you. Secondly, that analysis is a direct testament to the work Eric has done and his positive abundance vision for the future of Ontario. Quite frankly, if it wasn’t for Eric, I simply wouldn’t have been in the room last night listening to the candidates making their pitches. He inspired me to get off my couch and get in the game.

Eric is young, passionate, and incredibly smart. Most importantly in my estimation, he embodies something that is so lacking among the vast majority of young Canadians : a willingness to put himself out there, enter the fray, and actually try to make a difference.

I have a theory about Canadian politics: most Canadians primarily consume American media and American political content. This causes Canadians, especially young Canadians, to think about politics as a spectator sport. They literally can’t impact U.S. politics at all. All they can do is watch. So we transfer that pattern into domestic issues, and we have subtly trained ourselves to look at politics as something that happens to us, not something that we happen to.

Eric is the kind of person who bucks that trend. He brought a unique bent to the campaign: his relentless belief that policy really matters, and that political rhetoric demands substance in order to effect actual change.

Thank you, Eric, for inspiring me to get interested and involved. You moved the needle for me. I would not be writing about provincial politics if it were not for your courage. I am proud of you, and I am looking forward to seeing what you do next.

---

And Then There Were Four

Lombardi’s announcement came at the end of a Toronto town hall hosted by a whopping seven riding associations, and the difference from the debate the party aired on Monday was night and day.

The questions were ostensibly the same: education, health care, etc., but the energy was completely different. Politics is fundamentally about people. So naturally, having people in the room made this far more engaging, and each candidate popped in ways that the YouTube debate simply lacked.

In private conversation, I asked most of the candidates and their teams about the official debate room, and they confirmed that there are some serious challenges with that medium. The party would do well to consider changing how it presents its candidates. Simply having a live studio audience, even if it’s relatively small, might make all the difference.

Speaking to a camera in a sterile room is really challenging, and it is not serving the candidates, the party, or Ontarians. I suggested to multiple candidates that the streamed debates felt a lot like the lockdown days of COVID, and they unanimously agreed.

One candidate had a clever suggestion. Open up some tickets for a live studio audience and position them as a fundraiser for the party. Just having a real-life person giving you those subtle feedback signals, a smile, a head nod, eye contact, all make an enormous difference.

Some notes on each of the remaining four candidates:

Lee Fairclough

In his resignation announcement, Lombardi endorsed Lee Fairclough as his pick for Liberal leader. Needless to say, it’s been a good week for Lee.

Fairclough has a Churchillian quality to her, one that shows some strength and gives you the impression that she could go toe to toe with someone like Doug Ford. In person, you can see the quiet confidence of an athlete focused on winning. She used to play rugby at the highest level and she has an aura that makes you believe she knows what it’s like to be in the trenches.

Fairclough is currently the most likely candidate to be leading the party moving forward.

Stephanie Bowman

Bowman was the last to join the race, but she is no slouch. From a technical standpoint, she might have had the best answers at the town hall. She was constantly pointing out nuance, and really wanted to demonstrate she sees issues like safe injection sites from different perspectives. Bowman has also started leaning into a couple of signature lines, like “education policy is economic policy” and “an economy with heart.”

Her supporters, of whom there are many, especially in Mid/Uptown Toronto, home to her riding of Don Valley West, tend to really appreciate her tactical mind.

Being late to the party meant she clearly saw a path to victory. She is running some interference on Fairclough in the sitting-MPP lane, though. While that can cause tension, it could also make for a natural alliance on vital second-place votes in the Ontario Liberals’ ranked ballot system.

Dylan Marando

With Lombardi dropping out, Dylan Marando has sole possession of the “Dalton McGuinty generational-change” lane in this race. Marando worked for Kathleen Wynne and Justin Trudeau, and when pressed, he was unabashed in saying that’s the kind of Liberal he is.

His proposed policies tend to echo that progressive bent. Marando has made some explicit promises that lean more left than centre like wrapping mental health into OHIP.

Marando is now the only candidate who’s never been elected to office, but he’s also the only one who’s worked in both the Prime Minister’s and Premier’s offices.

Marando does have a compelling case, and perhaps the most compelling thing about him is his charisma. Of the leadership candidates, he certainly has the most natural aptitude for speaking to a room. You can tell he’s a fan of McGuinty, with echoes of the former premier’s cadence in his speech pattern.

Marando won’t be able to make the case that he is the most experienced, but he definitely could make the case that he is the most electable in a general election. As the kids say, “he’s got that riz.” It will be interesting to see if he leans into that angle.

Navdeep Bains

Finally, there’s Navdeep Bains. Frankly, the town hall moved the needle for me more on Bains than on any other candidate. In a previous article, I mentioned that Bains has a wise grandfather energy, and I genuinely believed it, given what I was seeing on my computer screen.

In real life, with a live audience of a couple hundred people in the room, Bains was almost a completely different person. He was lighthearted, gregarious, having a good time, joking with the candidates next to him, and far less rigid than his YouTube debate performances would suggest.

Bains has that federal experience, which is valuable in its own right. He was not willing to say whether or not he was a Trudeau or a Carney Liberal. He said instead that he was “just a Liberal.” Bains was a cabinet minister for Trudeau, so there is likely some allegiance there, but Justin Trudeau is not exactly in vogue, so perhaps Bains is making the calculation that that association could be a bit of an anchor.

What Kind of Liberal Are You?

In the aftermath of the debate, there was some eye-rolling online about that question: “Are you a Justin Trudeau Liberal or a Mark Carney Liberal?” It might seem benign, but in actuality it speaks to the heart of this race.

As I put it on Twitter in response to a criticism from Greg Brady: “Trudeau liberalism and Carney liberalism are very different animals. Trudeau Liberalism was a lot further to the left, and in a place like uptown Toronto, where the NDP traditionally has no chance of winning, a lot of would-be progressives really like that style. On the other hand, the Zeitgeist in Canada is very Mark Carney, which in turn is a very different flavour of Liberal. Whoever wins this race will determine the tack the party takes moving forward.”

So in a sense, it’s exactly the right question.

At the end of the day, four remain in what I am coining the Provincial Premiership Semi-Final. It is not unlikely that the Liberals win the next Ontario election, so the next premier just might have been on that stage last night.

Each has a phenomenal case to be the next leader, and while many electors might have already determined their first choice, it will be agonizing to figure out who should be second, third, and fourth.

This matters, so hopefully Ontarians are paying attention.

** Sep 30th correction - there is a glaring omission in this story. Candidate Eric Lombardi made a significant dig at Premier Doug Ford, insinuating that the Premier “spread cheeks” for the President, Donald Trump. We heard that as “spread cheer” and didn’t think much of it. Of course, this is a notable escalation of rhetoric. In a sense though, this insult and its lack of coverage reinforces the point that this race isn’t breaking through to the mainstream… outlets like the Globe and Mail haven’t even reported on this at time of correction.

The second Ontario Liberal leadership debate took place on Monday, and the race has remained in relative stasis. A month has passed since the first debate, and if you stitched clips from the two side by side, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference.

Navdeep Bains, Lee Fairclough, Dylan Marando, Stephanie Bowman and Eric Lombardi all have strong individual cases to become leader, and a lot could change in Ontario once one of them grabs the reins of the party.

The election is just six weeks away. The membership drive is over, which means candidates can now focus solely on winning the hearts and minds of declared Ontario Liberals. The opportunity exists for a candidate to break away, but so far all five hopefuls are seemingly sticking with the peloton.

It’s a tricky landscape, as these events are still barely visible to the public. Viewership for the debate peaked at about a thousand people on YouTube. The August debate is still at only thirteen thousand views, neither event was exactly primetime programming.

There’s been a good deal of justifiable criticism lobbed at the mainstream media for not covering this leadership race, but the OLP can’t make that an excuse. If they aren’t relevant, they need to make themselves relevant to have a chance at winning back Queen’s Park.

In defence of the media, both debates have been a tough watch. The format is fine in theory, but the presentation is bland and makes it really difficult for candidates to manifest their charisma. Further, in hindsight the OLP might wish they had picked a different time to hold this race. Municipal elections are heating up across the province, and those races are taking all the non-trade-war political oxygen out of the room.

It’s a tough task to drive emotion when you’re speaking to an empty room. It’s rather reminiscent of the worst parts of COVID conferences, where the space feels cavernous and grey.

As far as who won, again, no one really. Most of the trends from the previous debate stuck, so readers looking for a more in depth breakdown can check out our debate review from August. The most prominent theme remains that the candidates seem more interested in criticizing Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservatives than each other.

The result is that practically no one watching will have felt like this debate moved the needle.

Strategically speaking, that might be a consequence of the election’s format. The actual vote is going to be a ranked ballot, which means if a voter’s primary choice is out of the running, their votes get redistributed based on whoever they put second on the ballot, and so on. Candidates can have confidence they have signed up their loyalists, but none has anything close to a majority, nor does it seem they will approach one.

This means that, fundamentally, whoever gets the most second-place votes will likely become the Ontario Liberal leader. Making enemies out of a rival and their base could therefore have disastrous consequences.

The format makes it natural for the candidates to be hesitant to bash each other. There’s a bit of a standoff, though: none of them seems to want to draw first blood for fear of reprisals.

Lombardi did try and push the issue a little. He challenged Bains on his lack of a plan. Bains maintained he had one, but never actually explained what it was. That was by far the spiciest section of the debate, as low a bar as that is.

Moderator Siobhan Morris did well given the vanilla circumstances but could have pushed to find wedges between the candidates. The challenge is that, for the most part, the three more experienced candidates seemingly agree on every policy. Marando has come out with some interesting and novel ideas like a different tax rate in Northern Ontario. Lombardi has a fully fleshed-out set of policies, costed and publicized, but this debate format isn’t conducive to communicating them in succinct ways.

A creative candidate might be able to leverage this format. If they spent less time bashing Ford, they could appeal to their rivals’ bases with a relatively simple yet explicit pitch: “I don’t need to be your first choice, but I should definitely be your second. Here’s why.”

At this time, Bains, Fairclough, and Bowman seemingly still have the hammer based on name recognition. Marando and Lombardi do still reasonably have paths to win this race, they will need to inspire a hunger for change among a largely establishment boomer party base. It is certainly possible though, if for no other reason than the nomination format.

The end result is that this election still does feel wide open. Given that the winner will be one step away from shaping the lives of sixteen million Ontarians, it’s worth paying attention to. In the meantime, it will be fascinating to see how things unfold. Perhaps a big move is waiting in the wings, but for now, it appears the candidates are all still analyzing the election math to see if the potential risks of going on the attack are worth the reward.

I’m voting for Brad Bradford, and I think you should too. Let me tell you why.

Brad’s platform is effective and it’s landing with Torontonians across all parts of the city.

It resonates with young business owners in midtown, older cab drivers in Scarborough, and the retiree in Etobicoke. His platform is simple. He calls it the three C’s: crime, congestion, and cost of living.

Here it is broken down:

Crime

Ask any Torontonian what their biggest fear is and you’re most likely to hear that they don’t feel safe. There are now countless stories of break-ins, carjackings, assaults, public drug use and indecency. People don’t feel safe, and they don’t feel like their public institutions are doing their jobs. That speaks to a failure on the most basic service that the government is supposed to deliver - public safety. Bradford is committed to fixing it, and he will start with simple measures that the current mayor clearly does not find worthy of her time. Low hanging fruit that the current regime ignores. He will sit on the police board, returning direct oversight of the city’s safety to city hall. He wants to hire more cops, and set up an actual positive alliance with the law enforcement in town. He wants police with actual authority on the TTC. These are basic policies that any mayor should be pursuing. It is flabbergasting that we don’t have them in place, and Bradford will restore sanity to how Toronto, the biggest municipality in the country, approaches public safety. Things are never as good or as bad as they appear on social media, but walking around Toronto and looking around… it’s clear — things are indeed bad.

Congestion

Bradford is a cyclist, he takes transit regularly, and he’s also a motorist. He understands that a city has to have all of its modes of transportation working in harmony, but that different situations and different areas call for different solutions. In sum, Bradford is anti-congestion. That means he understands how important it is to build bike infrastructure where bikes actually get used.

As a motorist he understands prioritizing cars where that makes the most sense. He also understands that Canada is cold half the year and our cities are built and designed around cars. We can’t simply ignore that fact and pretend like all of our people can bike their kids to hockey practice in -10 degree weather. Again the fix is a simple solution, but Bradford has committed to upgrading Toronto’s intersections with smart technology that works for motorists as well as transit takers. Because, as a transit rider, Bradford is committed to enhancing the TTC, and restoring the system to being world class.

That is why he is campaigning on installing actual subway platform doors. The doors are both for safety and because one of the biggest causes of delays on the TTC is people physically going onto the tracks. If you stop that from happening, you cut down one of the largest sources of wasted time.

If the system is efficient, reliability goes up. If reliability goes up, Torontonians will use the subway more. That means fewer cars, congestion goes down, cyclists have more space. That’s systems thinking. Bradford is a systems thinker. A city like Toronto needs that kind of mindset presenting actual solutions and not pretending like the city has peaked.

Cost

Bradford is committing to freezing property taxes for one year. That means the already high costs stay level for home owners, and landlords will have less pressure to raise rents. The city is in financial trouble, but Bradford is going to find real savings. Not by some magic farfetched promise. He’s simply going to do the boring old accounting exercise of going line-by-line and conducting an actual audit of Toronto’s finances.

Now some will say this is already present in the system, but it is widely understood that there is tremendous waste and corruption, at and adjacent to City Hall. Torontonians are paying more and getting less, and this is the simplest fix: find the efficiencies, eliminate waste, and use technology where appropriate. Bradford understands that when you have a massive enterprise dealing with humungous budgets of other people’s (taxpayer) money, there is a natural propensity for unnecessary costs to inflate.

The city is not a business, but the business parts need to be run like one. We have the internet and AI and decades of real global experience to lean on here. There is so much potential for improvement. Bradford will do what is necessary to drastically improve city hall. Those changes make it a better place to work, it makes it easier for city workers to be better at their jobs, and it improves service for everyone. City workers are taxpayers too.

The Name — Bradford Bradford

Brad has the right policies for Toronto. But more than anything, he is a phenomenal person. He puts himself on the line. He stands up for people, and he wants to be a mayor for everyone.

One of the common criticisms of Bradford is that his name is literally Bradford Bradford. At first listen, sure, it’s worth a chuckle. But when you understand the story, it’s incredibly endearing.

Bradford was actually born with a different last name at birth. His first name was an homage to his mother’s family name - a not uncommon naming convention. When Bradford was seven years old, his father was out of the picture and his mother had to raise the kids on her own. Knowing full well he’d take barbs from bullies for having a first name that matched his last, he changed his last name to hers, and he did so proudly. He chose to be Brad Bradford because his respect and dedication to his family was so great that he didn’t mind being chirped for it for the rest of his life. To be frank, if your biggest objection to a politician is their name, then you’re probably aligned and should probably be voting for them. Imagine how meaningful that must have been to his mother, I don’t know a lot of 7 years olds who would stand up for a single mom like that.

Bradford’s Character

Speaking of which, Brad inspires people, and his mother is no different. There are plenty of political families in Canada, but the Bradfords may be the most unique. Bradford’s mother, Valerie was a politician as well - but the difference is that the son convinced the mother to go into politics. Not the other traditional way around. That’s the kind of influence that Bradford has on the people around him. He isn’t someone who just stands on the shoulders of giants. He raises others up. He inspires. He helps the helpers.

A Mayor For Everyone

Finally, Bradford’s motivation for helping others is genuine and broad. The clearest case is that long before any synagogue shootings or rising statistics around anti-Semitism, Bradford stood with the Jewish community of Toronto in a way that no other non-Jewish politician did in the face of hatred.

Bradford did the hard work, he learned what was going on. He showed up. He put his money where his mouth was. To distill it, Bradford noticed a community in his city pleading for help, and when he could have done what practically every other politician did and step aside, Brad stepped up. He said: “I hear you, and I will stand with you through this time of darkness.”

There is no doubt that Bradford would do the same for any other community under similar circumstances. It’s this kind of character that makes people stand with Brad. He has true empathy, and he doesn’t let ideology get in the way of helping those in need.

Those are just some of the things that matter. Brad has a wide appeal, and once they learn a bit about him, his message resonates with individuals from all walks of the city. For proof, we can look at his political endorsements.

They come from politicians past and present on the right, the centre, and the left. Most of them at the moment come from sitting Liberal MPs and MPPs, which should be all the evidence one needs to see that Bradford is a centrist. The advantage to the middle means he’s never going to be bound by ideology. It means he’ll be able to make compromises and tough choices when they present themselves. Finally it means the mayor will once again be someone who will serve and concern himself with helping everyone in the city. Because that’s what this is about: bringing a city back from ideological short-sightedness. Away from polarizing, rash decision-making. Permitting changes in policy based on evidence not the colour shirt you’re wearing.

Bradford believes we are all on the same team, he will be a mayor for every Torontonian, even the ones that don’t vote for him.

I’m voting for Brad Bradford. And I think you should too.

The CBC won’t call it this, but let’s be abundantly clear: on Sunday night, Canada suffered a terror attack.

As congregants gathered at Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville for Kol Nidre, the opening of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, a 29-year-old with a shotgun opened fire on the building and the police officer stationed outside. He came, almost certainly, to murder Jews who were strangers to him. The man who stopped him was one of the people this country trusts to protect them: Constable Jeff Smith of the Belleville Police Service, a hero who is in critical but stable condition at the writing of this article. Without him, there would surely have been a much higher casualty rate. And if there’s one thing we can guarantee, it’s that the Jewish community will support and show up for him. A GoFundMe for the officer was started late Monday night, and the campaign has already blown past its goal. Raising money via donations is just the beginning of that support.

Every single Canadian should consider providing that same support. Because make no mistake, while this was a terrorist attack on Jews it was also a terrorist attack on every single Canadian.

Over the course of their history, Jews have often been the canaries in the coal mine of whatever society they happen to live in. Miners used to bring canaries down the shaft because the birds were so much more sensitive to gas leaks. It impacted them first. If the canary stopped singing, you got out, you made a change, because something was wrong. Something systemic. It’s such a salient allegory that last week in Toronto there was an entire conference on antisemitism and Jew hate titled exactly that: A Canary Song.

No one in the Jewish community is surprised by what happened. Our institutions have had to switch their framing, from preventing incidents at all to minimizing the damage when, God forbid, they do happen. It’s why some are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on security. It’s why there was a police officer parked outside a tiny synagogue in Belleville. “We never would have thought it could happen here” left the Canadian Jewish lexicon decades ago. In the current environment, we assume it will happen here. Two weeks ago, when Jews criticized Toronto’s mayor for not attending the debate on antisemitism, we were laughed at. We were told that we were exaggerating and hyperbolizing the situation for political purposes.

On Monday afternoon, during the calm hours of Yom Kippur, retired Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella gave a fireside chat about a lifetime of fighting for human rights. She brought much of the room to tears, but what stays with me is the clarity with which she said this is the most pressing human rights and safety issue in the country. She didn’t dismiss any other group’s concerns. She simply said that antisemitism needs to be at the top of the list for the time being.

Jews have been accused of hyperbole. Of making a mountain out of a molehill. For the last three years I have been asking myself: when will people start taking this seriously? When the hate speech picks up? When someone is killed? I’m not certain anything is going to change after Sunday, and that is exactly how insidious this is. Constable Smith is not in intensive care by chance. This is the logical next step in a highly sophisticated propaganda campaign designed to terrorize Jews.

I think of it as the creep. It starts the way it’s always started, by finding a vertical to “other” Jews on. In 2026, as for the last several years, that vertical is Israel. Anti-Zionism is the ground upon which Jew-haters find purchase. It’s how they sterilize their message and launder it into the mainstream.

Then the message creeps. It creeps into online rhetoric, into protests in Jewish neighbourhoods and outside Jewish businesses, into vandalism at Israeli shoe stores and Jewish-owned bookstores and supermarkets, into harassment, and the line keeps getting pushed, little by little, until someone goes from vandalizing to opening fire. Girls’ schools are shot up. Synagogues are shot at. You get Constable Marc Pinizzotto, killed in the line of duty in Toronto. You get the SPVM’s Officer Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, killed in the Montreal terrorist attack.

The good men and women working in law enforcement probably don’t have much to say about the Middle East. They want to protect Canadians and they put their lives on the line to do so. And now Belleville, of all places, with barely a Jewish presence at all, is the latest in a long string of attacks. It certainly will not be the last because nothing has ever short-circuited the mechanism. Bad actors are only emboldened, because they see no punishment, no accountability, no responsibility for any of it.

It may come out that this shooter was on the right, a neo-Nazi. It may come out he was on the left, so obsessed with Gaza that he felt he had to act. Or he may have been a zealot inspired by religion. Most likely it’s some combination of one of these with serious mental health problems, and a society failing its most vulnerable. He died in hospital Monday night, so we may never fully know. But it was no accident.

Which brings me to Avi Lewis, and what he posted on Sunday night. Robyn Urback has taken this on extensively in the Globe and Mail. I am not saying Avi Lewis is responsible for this attack. But he is, and needs to be, accountable. Our governments need to be held accountable as well. This is not COVID-19, coming out of nowhere and surprising us. The signs have been there for years.

Lewis is implying that Jews worldwide are responsible for an extermination campaign against Palestinians. It’s a lie. He has no actual evidence, and he’s parroting racist and antisemitic talking points, but that’s exactly the point. This movement hides hate in rhetoric, and rhetoric like this is rocket fuel because it’s unfalsifiable, or at least far too complex to be challenged in a tweet. These are Temu social movements, and history shows us they never last. Their authors make a deal with the devil and trade short-term success for long-term annihilation. No anti-Semitic institution has ever lasted as anti-Semitic. It is a poison pill.

Follow the logic Lewis is selling. When you’re taught that an ethnostate is committing genocide, and that all Jews support it in the name of Jews worldwide, then of course you protest these people. When they don’t listen, you take action. You shoot at their institutions and send a message. And when that message only makes Jews celebrate their homeland and dig in for a fight, well, they’ve chosen their fate, haven’t they? Terrorism, murder, and violence all become logical conclusions. The logic is technically rational. But the premise is a lie, so every conclusion built on it is false. If we don’t correct the public record on what’s happening in the Middle East, these attacks will continue, and they’ll get worse.

And it isn’t only the Avi Lewises of the country. Anyone who has picked up this rhetoric without knowing their history needs to look inward and recognize that parroting talking points about a foreign conflict causes damage. It is so important to remember that if you aren’t paying for a product on social media, then you are the product. If Canadians don’t stop to soberly consider how we let ourselves be worked into a frenzy of hatred by tweets, TikTok videos, and zero-context images of conflicts, then we are doing ourselves an injustice. We need to acquire the perspective that this is happening, and who is sponsoring it. The shooters in Montreal and Belleville are both dead. The hatred that drove them is alive and well. After Constable Smith and the congregants at Sons of Jacob, there are 40 million more victims this week. We owe it to them to hold ourselves accountable. All Canadians should consider their way of life under imminent threat.

Thoughts and prayers are not enough. That’s the difference between optimism and hope. In one of his Yom Kippur sermons, Rabbi Steve Wernick quoted Jonathan Sacks’s philosophy on the two. Optimism is easy: a belief that requires no effort, a delusion that things will get better eventually. I am guilty of being an optimist. I’m a Toronto Maple Leafs fan, after all. Hope, according to Sacks, is active. It’s believing you can influence the world through work, effort, and stick-to-it-ness. Optimism requires no courage. Hope requires the courage to confront reality, suffering, and tragedy, and then resolve to change them through action.

So is this the moment Canadians channel their hope? Or will we keep being optimists on the sidelines until the next terrorist approaches?

The Word We Need Is Judeophobia

Prominent Jewish thinkers have gone through three long years of hard thinking on semantics. I think most of the work is great. The process is great. The conclusion is wrong.

So simply put, I will back off and fall in line with “Jew Hate” if you can answer me this:

If anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, then why is anti-Zionism de facto Jew hate?

Here’s the logic, and it’s good logic: our understanding of this thing has evolved, and the language needs to evolve with it. You don’t keep using the 1950s definition of a word after you’ve learned something the 1950s didn’t know. And what we’ve learned, post October 7th, is that “antisemitism” can’t hold what’s actually happening anymore. Antisemitism means racism against Jews. Specifically Ashkenazi Jews. Ie, the race. Anti-Zionism, whatever else it is, is not technically that. So when someone says “I’m not racist against Jews, I just hate Israel,” they’re not lying about the dictionary. They’re right. And that’s the trap. That’s the fundamental reason these brilliant thinkers are suggesting we change the vocabulary.

To close the trap, the people building this model — and I want to be clear, I think they’re right about everything else — went looking for something underneath. A root cause. A single current of discrimination against Jews running under the surface of history, throwing off different symptoms depending on the century. Blood libel in the Christian era. Anti-Judaism in medieval Europe. The forced converts in Spain, watched for centuries in case the conversion wasn’t real. Then racial antisemitism, which is the version we’ve mostly been dealing with for the last hundred and fifty years. And now, the theory goes, anti-Zionism. Same virus, new symptom. (As a matter of fact, I would contend that anti-Zionism goes way back and started much earlier — anti-Zionism, or an aversion to the Jewish state, is an old habit. The Romans had it. The Babylonians had it. They wanted to destroy ancient Judea. They succeeded.)

I think all of this is almost right. But it comes to the threshold and then takes a sharp turn.

Anti-Zionism is a hate movement. Yes, for sure. It is a double standard, etc etc, no argument there. What I’m asking is the question I opened with, and after asking many smart people, I have not gotten a satisfactory answer. If anti-Zionism is not antisemitism — and by the model’s own logic, it isn’t, that’s the entire reason we needed a new word in the first place — then why do we think we can treat it as de facto Jew hate? We cannot painstakingly build the case that the old term needs replacing or an evolution because it’s too narrow, and then turn around and pour the exact same old meaning into the new one. Pick one. Either the category has changed, or it hasn’t.

You can love Jews and want Israel to not exist. It is possible to say “I love Jews. I want Israel destroyed.” Both sentences can be true at the same time, held by the same person, with no contradiction between them. You might think that’s an insane position — I would tend to agree it is at the very least incredibly misguided. It is certainly uninformed. But it is not necessarily hateful.

You can, for example, love the story of the Palestinians so much that you don’t think Israel should exist. That doesn’t mean you hate Jews. Uninformed and wrong isn’t the same as hateful, and if we keep treating them as synonyms we are going to lose the argument to the first Jewish anti-Zionist we come across.

Now, most of the time? Sure. Seventy, eighty percent of the time, when you pull back the anti-Zionism, there’s a person underneath who just hates Jews and found a more respectable coat to wear. I’m not naive about that. But “most of the time” is not “always,” and a model that only works most of the time is a model with a crack in it, and everyone — especially the Jew haters — eventually finds the crack and exploits it.

And here’s what happens when they find it. Some percentage of anti-Zionists genuinely, sincerely do not hate Jews. So you call them a Jew hater anyway, because the model says the underlying cause is always hatred, and they say: no, I don’t. Now what? Have you ever tried accusing someone of hating something they insist that they don’t hate? It is not a good way to win an argument, and it is a spectacular way to lose one, because now the entire fight is accusing them of evil. Of being hateful. Venomous. Of loathing a population they do not know. They’re not going to change their mind about Israel. You have handed them the exit and you have pissed them off.

I don’t believe that someone who does not think Israel should exist is automatically working from opinions based in hatred. I think most reasonable people, when they dwell on this idea, will come to that same conclusion. I think that anti-Zionist person is working from a theory. A wrong one, in my view. But a theory has a logic to it, and for many, hatred is not part of that.

I suspect we picked the term “Jew hatred” because it is evocative. It feels really good to simply say that someone who hates Israel hates Jews. And they probably do — but they don’t always, and that is so important. It is a trap that we are setting for ourselves because we are hurt. But we would do well to be specific and not make a rash decision.

Otherwise our leaders are going to start accusing a lot of people of hating Jews. That is strictly an escalation, and while it does feel good, it feels true, and oftentimes it is, it is not in line with our values to punch like this. To insult. No — the correct path is to have empathy for those who are misinformed or ignorant. Not to call them hateful if they are not coming from hate. That will win us no friends. That will in fact make the problem worse.

So if hatred is the wrong word — too precise, too easy to disprove with a single sentence, and inflammatory — what’s the right one?

Judeophobia.

Judeophobia: the irrational fear, hatred, or aversion to Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Israelis. It’s built to hold the whole range without breaking the first time someone hands it a counterexample.

Not hatred. Phobia. I mean it the way it is already understood by the entire Western world. We already use the suffix to great effect and success. Sharp thinkers will retort: “Phobia doesn’t work because it means afraid.” Well, homophobia doesn’t mean “fear of gay people.” Homophobia covers the spectrum. Yes, someone who hates gay people. But also, someone who is just afraid of what they might do around his kids. Or who feels homosexuality is strictly immoral for no reason other than it disturbs their psyche.

That’s not hatred, necessarily. That could be fear. It is certainly an irrational aversion. It’s a double standard applied. We didn’t solve homophobia by saying all homophobes hated gays. We kept one word big enough to hold fear, aversion, discomfort, and yes, sometimes hatred too, all under one roof. That’s why the term works. That’s why it stuck. Islamophobia did the same thing, for the same reason. It is working incredibly well. Islamophobia is perhaps a tired term. It certainly invokes some eye-rolls, but it is highly effective. We should take a lesson from our Muslim cousins.

Judeophobia, as “Jew hatred” intends, does what antisemitism can’t anymore. It covers the person who genuinely, unambiguously hates Jews. It covers the person who doesn’t hate Jews at all, loves Judaism, has Jewish friends, and still finds something icky about a Jewish state existing that he wouldn’t find icky about literally any other state on earth existing. That’s not hatred. That’s a phobia — an aversion he can’t fully account for, that only ever seems to land on one people.

Finally, Judeophobia lets us retire “self-hating Jew,” which was always a strange and cruel phrase anyway. A Jew who doesn’t believe in Israel almost never hates Jews. What he has — and this is the far more useful diagnosis — is internalized Judeophobia. The same phenomenon everyone already understands from internalized homophobia, applied to a different population. Nobody’s shocked when a gay person absorbs the culture’s aversion to himself. We shouldn’t be shocked when it happens to Jews either. I am twenty thousand words deep on that particular topic right now — the “self-hatred,” what I call “internalized Judeophobia,” doesn’t typically come from hate.

So what does this mean for “Jew hatred”? Rather than being the underlying cause, Jew hatred is to me better suited to be another modern manifestation of the same underlying root cause. It is the evolution of antisemitism. Jew hatred is to the Jewish people what antisemitism was to the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe. As our understanding of Jewish peoplehood has returned to just that — Jewish peoplehood — thus has Jew hatred emerged. It is a real thing and it is a real problem. But it is not all-encompassing.

Ultimately, what I am saying is that we have picked the wrong word here, and we are setting ourselves up for failure. Because Jew hatred as a term has the same incompleteness as antisemitism. I know it feels good, but feeling good is not going to win any arguments. Jewish thinkers have been doing tremendous work on this, but I think we are making a mistake. We got the ball to the one-yard line and then, at the very last step, we handed the whole argument back to the other side, for free, by insisting the new territory was hatred. All someone has to do is say the one sentence that’s technically true.

“I don’t hate Jews. I just hate Israel.”

Fine. You might not hate Jews. But you certainly have an aversion to them. You might be afraid, you might be comfortable with an irrational double standard. That is Judeophobia.

A year ago, I put out two thousand words in an essay I titled The High Hat.

It was scary to hit publish. I was angry. Two years of constant post-October 7th pressure had changed my world completely. Being Jewish had stopped being a neutral characteristic. It shifted from being a benign piece of my identity to suddenly something that put a target on my back.

Over those two years, I watched people I knew and loved get tricked into supporting hate movements. I lost friends. I tried to take the high road for a long time. And then something broke.

The High Hat was a call to action, aimed especially at young adult Jews — the ones of us who’d been relatively complacent our whole lives. Rightfully so. We’d lived in wholly uninteresting times, at least as it pertained to our heritage. We were raised on stories of survivors, but it never occurred to us that threat would return in our lifetimes.

So I pleaded with my network to try different words, to step up, to become leaders. No one else was coming to save us. It had to be us.

The best thing to do is to lead by example. So for the last year, I tried to live those values that I was demanding of everyone else.

I am completely ordinary. But if I have a superpower it is that I suffer from just enough self-delusion that I genuinely believe I can make a change. We are all, in some ways, suffering from imposter syndrome.

So I started where I was. I thought and I spoke and I wrote about Jewish issues in ways that were, until then, impossible. I tried to leverage my voice — but most importantly, I rediscovered the strength of will to drag other people along with me.

I serve on the board at Beth Tzedec in Toronto. I spend most of my time there thinking about how to galvanize the community. We have over 1,000 members under 40. A year ago it felt like there were maybe twenty-five of us who showed up consistently. Today it feels like one hundred. Sure, that’s not a thousand. But it’s something.

Slowly but surely, incredible people — young leaders, doers, and change-makers — made themselves known. They stepped up. They validated every single late-night conversation I’d had with clergy, friends, and mentors about the intricacies of building something genuine.

A year ago, within the under-forty cohort, I could count on one hand the people I was confident could become change-makers. This year there’s a dozen at least, and they’re more talented, more capable, and younger than I am. In time they will be far better leaders than I ever was.

Next year, there will be more.

When I published The High Hat, I wasn’t banking on many people paying attention to what I had to say. Writing had only ever been personal therapy — journal entries, one page at a time, always in black ink. But as I kept writing, and putting myself out there, being vulnerable and honest, things changed. Peers started mentioning that they’d always wanted to write publicly and put something out into the world. So what started as accordingtoJacob became accordingto.ca.

A roster of writers started showing up, one at a time. They contributed, they made the site something. Their creativity and their intellect astonished me and motivated me to do even better. They’re all busy. They have lives and jobs and families, but a handful write regularly for the site now.

Next year, there will be more.

With accordingto, some people trusted us enough to sign up and hear from us regularly. accordingto’s subscriber list is modest, a hundred or so people. But we still haven’t even hit the site’s first anniversary. One hundred feels small. But two felt much smaller.

And next year, there will be more.

There are nights I feel like I’m screaming into the great aether — collaborators gone quiet, hours of work turning into a paltry number of site visits. But when I check the analytics, I can see that in less than a year, thirty thousand people have visited accordingto. That’s thirty thousand interactions, a sharing of ideas that, hopefully, made someone think differently about a topic, an issue, or about their life.

Thirty thousand people is a lot. But next year, at this time, there will be more.

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As Jews enter the Days of Awe, we are asked to take a spiritual accounting of our lives in the context of the year that has passed. I’ve always liked that the High Holidays carve out time for this important work. This year, for me, that accounting is more practical than usual. I’m thinking about how to effect change. I am thinking ahead. I am considering what I want to be able to say this time next year.

What will I have been responsible for? What will I have been most proud of? What difference will I actually have made?

I am standing at the threshold of some pretty big life changes. I live life with a clear-eyed understanding that none of us are here forever.

So whether you’re Jewish or not — on this Rosh Hashanah, I want to ask you another version of what I asked you last year. What difference can you make? And how do you make that difference?

Here is my promise to you. If you commit, and you stick to it, and you demand better of yourself and of your peers — for the right reasons, with real intentions of goodness and mutual prosperity — you will, very slowly, start to move the needle. You will start to make a difference.

If you’ve felt called to do more in your life, then seriously consider that call. Consider it not for yourself.

Consider it for the dozen people you might inspire to step up and lead. Consider it for the hundred or so who trust you enough to want to listen to what you have to say. Consider it for the thirty thousand who you might impact in passing.

The late great Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks demonstrated that there are things — like power — that if you share, you lose. Zero sum. Sacks talked about love, but I will mention leadership. Because if you have love or leadership to share, and you do, then you are also enhanced. There will be more.

So if you consider those people, and accept the mantle of leadership, for yourself, for your family, for your community, or for society at large — I promise you that in a year from now, when you are doing your spiritual accounting.

There will be more.

Shana Tova

Canada’s counter-tariffs came into effect on Tuesday as the trade war entered its third week. In the meantime, the federal Liberals swept three by-elections, and there was hope that the temperature might diminish. In actuality, the situation is only more tense and it seems like Canada is digging in its heels.

There is a useful lens through which to examine this conflict: in his 2015 book Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall argued that no amount of political will or technological progress erases the physical constraints of where a country sits on a map. Canada borders just one country, the United States of America. The limits of time and space mean that Canada has to manage the American relationship differently than overseas countries do. When we start examining the trade war through that lens, we can think a little more rationally about the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Canadians are seeing red, and justifiably so. The Americans did start this conflict, after all. But to cut through the noise and see the full landscape is vitally important. Here are some hard truths that Canadians need to know:

Canada is Not the 51st State

First and foremost, we have to remember that we aren’t America. Of course, that’s the whole point of the trade war. But too many people seem to skip out on the fundamentals. The fact that a free trade deal is necessary in the first place exists because we aren’t the same country. That’s a good thing. But it means that there are some key differences around “Free Trade”.

American states have free trade with each other, which means that if there’s bourbon distilled in Kentucky, Americans can buy and sell it anywhere in the US without any extra taxation. Because Canada is a different country, that bourbon cannot cross the border without someone paying a tax, referred to as a duty. If you’ve ever wondered why beer and cigarettes are cheaper when you cross the border or take a plane in from another country, this is why. The difference in price is the duty tax.

So this very fundamental note is the first big misunderstanding: the free trade agreement that we have is a misnomer. It’s never actually been “free” in the way that the vast majority of Canadians understand it to be. It would be better categorized as a “mostly free” trade agreement. So when Donald Trump says Canada wants all the benefits of being a state without being a state, this is what he is talking about.

This is so vital because Canadians have it in their minds that we have some kind of carte blanche with the Americans. Intuitively, free trade implies that we are able to move all of our goods in and out across the border, the way that we can move ourselves across the border, and that that is our right. But the truth is that it’s never actually been that way. We just feel like it’s that way because we’ve had such a great relationship in the past.

It is even more vital to understand that the Canada-US relationship is an exception on the global scale. The vast majority of countries do not have as liberal a trade agreement as Canada and the Americans do. That’s what Mark Carney was talking about when he said that “Canada has the best deal in the world with the United States”.

Of course it is frustrating, the “mostly” free trade deal that Canada has had has been extremely beneficial for Canada. But we are a different country. The Americans are essentially saying “We have the biggest and best market in the world, and we don’t want to give access to that market away for free”. Canadians are well within their rights to be bothered by this change in stance from the other side and to push back on this notion. But it is not Canada’s God-given right to trade with the United States, and the Americans do not get to trade with Canada for free. To look at another global example, the whole reason the European Union exists is to simplify and reduce trade barriers.

There is much aversion to this idea of “fortress North America,” but that is what CUSMA essentially is. Lowering of barriers between three neighbouring countries to promote (mostly) free trade across their borders.

These things do change over time as well. The United Kingdom was a part of the European Union and they voted to leave it. A huge consequence of that is that they needed to establish new free trade rules. The EU, by the way, already tariffs Canadian goods like steel.

The thing with rules and agreements is that parties can walk away. If Rogers raises the price on a customer’s phone bill, they can walk or not. These things happen all the time. Deals are not binding forever. Organizations and people change their minds. It is not in Canada’s interest to be precious about this fact.

International agreements ought to be upheld, of course, but there’s no judge, jury, or police force to call when another country says they want to charge you more. Governments change, tastes change, circumstances change. It is frustrating, but it is not completely offside.

Canadians are right to be upset. We have to be sober about the reality of the world we are living in. “Fair” is subjective.

Mark Carney, Master of Rhetoric

If you really pay attention to his rhetoric, Mark Carney is extremely deliberate in the words he has used to describe this dispute. Weeks on, there is still no evidence, either for or against Mr. Carney’s claims about who changed what aspects of the phantom trade deal.

The prime minister is effectively using inflammatory language to ignite the passions of Canadians and to drum up their patriotism. It is working very well, but he has still provided no evidence that what he is saying is credible. Now, most Canadians are rightfully inclined to trust the prime minister and his trade negotiators over those of a foreign entity.

However, it is neither unreasonable nor unpatriotic to be demanding specifics before accepting the casus belli for a global conflict. If Canada is at war, then we should be unabashed and specific about socializing exactly why. The best evidence to trust the government’s position is that the United States hasn’t produced a trade document either.

There is a common rebuttal that prudent negotiators will not share unsigned trade deal documents in order to preserve the credibility of negotiating positions. However, this does not really apply here. While the public is uncertain on specifics, surely the other country at play here — the United States — already knows what was in the document, so there is no secret to keep.

Most conveniently and alarmingly has been the pushback against any wartime dissenters. There are very few Ameriphiles in the Canadian polity at this moment.

But it is a scandal that any kind of dissent or questioning is being treated as a crime. Andrew Coyne put out a frankly offensive opinion article in the Globe & Mail this week insinuating that anyone who does not fully endorse this government’s handling of the trade dispute is disloyal to Canada.

To be clear, in 99% of cases, these are not people who are disavowing Canada or accusing the government of manufacturing a crisis — they are simply asking for the evidence that Canada was attacked. When politicos like Sean Speer write about a path forward, this is not treason — it is steps ahead of the fever pitch we are in. Eventually, someone has to make a deal. If you can’t trust Trump, fine — but Trump is democratically elected. He represents some critical mass of the American population. Why does Canada assume that things will change when he is gone? Trump has dominated US politics for twelve years. Are Canadians still so naive that we think that this is an accident?

Now, there is an irrefutable fact that must be acknowledged here. The trade war has been political rocket fuel for the federal Liberal party. The Liberals were elected in 2025 with 43% of the popular vote. They were given a mandate as a minority government.

That has changed, primarily via floor crossings, and there are now some seven by-elections happening this fall, three of which the Liberals have already won.

Although they were elected as a minority, the Liberals have absolute power to make decisions on Canada-US relations without any accountability from the opposition.

It is undeniable that this trade war has been extremely positive for the prime minister’s domestic political standing, and that fact cannot be discounted when examining the circumstances. That is not to say the government’s actions are not necessarily justified on this matter — but to point these obvious facts out is not treasonous. It is necessary perspective.

Once we accept the reality of domestic politics, it is reasonable to ask for some verification and evidence if Canada is going to war.

To accuse your fellow Canadians of being traitors for not supporting the prime minister is not right, and it ruins our own internal credibility. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Coyne wrote an entire book about how dangerous it was that Canadian power is so centralized. Clearly, that isn’t an issue in circumstances where Coyne agrees with the PMO.

It is not controversial to think that it would be best for Canada if the government was more transparent. Nor is it offside to be demanding that parliament be sitting if the country is at war. To deny Canadians these requests and label them traitors over requests for information and democratic debates is just as authoritarian as anything the Americans or Donald Trump has ever done.

Leverage, Proportionality, and the US Midterms

Beyond taxes and duties, there are tariffs. Fundamentally we must acknowledge that for 99% of the Canadian population, they could not describe the difference between the three. A tariff is a duty that governments impose on imported goods to disincentivize consumers and businesses from purchasing foreign products over domestic ones. The importer pays the tariff, though the cost is almost always passed on to the consumer through higher prices. In other words, Canadian counter tariffs are taxes on Canadians.

With regards to leverage and proportionality, Canada needs to sober up a bit about its circumstances. If Canada is to match the American tariffs dollar for dollar, that will be disastrous for Canadians.

It is easy to forget that the USA is ten times the size of Canada. It has a completely different climate, far more industry and agriculture, and yes, it is the biggest and most valuable market in the world. Consider the size of these countries when it comes to going shot-for-shot with the Americans: Canada does seventy percent of its trade with the United States. The US, on the other hand, does less than twenty percent of its trade with us.

This is what it looks like to be a smaller country sharing a border with a much larger one. The math around leverage was never going to be close.

Culturally, Americans do not think about Canada at all. In Canada, it is impossible not to think about the United States. The US is culturally dominant over Canada.

Every Canadian has an opinion on Donald Trump. Canadians all had opinions on Kamala Harris. Americans do not know who Mark Carney is. They certainly do not know who Pierre Poilievre is.

The trade war is massive news in Canada. It is practically uncovered in the United States. Americans simply don’t think about Canada at all. They do not care.

This is the essential context that the Canadian public seems to be ignoring. The leverage we are implying — that we are somehow hurting the American economy by implementing counter tariffs, which again, are taxes on Canadians, not on Americans — does not exist. At least not nearly to the extent Canadian opinion makers are insinuating.

It is unlikely that the trade war will move the needle on American politics for the foreseeable future. The American electorate is uninterested in Canada. What voter was supporting Trump but has now determined that this issue is the final straw?

Let’s steel-man the argument, however, and accept momentarily that Canada does have current leverage over the president. The primary theory in Canadian media is that Canada’s leverage is currently at its high-water mark because the US midterms are less than two months away.

To explore potential outcomes, we can fast-forward two months, and imagine the two scenarios once the US midterms are over.

If the Democrats are successful, and he lost in part because of Canada’s decisions, why exactly is Donald Trump going to reverse these tariffs? A more logical response given what we know about the president is that he would likely be enraged. If nothing else, he would be scorned and looking for someone to blame. It would be simple for him to go even further into anti-Canadian positions if he believes he lost an election because of Canada.

Now, imagine the other scenario, where Trump wins the midterms — despite Canadian politicians antagonizing him, calling names, and poking the bear. It is not likely that suddenly the president becomes enlightened, humble, and modest. It is far more likely again that this continues, except now Trump is emboldened further.

If this seems like a lose-lose scenario, it is because it is. This means that Canada needs to be deft and deliberate. There is no guarantee that once Trump is gone in 2030, circumstances will change for the better either.

All that said, if Canada does have leverage now, then now is the best time to get the best terms for a trade deal. If the US midterms are a factor at all, once those elections have passed, we are weaker. Canadians should not like any of this, it is unfortunately the reality however.

Escalation

Finally, we can look at the idea of counter tariffs and, beyond those, escalation. Federal NDP leader Avi Lewis recently said: let’s go even further. Let’s really stick it to the Americans. “When you’re in a war, you use your strongest weapons. And our power in this trade war comes from resources we have that the US needs — like oil, gas, potash, and other critical minerals.”

The argument here is essentially: let’s escalate — and let’s charge the Americans even more for the energy and the lumber and all the essential things we currently ship to the United States.

Well, saying “When you’re in a war, you use your strongest weapons” is an outdated and disastrous way of thinking.

The big nations never use their biggest weapons in wars. The Americans and the Russians and the Israelis have nuclear weapons. They never use them. Why? First, it is because the deterrence provided by those weapons is highly effective. More importantly, however, there is the concept of mutual destruction and annihilation that comes with escalations.

So if our “nuclear option” is to start withholding or taxing the essential goods going to the States — the energy, the potash, etc. — well, what would the American nuclear option be in that case?

Canada, we must remember, is a cold place. Canada relies on other countries for its essentials too. Essentials like food. In fact, roughly half of Canada’s imported food comes from the United States. So if Canada withheld energy, what is to stop the Americans from withholding or taxing our food?

This is just one drastic example, but it is demonstrative of the actual leverage we have given the size and location of our country. Canada is on an international trade front, still an extremely small fish compared to the United States. The US is the biggest economy in the world, and it’s the only country Canada shares a border with.

If the giant to the south has completely lost its way, Canada has to deal with that. No one outside Canada really cares if Canada gets trampled on or suffers in any kind of prolonged dispute. Diversification is an excellent future state. But it is not nearly as simple as it is portrayed. If it was easy and beneficial for Canada to trade with other places, they would be doing so. Canada does not have a close relationship with the US out of the goodness of Canadians’ hearts. It has been a highly advantageous market to access.

You cannot change geography. Canada is bound by its own physical position in the world. The border is vast, and almost all of the major Canadian population centres are a stone’s throw to the USA.

Canada is a prisoner of geography and that will never change. This is just the way of the world. Globalization is great, but you still need to physically move goods around. You still need to live beside other nations, no matter who they are electing.

There are simple hurdles raised by the basic realities of time and space that need to be overcome. You cannot relocate Canada. This means knowing your neighbour intimately and knowing how to deal with them when they are acting up.

These are hard truths, but they are truths. So if Canada wants to move towards prosperity, the sabre rattling, the inflaming of passions, and the internal accusations need to subside.

It is being felt gradually, but there is more pain coming. Canada needs to tread carefully and meet reality where it is.

Tuesday night, Toronto got its first mayoral debate of the campaign. Or at least, it was supposed to.

What it actually got was a series of seven speakers, a moderator, and one glaring empty chair.

A rabbi opened the evening. Four city councillors took turns at the podium. Two mayoral candidates, Brad Bradford and Chris Alexander, sat down for one-on-one interviews. Jesse Brown of Canadaland moderated.

Olivia Chow was not in the building.

That was the biggest story before a single word was said about policy, and it’s the story that should follow this race. Can Torontonians support a mayor who is not willing to support all Torontonians?

Toronto’s municipal politics have been sleepy since the election following John Tory’s resignation in 2023. Tuesday night was the opening salvo of what could be an extremely interesting couple of months. Hell hath no fury like a populace scorned, and Torontonians will take note that their mayor lacked the courage to speak in front of a crowd composed mainly of grey-haired lawyers, clergy, and politicos.

Winners

Brad Bradford

Bradford didn’t just show up. He owned the room, and he did it in what was essentially a home game for him. He took his shots at the mayor — but he took them respectfully. He captured the gravity of the moment perfectly and has developed into a strong storyteller. Bradford showed that he is the kind of candidate who can hold a crowd on a personal register and then zoom back out to “I want to be a mayor for everyone.”

He got the tangible stuff too. An official endorsement from Councillor James Pasternak. He got something close to one from Mike Colle — “I wouldn’t have a problem with Brad Bradford as mayor” — the kind of thing an Italian father might say when he approves of his daughter’s fiancé.

Bradford received multiple standing ovations over the course of the night. He took advantage of the environment.

On policy, Bradford met Brown’s questions with the specifics he was asking for — though he would not say what he thought about the current police chief. Bradford emerged from the night with strong stances on public safety and integrity, and an excellent kickoff to the stretch drive of the mayoral race.

Bradford indicated that safety needs to be priority number one. That’s not a complicated message. It’s just one he was willing to say plainly, on principle, in a way Mayor Chow has not been. This was a home game, and Bradford played it like one. Call it a coup.

Diane Saxe

If the mayoral candidate interviews were the prize fight, the city councillor speeches were the undercard. No one in the audience expected the most compelling preliminary speech of the night to come from Saxe, but that’s exactly what happened.

Saxe alluded briefly to her last-minute change of plans without getting into details. She was a highlight because she held the crowd in a way that, frankly, surprised a lot of the audience who were at the time ready to proceed to the main event.

She may have been the best speaker on the stage.

Saxe talked about why she has been wearing a kippah for the better part of three years. Known as a progressive, Saxe spoke to her experience on council and told the story of the vitriol she’s been on the receiving end of from some of her constituents. The anecdote of the antisemitism that Saxe experiences on a regular basis is a testament to just how vital this subject is to address.

Saxe also made an impassioned appeal to the mechanics of council and the fact that, no matter who wins the mayor’s chair — council races might matter more. A sentiment that politics nerds of all stripes can appreciate.

Jesse Brown

For several years now, Brown has been the target of a hate campaign. This evening was no different. His independent media company, Canadaland, has some of the most passionate subscribers in the nation. Many of his former subscribers have lost the plot and have sunk into some terrible behaviour.

Brown had to moderate an event with an incumbent-sized hole and addressed the elephant in the room — Chow — with grace and respect. There is no doubt he would have treated the mayor that exact way had she been in attendance.

As far as interviewing the two candidates he sat down with, he was fair but firm. When they gave him a political non-answer, he followed up instead of moving on.

Brown got Alexander to admit that he might drop out if winning seemed impossible as the campaign went on, and continued to push for answers that would have actually been relevant to the city. Alexander clearly did not have a mastery over the subject matter and Brown’s questions exposed that. None of those questions were gotchas, they were straightforward and disarming.

When sitting down with Bradford, Brown held the candidate to account on his record as a councillor and doubled down on some tough questions. He managed to get Bradford to actually answer the question about the roots of the actual problems of antisemitism and violence against Jews. Bradford met Brown’s toughest questions with specific answers — declaring that as mayor he would not abdicatewhat he sees as one of the most vital of duties — sitting on the police board. The police answer to the board, after all, and as Bradford tells it, every mayor for the last twenty years has sat in that chair — except Mayor Chow.

Brown, with a great deal of chutzpah, also managed to work in a mini membership drive for his company, a risky move in a place like Toronto where people don’t like to be solicited. Brown was upfront about why he was doing it: although combatting hate has been a feature of the coverage for Canadaland, they have lost some subscribers since covering antisemitism. You can check out Brown’s work at Canadaland here.

Hon mention: James Pasternak for picking a perfect moment for an endorsement.

Losers

Olivia Chow

Not showing up for Toronto is going to follow the mayor for the rest of this campaign. Torontonians don’t love being told, implicitly or explicitly, that they’re not worth an evening. You see it all the time when a sports team or their star player loses its lustre. That’s what skipping this event communicated, that this simply wasn’t worth the effort.

It might have been tough, but Chow could have shown up and shown grace instead. As Brown pointed out from the stage, the room would have gone in skeptical of her — that’s fair, that’s politics — but it would have been respectful. It would have given her a chance to make her case in front of the entire city. Like so many chances this mayor has had to deliver for her constituents, she simply didn’t take it.

Now, from the outset, Chow is in danger of losing her credibility. Toronto at its core is still a blue-collar town, Torontonians want a scrappy leader. Someone who will fight for them. They are not interested in someone who will cower away from adversity. This single terrible decision could be the string that unravels a fifty-year political career.

Toronto’s Keyboard Warriors

While the event itself was well attended. In the days leading up to the debate, there was a significant, coordinated wave of bad-faith activity. The brigading tried to defend Chow’s decision to not face the music. It tried to discredit the moderator and mischaracterize what the event actually was, before it had even begun.

Partisan activists repeated ad nauseam a racist fabrication that this event was some kind of Zionist death trap meant to ambush the mayor.

The inconvenient fact for that crowd: the word “Israel” was said zero times, by the moderator or by either mayoral candidate, across the entire evening. Zero.

The other inconvenient fact — about half of city council and dozens of candidates were in that room. Toronto’s body politic has, it seemed, smartened up to these characters. Anyone who would attempt to blacklist and suppress something as fundamental to democracy as a debate on public safety is not participating in politics in good faith.

Luckily for Toronto, the event was a success.

Josh Matlow

He went unnamed all night, but he didn’t go unmentioned. Saxe’s coup of a speech sniped at Matlow without naming him directly. Matlow’s ward carries a significant Jewish constituency, but he is on record voting against bubble zones in the city. He was the only Jewish councillor who didn’t speak on Tuesday night. There was no reason given by Matlow or the organizers.

He was at least, in attendance.

Matlow’s seat in Toronto-St. Paul’s is considered extremely safe. But nights like this are how “safe” seats start looking like something else — just ask challenger Jenny Kalimbet, who now might have some real leverage.

Hon Mention: The Toronto Police Chief was not in attendance

One debate does not determine the outcome of a campaign. But it can set the terms of one, and Tuesday night did that despite Olivia Chow attempting to dodge the question.

Brad Bradford started the campaign with momentum, integrity, and a strong stance on public safety for an entire city.

Chow started out with an empty chair.

“Anti-Zionism is a hate movement.” - Adam Louis-Klein

In 2026, Anti-Zionism is the most dominant strain of systemic Judeophobia. It therefore is reasonable that also the most substantial portion of Jewish self-hatred ie, Internalized Judeophobia. While we discussed what internalized Judeophobia looks like in part X, we need to carve out an entire section to discuss anti-Zionism.

There is already a tremendous amount of literature, work, and thinking done on the scourge of anti-Zionism. Nevertheless, it is vital to briefly examine how it manifests within the framework of Internalized Judeophobia.

On the more benign end of the spectrum, we witness Jews who have decided that wearing a kippah is embarrassing. They agree that Jews are rich, and that Israel is just as bad as Iran.

Along the middle of the spectrum, we see Jews who genuinely believe that if they weren’t Jewish, life would be better - their Jewish identity is inconvenient for their chosen target identity. These opinions begin to see Jewish institutions as not just ineffective or unnecessary, but as actively harmful, if not evil - this is where the “Not in my name” crowd fits. They have accepted the external notion that there is active harm being done on their behalf.

As these people move along the spectrum, as well as the asymptote of assimilation, unmoored Jews continue to absorb the propaganda. They internalize the double standard applied from watching enough coverage from outlets like Al Jazeera. They believe the “truth tellers” who are “exposing what’s true”. They put their tin foil hats on and believe the conspiracy theories. They become convinced that their people’s existence can and should be conditional on conforming to their group’s politics. In 2026, this has no analogue like that of anti-Zionism.

Zionism is and always has been the simple notion that the Jewish people have a right to a nation state in their ancestral homeland.

Anti-Zionism is the active denial of this simple fact. It is a nonsensical and hateful ideology that fits every single main point. It requires an extreme kabuki theatre of denial - a hyperbolic double standard so unmoored from reality that it seems compelling. No one could lie about something like that, you would think.

For Anti-Zionism to be even remotely coherent, it needs to first create the ultimate straw man out of Zionism. Zionism, as they would explain it, is no longer a simple, positive conclusion to a two thousand year exile. For anti-Zionism to exist, Zionism must be reframed as racist. Zionism must be described as colonialist. Zionism must be painted as a uniquely evil ideology. It must ignore history. It must ignore reality.

This can only be done with extreme fantastical enhancements. Centuries of compounding propaganda, spanning across civilizations, and manifesting in 2026 as the ultimate omnicause. Anti-Zionists need to be credited for their unwavering commitment to their cause. They have injected their hate movement into every corner of western culture.

They have done so via lawfare and via the media. They have made their cause about religion, and about human rights. They have masked a hate movement as being positioned in opposition to hate.

They have figured out how to make millions of people ignore facts through sheer strength of will. They have repeated lies enough that they sound true. They have optimized the rhetoric. They have applied such dramatic pressure on politicians and organizations that those institutions have forgotten to check the facts.

They have relentlessly minimized any idea, event, circumstance, or truth that could detract from their goal. They have hyperbolized and propagandized and sensationalized any one thing that paints their cause as noble. Many books have been, are being, and will be written about this matter.

The fundamental reality however, is that anti-Zionism is a movement based in lies. Its premise is impossible and collapses under scrutiny. It cannot hold up to truth. For Jews, this is the safe harbour. Truth is on Israel’s side. Despite all of its shortcomings — which any Jew and any Israeli would gladly point out, there is no circumstance in which anti-Zionism has any credibility. (With perhaps the rare exception of religious orthodox Jews who have a strictly religious motivation, that of Israel as a barrier to a return of the messiah).

The marketing and branding of the hate movement is ingenious. It has been framed as a festival, a purity crusade masquerading as a party. The entire saga is a massive sales pitch. The fine print of course, is never read. Because the depth is never fully examined, there exists heavy cover for the enabling of an orgiastic condemnation of the wrong kind of Jews. In a world where so little is under our control, there is a soft target in Israel. It is the systemic prejudice, the organized hate, on full display.

When this gets internalized by a Jewish person, they do not understand that their own history has been rewritten for them. They do not understand that they are under threat by a people who actively seek to destroy some of the most fundamental aspects Jews and Judaism.

Anti-Zionism is, by a wide margin, the most pervasive manifestation of internalized Judeophobia in the world today. Israel has been vilified and held to such a distinct standard that it’s become radioactive for a lot of people. In many political spaces, being anti-Zionist is simply table stakes for participation.

Those hateful participants can not ever have a reasonable conversation without fundamentally creating straw man arguments, or dodging the question. They attempt to change the definition of Zionism. Whenever they are approaching having to answer the question logically, they say the questions are not asked in good faith, or they blink over to a new libel. This is of course, not how any other debate or logical argument works in any circumstance whatsoever. An anti-Zionist does not have license to define Zionism. The same way an anti-anything does not have license to initially define the “thing” it is against.

That reframing is so key and its acceptance and internalization is one of the most damning and damaging shifts – it is also an extremely convenient one. Of course it is a great deal easier to argue against a “settler-colonialist, racist enterprise committing genocide” than against the actual, complicated thing that is Israel. For some Jews, taking that framing on is a kind of safe harbor. It lets them off the hook.

Knowing an entire people’s history is not easy. Educating oneself on the ins and outs of geopolitics in a place you have never been and might not feel any attachment to is a mighty impossible task for a person who has no interest in these matters. The mountain of work, the fight itself, is the disincentive. Self-preservation is the easy way out. Saying “Ok”. Believing the buzz words. Saying “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is easy. It rhymes. That’s the point. Engaging with a hateful or a naive person on the necessary implications of that statement is much harder. Many might come to think that it is best to simply not think about it too much at all.

That rhyming slogan gets caught in a person’s ear though - tell a neutral party or a disengaged Jew enough times that Israel is committing a genocide, and human psychology necessitates that it will start to sound reasonable.

But it’s worth naming plainly: no other state on earth is held to that same claim, on those same terms. That’s the double standard again, showing up in its sharpest form. You see it in the implicit ultimatum some Jews describe feeling — that they have to condemn Israel outright, or else accept whatever hostility comes their way as a natural consequence of refusing to disavow their own people’s nation state in their ancestral homeland.

When the carrots and sticks in their life align in a certain way, resistance seems futile. When your identity and your friend group and your profession all rely on some condemnation of Israel, that myopic bargain is easy to make.

The simple antidote is and always has been the truth. But truth is inconvenient. Truth usually doesn’t rhyme. Truth is difficult. It requires tradeoffs. Truth is not for the lazy.

Those who are lazy, fearful, or simply opportunist are the most vulnerable. When they are vulnerable, they can be leveraged into the most damaging manifestation of a Jewish person who has internalized systemic Judeophobia – the token Jew.

In the next segment, we will look at the tokenization of Jewish people. We will dive into the “As a Jew” claim. We will explore the damage it can do to the Jewish people as a whole but perhaps most saliently, the individual token themself.

“Every time I say ‘I’m Jewish,’ it feels like I’m confessing to a crime” - Anonymous reddit user

In Part IX, we examined the pulls — the ways people get drawn out of their Jewish identity and into other identities. That’s where the compromise of identity begins. As a person moves further down the asymptote of assimilation, they make trade-off after trade-off, each one a little easier than the last. It is a slow trickle that erodes their identity until it is unrecognizable.

But moving away from an identity is not the same thing as internalizing a phobia or accepting an aversion against it. Something more specific has to happen. Internalized Judeophobia is the product of three things arriving together: a push, a pull, and the activation of an ambient, systemic prejudice against Jews, Judaism, Israel, and Israelis. On their own, none of the three is sufficient. Together, they’re combustible.

We can picture this scenario as a gas leak. The ambient prejudice is the gas, already in the air, already seeping in from a hundred different directions. The push is what turns off the alarm. The pull is the match that ignites the flame. The insidious trick is how benign each step seems on its own.

Each path an individual person might take here is different in its particulars. But those paths all follow the same underlying shape and spine.

First, there is an unmooring from mainstream Jewish identity (the push). Then a landing ground in a new identity (the pull). That new identity offers cover— a kind of myopia about the relevance of Jewish identity in the first place. Then the combustion reaction begins.

Take for instance a student who was bullied at their Jewish day school. Or a person who came to resent their Judaism because of what it cost them — the extra schoolwork, the compromises, the afternoons they could have spent with friends instead. That student is primed.

If they go on to enter a profession saturated with people who have already bought into Judeophobic ideas, they have no internal resistance left to push back with. They are rewarded, instead, for turning on the place and the people from which they came — mentioning, almost casually, that they were part of an institution they always secretly thought was awful. They’ll criticize it freely, often without any real evidence behind their criticism. This will be based in feelings, or “vibes”.

Although they will have perhaps always felt an aversion to their Jewish identity for a plethora of reasons, these people will never have been compelled to rationalize it or to focus on it. The pulls of certain ideologies provide the motivation and the highly refined words to voice that criticism. They move the tension to the foreground and draw it into focus. Suddenly there is a well-established, hateful vocabulary that expresses their unmooring in terms of victimhood. That is ammunition for tokenism to manifest.

Once the gas leak ignites, that internalized Judeophobia manifests in many different ways. Like most things bound up in identity, there isn’t just one thing. It’s a spectrum, a buffet of opinions, actions, and affiliations roughly understood as “self-hatred.”

Specifically, self-hating Jews manifest a mix of negative emotions toward themselves — but because there are grifters and merchants who benefit from hatred of Jews writ large, that self-directed version gets supercharged into something aimed outward. Those are the industrial fans, providing oxygen. The fire becomes an inferno in some circumstances: it moves from limited internal prejudice, self-doubt, self-criticism, and embarrassment, to full-blown conspiracy theories about Jews generally, anti-Zionism, anti-Judaism, and — in the most extreme cases — tokenism.

That spectrum shows up across a number of different verticals: religious anti-Judaism, hatred of Jewish peoplehood and culture, racial antisemitism, xenophobia, general prejudice against Jews, sensationalized narratives, the list goes on. But the pattern underneath is consistent no matter which vertical it surfaces in.

The mild end of the spectrum is the more benign version — still damaging, but quieter. This is the person who has silently absorbed these ideas without ever quite naming them. They were taught, maybe in school, to be wary of the Catholic Church, and without noticing, they’ve grafted that same wariness onto their own Judaism. They’re self-critical. Ask them, and they’ll agree — a little sheepishly — that there’s “a type” among Jews: avarice, elitism, insularity, whatever the particular flavour of resentment happens to be. This would be dispelled with exposure — of course Jews are just like anyone else. Fallible and sometimes tribal and with their own foibles and communal orbits. The harm comes when there is an exceptionalism at play. They heard once upon a time that Jews were God’s chosen people. “Chosen” for what — that is of no matter. The key is that the exceptionalism was germinated decades prior.

This is the throughline — the spine that runs under every point on this spectrum: the double standard. There’s a real irony in Jewish exceptionalism being negatively perceived and then voiced by Jews — in holding Jewish people and institutions to a different standard than everyone else. You see it in the Jew who is sharply critical of Jewish institutions but has nothing to say about the equivalent failures in, say, Muslim or Islamic institutions. You see it in the political obsession — in 2026, as this section is being written — with AIPAC, a Jewish lobbying group in the United States that has become the singular target of coordinated attacks on its credibility.

The double standard is clear: a group of people who do their best to influence policy and direction is somehow held to a standard that isn’t applied even remotely equally anywhere else. AIPAC and the “Israel Lobby” have a fraction of the financial backing and influence that lobbying groups from nations like China and Qatar apply on the US government and its institutions, universities, non-profits, and populace. But still, that is of no matter, and Jews with internalized Judeophobia buy into these narratives with hunger.

It would be easy to write these people off as charlatans. Much energy is wasted on attacking the bad faith approach of opportunists. In reality, these are, in the vast majority of cases, genuinely held beliefs. That is another great trick and insidious charachteristic of internalized Judeophobia.

These are people who have been fed a narrative enough times that it has started to sound like truth.

That is not a unique failure of character; it is how propaganda works on anyone. It is, of course, a failure, but it is not unique — the systemic Judeophobia is sophisticated and organized. It is not a coincidence that a significant but still fringe number of Jews have suddenly awoken to these ideas. There has been a major ramp-up in propaganda. It is documented and it works. That’s why it is done. When an in-group with hateful elements begins to make belonging conditional on saying or believing a certain thing, that belief stops feeling like an opinion and starts feeling like reality.

Alongside the double standard, the most telling symptom of internalized Judeophobia is what we can call the Purity Narrative. The purity narrative can be thought of as an autoimmune response. It is one’s yearning for safety turning against oneself, misguided elements throwing up flares against its own body. Again there is a familiar pattern: everyone else has gotten Judaism wrong, and the dissenting voice is the true follower. The pure one.

They are the person who actually understands the faith, its values, and its real meaning. This is the politician who shows up, passionately, publicly, and unironically to an anti-Israel protest on a Saturday morning. It’s the artist who didn’t pursue the “right” kind of degree according to their disappointed parents, and has since disavowed an entire culture of learning because that’s the only way to make peace with what feels like their a personal failure.

The exceptionalism here is phenomenally ironic. It is the double standard on full display again. The criticism of Jews and things that are Jewish necessarily relies on the fact that they are different, set apart, or other. But holding Jews to a different standard than everyone else — which is what the critics are doing — only proves the point they’re supposedly rejecting. That’s why the double standard is so damning: it’s the tell. It shows up in celebrity culture, in “as-a-Jew” commentary, and in the quiet dread some Jews in the diaspora describe — the sense that admitting you’re Jewish feels less like a fact and more like a confession.

Underneath that sentiment is the internalized idea that Jews are somehow personally answerable for the actions of a state prosecuting a war, of a settler in the West Bank, of a diaspora billionaire, of even something as simple as a Jewish person who has committed a crime. The fear demands hyper vigilance in order to ensure the avoidance of guilt by association. The group punishment is rocket fuel for tokenism, and it runs on a kind of short-sighted arithmetic: small, immediate social gains purchased by going along with whatever the prevailing narrative happens to be. It bears repeating that none of these mechanics are exotic. They are staple traits of ordinary human psychology, applied to an identity under pressure, in conditions that facilitate a specific outcome. That systemic prejudice and aversion is a key difference maker. Another way of thinking about this idea is that the internalized prejudice of Judeophobia is a Trojan Horse for that hate.

That Trojan Horse breaches the gates and enters the mind. It exploits group dynamics. This is where we see for example a critical mass of celebrities applying the Purity Narrative in pursuit of individual success. The devil’s bargain that they make is a symptom of being exploited. They are not charlatans. They are not malicious or nefarious, it comes from a very human and very Jewish perspective to alleviate suffering, and to provide a safe environment for all.

The “big lie” in this circumstance is the acceptance of the double standard. At some point, these people are unfortunately inoculated to seeing the double standard for what it is. This is the moment that the internalized Judeophobia becomes crystallized. That crystallization moves it from being a belief held by a new identity, to being the identity in and of itself. The pure one. The one who sees the world for what it really is. They believe themselves to be the Cassandras of their day. In reality, they are simply doomsayers predicting the apocalypse. No different than the man with the megaphone in Times Square.

We can easily identify the patterns and markers of internalized Judeophobia with the purity narrative. This is an historic trend with self-hating Jews. It came with othering, with a desperate attempt to survive by going along, and most of all by embracing the other necessary marker - the double standard. Internalization leads to buy in and acceptance that the double standard of Jews and Jewish institutions can be considered fair, honest, and well reasoned. Again, this means ignoring the big lie.

Historically there have been countless examples of Jews who have adopted these external anti-Jewish views. Hellenistic or Roman allies in ancient Judea. Spanish conversos, German socialites, concentration camp capos.

The modern pinnacle of this double standard is of course the treatment of Israel by the world. For Jews with internalized Judeophobia, the self-hate, a unique stance of despising the only Jewish state is the textbook demonstration of this mental sickness.

In the next part of this series, we will conduct the reluctantly necessary exploration of internalized Judeophobia manifesting as anti-Zionism.

“And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you” - Friedrich Nietzsche

In part VIII of this series, we examined some of the most common pushes that act as inciting incidents, priming Jews in the diaspora for the internalization of systemic Judeophobia.

An aversion to Jewish identity driven by a push cannot alone push a Jew to internalize prejudice. In addition to that initial propulsion, there needs to be a landing ground, a target for the mind to set as an imagined harbour for their identity. There is a grander dynamic at play between pushes and pulls, all of which happen within the environment created by systemic Judeophobia. These three forces together are combustible.

In part VIII, we also established that each “push” is motivated by undercurrents of fear, guilt, shame, and insecurity. On the reverse side of this, “pulls” always provide some form of security. There is a perceived safety to allay fears. There is enough distraction to ignore guilt, and there is no external shame. This combines to provide the illusion of security. Optimizing that perceived well being in the short term. This is the trojan horse of the pulls towards Judeophobic identities.

The pulls all tend to be along the asymptote of assimilation, luring identity towards an unreachable goal. Let’s examine the pulls and understand the receiving grounds where Jews who feel ostracized spend their lives.

It is important to note that there is no such thing as a “best” or “supreme” culture, network, or style of living. It is completely natural for Jews to want to participate in all the aspects of life diaspora Jews have available to them. Every culture in the world offers its own wonderful adaptations, new wrinkles, and glorious expressions of human ingenuity, creativity, and thought. Many identities can be moved between freely, at little or no cost — something as mundane as being a fan of an artist or a sport. Those are mutable characteristics. Other parts of identity — core to, and in some way unique to, Jews — can never be fully shed. That is the most salient point, one that cannot simply be abdicated, as we saw in Parts 4, 5, and 6.

There are systems of belief and thinking that do not run contrary to Judaism — dabbling in Buddhism, meditation, and yoga, for example.

There are some value systems, however, that require a cost — a sacrifice or a muting of one’s character and culture. We call this impossible task the asymptote of assimilation.

This is the key difference.

When a Jew moves further along the asymptote of assimilation, they are being pulled out of their identity and into another one. Those newly adopted identities come with varying amounts of Judeophobia baked into their belief system. That is systemic Judeophobia. As parts of this new identity are adopted, they begin to become internalized — even if doing so is illogical or counter to the person’s own well-being.

Humans naturally mimic and go along with social proof. It is a core feature of human socialization. While there are a vast number of potential pulls at play, it is nevertheless worth exploring some of the most common situations:

The illusion of safety in the arms of the left wing.

Many Jews felt like suppressing their Judaism and their tells would eliminate any risk of being unsafe. Most saliently in 2026, we see this pull on the left. This happens in political spaces. This happens in art spaces. This happens in academic spaces.

Within left wing politics, intersectionality and woke ideology seemingly have no room for Jews as a minority group. That means that in the modern iterations of these political belief systems, we have Jews who have been strung along into cults of suicidal empathy that don’t extend to them. For many, this eventually becomes a lifelong version of the sunk cost fallacy: those who find themselves pulled towards ideologies that speak to most of their inclinations and preferences need only sacrifice pride in their Jewish identity. Because they have invested so much of themselves already, they cannot back down or risk losing the “sunk cost.”

The Jewish part of their identity is conditional. It is only allowed on the target group’s terms, in the instances where it is not deemed problematic. If Jewish identity threatens the target identity, it cannot be tolerated. This has the effect of deepening the feedback loop, further conditioning entry into “inclusive” spaces.

The loop “pulls” the Jew further and further away from their identity. If the person is unmoored with no Jewish anchor (typically because of a push) then the abandonment or cheapening of their Jewish self is an easy mental move to make. The arithmetic is myopic and in the short term is a low-cost, high-reward move.

This is the typical outcome for all forms of this phenomenon, and it is why constantly recognizing that assimilation is an asymptote is important. The allure of belonging is intoxicating. It seems so easy to continue down the path you’re already on. You have momentum as you’ve started to integrate and begun to be part of this movement that is brand new and exciting.

Political movements are the most common and significant pull in the modern context because they are so alluring and their long-term costs are hidden. Modern politics in the United States and Canada force you into compartments. They define you along a very slim binary axis. Being pulled towards another identity — say, being a socialist, a leftist, an anti-racist, etc. — all of this pulls you out of your Jewish identity.

We can think of many Jewish politicians, for example, who fall down this path — the allure of power in progressive spaces, the sense of belonging, drive them away from their Jewish identity, from the core of it. It makes them compromise it as they yield to the systemic pressures of their targets, of the orthodoxies of their adopted identity. This can also provide fertile ground for the harvesting of tokens.

The pull into artistic spaces.

This pull, for many, goes hand in hand with politics. Arts workers and musicians tend to lean far left. This means progressive spaces carry a bohemian allure, packed with artists and an ideology that promises equal treatment without the work. Oftentimes, the sunk cost of a lifetime pursuing an art form becomes the only thing that matters.

Consider a person who has spent their life working towards a certain profession or discipline, perhaps an architect or a filmmaker. It is totally reasonable for them to look at the risk and reward equation and make the decision to move down the asymptote. The transaction would be to sacrifice decades of toil, social networks, and professional clout in order to — what? Pay homage to a religion they don’t even believe in? They are missing the full picture, but in each small moment, their choice seems clear, as well as completely reasonable and appealing.

The pull into professional spaces.

Conforming to an in-group culture is endemic to human psychology. In some professions there is a reinforcing cycle of opinion and ideology. There are orthodoxies and sets of interlocking opinions that seem inexorably linked. Stapling on Judeophobic tropes, especially around Israel, is frictionless.

Consider the arts-worker orthodoxy, the social-worker orthodoxy, the healthcare-worker and addiction-specialist orthodoxies. Even labour unions, at times, are run by severely Judeophobic people. Each of these has a massive bias and overrepresentation of specific ideologies. It is sensible to sacrifice your own identity in order to be respected in the workplace. For many, the workplace is the only community that they have. If there is a dominant ideology, set of values, or way of thinking about the world, it is only natural to absorb it. These newly adopted professional identities can certainly pull a person away from their Jewish identity.

The academy

Higher education and school systems writ large are currently facing something of a reckoning around their adoption of postmodern thought. In the era of diversity, equity, and inclusion, entire departments are purged of people with politics right-of-centre — or really, anyone who would dissent from progressivism. There is a strict dogma in most humanities departments. Non-political subjects like physics and biology are en route to being captured as well. Taking on the identity of your workplace, and that of an academic who needs to be focused on progressivism and activism, is an immensely attractive pull. There is professional clout at stake, tenure, security, and the allure of acceptance. Universities and colleges are incredibly strong and vast community networks.

So, a Jewish person becomes unmoored from their personal identity and then is pulled towards other identities along the asymptote. There is a mountain of work done on the groupthink that encompasses universities. In Canada, there is the CASE report that outlines, among other horrors, a trend of active antisemitism coming from professors. This is never punished — if anything, it is rewarded.

For students, these pulls are just as present. What’s more, they are formative. Students are vulnerable, they are at university to learn. For most young people in the West, post-secondary education is the time that they are allowed to finally self-actualize. When student groups, clubs, residency associations, and professors’ philosophies are all geared towards a certain ideology, the plasticity of the student mind can quickly internalize Judeophobic tropes, ideas, and thoughts with almost no resistance.

Friend groups.

On the micro scale, this idea translates to peer groups just as much. Social proof is a powerful tool. Many Jews will choose friend groups that are predominantly non-Jewish, and they will not understand or recognize the slights and slings and arrows that are levied upon them.

This opens the door to antisemitic or discriminatory tropes — systemic Judeophobia spread, consciously or not, by their peers. Comments like “Jews are cheap” or “have big noses” eventually get glossed over.

Of course, any kind of discrimination is waved off. Their peers, colleagues, and interlocutors are not prejudiced or racist people. They are predominantly just naive, living in a context of systemic Judeophobia where they have no reason to investigate further into claims about Jews, Jewish people, and the Jewish state. Again, the calculus becomes clear: do you stay silent and accept the claims, or do you risk your personal standing in your community?

Again, this all makes sense because there’s so much good done by all of these movements. The kaleidoscope of activities, ideas, spaces, and movements in the West is incredibly appealing — it’s a prime reason Jews have been able to survive and excel in all these different capacities. Other identities are wonderful, but sometimes they come into conflict with the Jewish identity, and that can be another point at which a decision is forced.

If the Jewish story is not told and the heritage and culture are not held in high esteem, the exchange is often made willingly without the true value of the identity being understood.

This is like a subconscious mental negotiation wherein the Jewish part’s value is completely undervalued. The Judeophobic pull is a Trojan Horse.

More miscellaneous examples.

Like the pushes away from Jewish identity, there are too many examples and circumstances of Jews in the diaspora being pulled into other identities. A few more include:

A person marries into a family that holds antisemitic views.

They ultimately have a decision to make: forgo their family, their in-laws, who may feel extremely passionately about certain issues, Jewish values, or the Jewish state, or risk their relationship — and their children’s relationship — with the in-laws, and acquiesce instead.

The Country Club Member.

In the 20th century this was a much more common occurrence. But as Judeophobia began to morph into anti-Zionism and Jew Hate, it has become less common. For now, Jews are not categorically denied entry into elite society.

Sometimes at the heights of society there are carrots and opportunities too irresistible. Oftentimes, these positions require a sacrifice. This is a less common situation in modern times, but this idea coloured Jewish assimilation throughout history in the West.

For many whose Jewish identity was not a significant part of their life, the pull toward these prestigious institutions was strong, and they happily sacrificed any signs or symbols of their heritage for access. It did not matter that these places clearly were not hospitable to Jews.

In the early days of the reform movement, this was its stated goal. In an enlightened world, Jews wanted to be treated just like everybody else. The degree varies, but the pull of assimilation always seduces unknowing or naive Jews. The siren call is always there.

Romance.

There are young people who are more interested in pursuing romantic partnerships than in exploring their own identity. Each of these is reasonable. And the shortcoming is when they make the exchange and sacrifice something immeasurably valuable — thousands of years of heritage — for something ephemeral.

The consequences of each of these pulls, especially when paired with the pushes, are that they operate as access points for systemic Judeophobia to become internalized. When other worldviews have accepted or incorporated antisemitism, Jew Hate, stereotypes about Jews, then it can easily sink in and access your subconscious.

Anarchy.

The energy of anti-establishment protests is intoxicating. In a world where everyone is struggling to belong, belonging to something else, despite some concessions, is arithmetic that can be relatively easily rationalized.

The umbrella idea is that this exchange, the pull, is done subconsciously. People build their entire lives, not recognizing that this is what is happening to them. It can take literally decades before these micro-Judeophobic messages are amalgamated into internalized Judeophobia.

In the next part of this series, we will put it all together and examine circumstances that demonstrate the explosive nature of how pushes, pulls, and systemic Judeophobia combust into full-on internalized Judeophobia.

We sat down with Eric Lombardi, one of five candidates in the running to be the next leader of the Ontario Liberal Party.

The conversation comes two days days after Prime Minister Mark Carney called off trade negotiations with the United States and moments after Ontario Premier Doug Ford and President Trump traded public jabs online.

During the episode, we discuss the effects of the trade war, and Ontario’s place in it. We talk healthcare, and what Lombardi says needs to change about Ontario’s system.

Finally we get into the rise of antisemitism in Ontario, and what the province’s role ought to be in addressing it.

Thanks for watching and listening

The Toronto political focus has been on Chris Alexander recently. Centrists don’t want him to run, as his candidacy can only improve the chances of an Olivia Chow victory. Yet, there is no compelling reason for Alexander to drop out at this point.

Why? Well, to understand that, like most things, we need to examine the incentives at play.

For Alexander, it is pretty clear that there is no path to victory, so this isn’t about winning. The primary incentive for him to stay in the race seems to be the simple fact that we’re talking about him at all. In other words: no one — myself included, and probably you — had any idea who this guy was before he jumped into the mayoral race. Anyone who did had long forgotten the Harper-era Conservative politician.

That, in itself, is a highly salient and high-value incentive. In the modern era of the brand economy, Alexander is now going to be the focus of the conversation for another few months — and all it cost him was $200, the fee to run for mayor in Toronto.

Baffling as this decision seems, Alexander is not an idiot. To underestimate him, or declare him one, would be a mistake.

This guy was a federal cabinet minister. He is not a fool.

So what are his larger goals? Well, it’s no secret that there’s a lot of turmoil within the federal Conservative Party of Canada. Pierre Poilievre is running out of time as leader — whether that comes before or after another election, no one lasts forever. There is no clear logical successor for Poilievre at this time. Similarly for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, Doug Ford is coming up on ten years in the job. Eventually he will be doing something else.

For Alexander, this is all upside. He may never get to be relevant in Conservative politics, but building his brand, getting the practice in primetime, it certainly isn’t going to hurt him. This might explain why most of his stances have been about issues that have little or nothing to do with Toronto — he’s not really running for mayor.

Politics in Canada is about name-brand recognition more than anything else, so for the low cost of $200, Alexander is getting publicity and experience in the limelight that is worth tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of dollars.

You don’t have to look any further than that — it becomes clear. Every interview he does, every article posted about him, is exactly what he wants. If he were being ignored, he wouldn’t be doing this — but he’s not being ignored. He’s being rewarded for his decision.

On the other side of the ledger. Why would he be incentivized not to run?

For some moral reason? That’s just not relevant, unfortunately, this is politics.

For the love of Toronto? Chris Alexander doesn’t care about Toronto. He’s from Ajax. Why would he care about Toronto?

Because he hates Olivia Chow? Maybe — but obviously that’s not enough of an incentive. She’s already the mayor. He probably figures that whatever damage she’s doing is either not relevant or not so bad that it compares to the upsides.

Because he loves Brad Bradford? Of course not — Bradford is endorsed by Liberal MPs and MPPs. Bradford, despite what progressives think, is about as centrist as they come. Smart conservatives are rallying behind him because they know that Toronto is never going to be blue.

But if you’re Chris Alexander, all this is academic.

The incentives are clear. Lots of upside, little to no downside. Well worth a three-month experiment.

So if Bradford supporters want to get Alexander to actually back off, what’s it going to take?

Well, you would need either Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre to offer him something — anything — better than the publicity he is getting now. There is little incentive for them to be spending political capital on Alexander.

At the end of the day, this all comes down to incentives. The more Alexander is attacked by Bradford supporters, the more he’s featured in the media, the more they are playing into the would-be spoiler’s hands.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, Progress Toronto supporters of Olivia Chow will want Alexander to remain centre stage. Every vote for him is a vote Brad Bradford might have gotten.

Anyone who supports Bradford, or who simply doesn’t want Chow to be the mayor, would do best to ignore Alexander completely. There’s no evidence he’s a serious contender — he can only hurt a centrist like Bradford by splitting the vote.

Liberal voters and partisans should keep their powder dry and instead focus on building up Brad Bradford’s prominence if they really would like to see change at city hall.

“My parents decided to move to a more predominantly Jewish area and to enroll me, at the age of 8, in a Jewish day school. They hoped that in a close-knit Jewish community I’d be safe from outsiders and that I would cement my attachment to Judaism.

Instead I became a target for years of emotional and physical bullying that sparked a lifelong struggle to come to terms with my Jewish identity.”

— Aaron Hamburger, Tablet Magazinne, 2019

In Part VII we connected the well-documented phenomenon of internalized homophobia to Jewish self-hatred via the concept of internalized Judeophobia. This can be traced to a person who, for entirely legitimate reasons, has internalized the systemic Judeophobia that surrounds them. In exactly the same way a religious gay man might exhibit extreme homophobic sentiment as a defence mechanism, we observe the same behaviour in Jews around the world.

This section looks at some common circumstances and scenarios in which Jews are pushed out of Jewish spaces, or away from their Jewish identity — sometimes as victims, sometimes as purposeful pariahs. In each and every case, the person with internalized Judeophobia is experiencing one or more of fear, shame, and guilt, and in every circumstance, some meaningful degree of insecurity.

Many of these experiences end up coupled with a pull, or mixed together with one or more other pushes. They are all experiential, and very real. Any Jew reading this knows a person who fits one of these archetypes. They can often see moments in their own lives where, had they had less strength of self, they might have gone down a similar path. That familiarity is no coincidence — the resonance is the proof.

This list is by no means comprehensive. It is expected to expand as discovery and research begin to unearth more and more cases. Each of these examples is rooted in the North American context, so there is a degree of tunnel vision that needs to be applied. Nevertheless, each of these situations is dynamic, and these are mere archetypes that describe individual experiences that make up the whole.

The throughline is that these typically all happen within childhood, early adolescence, and sometimes even young adulthood. They are all formative experiences, and they all have the possibility to cascade outward and ultimately lead to internalized Judeophobia. Saliently, these insertion points do not typically come from places of malice. That is why those who end up with internalized Judeophobia should be understood as victims.

The child taught to hide their Jewish identity for their safety.

The first scenario is a child traumatized by their Jewishness through fear passed down from a parent. Especially in high-anxiety, fearful households, parents or mentors will tell children to hide their Jewish identity. This is usually a well-meaning directive — an effort to keep the child safe.

As the parents are themselves insecure and afraid on behalf of their child, they tell the child that under no circumstances should they reveal anything that might out them as Jewish. There are the classic directives: don’t talk about the Jewish holidays. Do not wear a kippah. Do not disclose any markers of Jewish identity, like a Magen David or a necklace with Hebrew writing.

The key trouble is that a child cannot easily tell the difference between hiding for safety and hiding because something is wrong. They rarely have that sophistication. So when a parent says “we don’t talk about being Jewish,” the child begins to internalize it. They don’t know why it’s bad. They just know that it’s bad. This is the initial entrance point for many Jews. This push is dominated by fear of their own identity. Especially in situations where no supplemental Jewish experiences are created, children will begin to develop a conditioned aversion to Judaism.

A young person ostracized or bullied by their own local Jewish community.

Imagine a child who, like many other thirteen-year-olds, doesn’t fit in. They might lack the social skills, have a learning disability, or be slightly neurodivergent. For any number of reasons, the young person might be the subject of bullying through their formative years. This happens in every social setting, and in every culture. In a Jewish context, this kid might attend a day school, or a public school with a high concentration of Jewish students. In those contexts, when a tween is a social outcast and gets bullied, they can feel like there is something wrong with them specifically.

A healthy person can understand that bullies are simply a fact of life, best ignored and pitied. A more resilient, mature kid might be able to weather the storm of adolescence.

But that isn’t the case for everyone — some young people are prone to feeling like victims. Justly so. But someone with a fear of taking personal accountability — an external locus of control — can arrive at a different conclusion. They can see something is wrong, but it cannot be typical teenage life. Something is wrong, but they reason, or are counselled by parents, that there isn’t anything wrong with them. They can then make the logical jump that there must be something wrong with everyone else.

From there, the jump is to draw the pattern, and the common thread amongst the bullies or the “mean girls” is apparent: They’re all Jews. The push comes in this circumstance because the individual has created a false dichotomy in their mind. We are all Jews, and that is the common thread. One common fallacious exit strategy is to determine that the others are the bad Jews. The victim of the bullying, as a defence mechanism, believes they could not possibly be responsible for their mistreatment, and so it has to be rationalized. Humans crave an explanation, so they invent ones — in this case, they are virtuous and victimized. Their oppressors are the bad Jews.

This seeds one of the most common and egregious sources of tokens as well. These are the people who say they grew up in Jewish spaces and know what it’s “really like” on the inside — when in reality, they are almost always translating their own personal traumas and shortcomings into a verdict on the whole community.

Abuse and harm within religious life.

As with any religion — especially those with strong patriarchal structures, which Judaism can oftentimes be — there is real potential for harm within cloistered populations. This can manifest in many different ways. Orthodox and Conservative Judaism especially can, like any religion, provide ample opportunities for negative experience. That association might be with strict or abusive parents, with controlling husbands, or with camp counsellors who became violent or inappropriate with kids. All of these can be the insertion point for complex personal issues that get tied back to Judaism writ large.

Sometimes children can be ostracized or told there is something wrong with them because they might not be convinced that they want to be religious or observant. Many women might feel like they cannot self-actualize because of the religion’s structure. Men who want to pursue a career might feel pigeonholed by Judaism, or might not want to go through a life of Torah.

LGBTQ+ individuals can be completely ostracized by their synagogues. Some rabbis will not perform gay marriages, and many will not perform interfaith marriages. For some, the “sin” of loving a person who isn’t Jewish might be reason enough to leave religious life entirely. That exit can have deep-seated consequences for one’s relationship to their faith, culture, and identity.

Men in particular may feel that because Judaism didn’t make space for them, there is something wrong with Judaism writ large. As with the bullied kid in the previous example, the biggest danger here is the false dichotomy that comes with thinking: “something can’t be wrong with me, so something must be wrong with them.” This becomes the insertion point. Once the ball gets rolling, it compounds on itself, and the human mind begins to detect all sorts of patterns that “prove” that mainstream Judaism is problematic.

The black sheep of the family.

In a similar vein to the child who is bullied, these children are caught up specifically within family dynamics. The black sheep is also sometimes called the alternative kid, or explained away as middle child syndrome — though of course, it is not isolated to middle children.

Jewish families oftentimes demand academic rigour at home. This is a product of the cultural carrots and sticks that exist within particularly elite Jewish societies. Many may roll their eyes when a parent jokes that there has to be a doctor or lawyer in the family. But for many kids and young people, this is a serious pressure. It sets the bar impossibly high.

For every doctor in the family lineage, there is a kid who doesn’t have that same knack for science, or whose intelligence means they’re not going to be as academically gifted as a sibling or peer. That peer might have qualified on a scholarship to day school, or to university. Comparison is the thief of joy, and for some, no matter what they do, the pressures of Jewish life — around work, salary expectations, academic achievement, or good behaviour — never let up. Even something as simple as learning their bar mitzvah portion can bring upon a young person a profound feeling of being the black sheep.

Again, this is oftentimes derived from parenting, but it can just as easily come from peers. This can all contribute to a repulsion that drives the push away from Judaism.

Judaism being inexorably linked to bereavement and trauma.

For kids forced to prematurely experience life-cycle events inside a synagogue — the death of a parent, a grandparent, a close friend — Judaism can become associated with trauma. If Judaism is the religious container for that grief, a child can come to feel that the religion itself is a source of negativity.

This, like in earlier circumstances, creates a conditioned aversion towards Jewish ritual, prayer, and spaces. When Kaddish and prayer become associated with a dying parent, or a kippah becomes a reminder of a shiva, it can become a deeply traumatizing association.

Jewish institutions have rightfully gone to great lengths to educate their children on Jewish oppression, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. Jewish trauma can be easily transmitted across generations in the silent lessons taught through stories and recalled experiences — that existing as a Jew is dangerous. For many, this is more than enough to act as a push. This begs the question and suggests that the entire polity of Judaism is guilty by association.

Then there are children and families who only associate synagogue and Judaism with bereavement. If they only attend once a year for Yahrtzeit, or for Yizkor, the shul, the key religious third space, becomes associated with negativity.

These can work in concert. Bereavement already primes an individual, and then every time they are back in a synagogue, they’re learning about the Holocaust and its horrors. Hebrew schools spend an inordinate amount of time dwelling on the worst parts of the Jewish experience. This has the potential to become a conditioned aversion. A great many people are pushed away in this fashion, coming to associate Judaism itself with negativity, trauma, and fear.

Embarrassment at one’s own and others’ “Jewish qualities.”

Visible religious symbols drawing hate, immigrant customs, particular foods, and so on. Oftentimes, whether in adulthood or childhood, Jewish qualities bear a cost due to systemic Judeophobia. This can be as simple as the discrimination that comes to Orthodox Jews in their black hats, an Eastern European accent, or a lack of awareness around North American customs.

For many Jews further along the asymptote of assimilation, this can provide a real threat. An association with anything different can shatter the illusion. That could be a Jewish outfit or hairstyle. That could be a person’s parents speaking Yiddish instead of English. That could be a failure to moderate the noise level of a conversation on public transit. Any of these can trigger a significant aversion in a person who does not want to be associated with any of these qualities. They do not want to be represented by “those people.”

Through each of these scenarios, the pushes can continue — all of them, in their own way, are earned. At face value they are reasonable egress points. Each, however, is overcomable with the proper lessons — whether those come from parents, faith leaders, teachers, or peers. Jews writ large need to learn to understand their identity and experience inside the notion of Jewish peoplehood. Armed with that framing, they can learn to fight back against these pushes.

Like any group or tribe, there will always be benefits and downsides to belonging. Each of these is a salient risk that needs to be monitored by Jewish institutions if they want to fight against the internalization of systemic Judeophobia. This is particularly important because pushes can be controlled from within the Jewish ecosystem. Pulls out of Jewish identity are much harder to monitor and control. In the next segment, we will explore some of the many situations that can tempt Jews to start heading down the asymptote of assimilation.

Looking back on his tenure as federal MP, it is reasonable to say that Nate Erskine-Smith was never really a big-L Liberal. Instead he was a Trudeau-era Liberal, and that era is over.

When you look at what he says and stands for, Erskine-Smith has always been a New Democrat wearing a red shirt. He wanted to win and hold office, so he ran for the Liberals during the most progressive Liberal era in Canadian history.

The hyper-progressive wing of the federal Liberal Party is slowly being eradicated, and Nate is another casualty of this purge.

Nate saw the writing on the wall and rightly positioned an exit from federal politics as wanting to make a difference in Ontario. This was a crafty solution that would work well for both him and the party. A diplomatic and sophisticated political move. Everyone gets through the breakup with their dignity intact.

So having been kicked out of cabinet and told he was not the future of the federal Liberals, Nate decided to go forth and announce his backup plan — leading the Ontario Liberal Party. There is a vacuum at the top of the OLP, and Nate assumed that his reputation would carry him to the leadership.

Unfortunately for Nate, that never got off the ground. Erskine-Smith could not even win the provincial Liberal nomination in Scarborough Southwest. This was highly significant — the riding neighbours the one where he was the federal incumbent — and he lost it to Ahsanul Hafiz. There is lots of controversy around this particular nomination, and Nate did appeal the result. His appeal was dismissed though, and instead of maintaining his commitment to helping the people of Ontario, Nate decided that he would no longer pursue life in provincial politics. At the first sign of resistance, he backed off. For whatever reason, Erskine-Smith was not interested in standing up for his beliefs.

Now here is where your spidey senses should be going off, because Nate said he was resigning from his position as federal MP to run in provincial politics.

He didn’t end up going into provincial politics — but he still resigned. Why? Well, the obvious answer was that it wasn’t actually a mutual breakup at all. In actuality, he was dismissed by Carney and the federal Liberals.

Now to his credit, NES has in the past drifted from his party, taking the rare step of voting against the Liberals on many files over the course of his tenure as an MP. As Andrew Coyne points out in his book, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy, dissent is not something prime ministers and federal party leaders abide by. But still, why would someone abdicate a federal position and then a month later decide he wanted to be a city councillor?

My suspicion is that Nate wants to be in charge. He wants power, and when he realized he couldn’t influence the federal party, he sought the provincial Liberal Party leadership nomination. Being premier of Ontario was his backup plan.

When he realized he couldn’t influence the OLP, he went one step further down to his backup backup plan: running for city councillor in Beaches-East York.

Now, I think Nate is doing this because he thinks that the best path to power is to become the mayor of Toronto in 2030. If he sits on council, he will instantly become one of the most likely candidates to come in and be Olivia Chow’s progressive successor. NES’s affiliation has always been fluid — sliding between big-L Liberal and the New Democrats, whether philosophically or in his voting record.

Becoming the mayor makes sense here, he does have a path. Freed from the yoke of Carney and the Liberals, he is joining team Chow and the NDP. This is probably where he’s always belonged, and his next stop will be with the New Democrats — either provincially once Marit Stiles moves on, or in the next federal election under Avi Lewis.

So — the conclusion is simple: Nate Erskine-Smith clearly wants power and isn’t happy settling for less.

Similar to what’s happened with Mike Layton in University-Rosedale, he is elbowing out progressive candidates who have been exclusively committed to municipal politics.

They all deserve mention, but I want to conclude by talking about three of those candidates. Jennie Worden, James Dann, and Natalie Johnson.

Jennie Worden has run in Beaches-East York in the past. She finished second to incumbent councillor turned mayoral candidate Brad Bradford. She was, until yesterday, likely to be endorsed by Progress Toronto. They will now have to abandon Worden and all the work she has done for the progressive left.

James Dann is a city worker with 25 years' experience in parks and planning. He has a lifetime of commitment and a track record of service in Beaches-East York. Like each of these candidates, he has put his life on hold and campaigned to represent the ward municipally.

Natalie Johnson is a reporter with CTV News. Having spent twenty years covering city hall, she understands its machinations and is positioning herself as a common-sense candidate who wants the basics of the city and the ward to work. With Erskine-Smith in the race, she is likely the only one who has a chance to beat him.

I don’t live in the ward, but for me, it would be impossible to support Nate Erskine-Smith at this juncture. He is, in my estimation, parachuting into this race for personal gain.

At the end of the day, the choice will be made by the residents of Beaches-East York. It is up to them if they are comfortable being Nate Erskine-Smith’s “other woman.” Realistically, Beaches-East York — even if he says he loves you — you know deep down, he doesn’t.

Nate will move on when a better opportunity comes up.

The Nate Erskine-Smith timeline

Human beings have spent the better part of history attempting to break free from the yoke of hereditary rule. The majority of revolutions in history have been focused on taking power away from a few royal families. Emperors, dictators, and kings. Progressivism has been at the forefront of this fight.

The irony abounds then, when it comes to former Toronto city councillor Mike Layton. When asked about running for the federal NDP just 17 days ago, Mike Layton said: “My family and my work…remain my focus right now.”

Well, in a sense, today Layton put his money where his mouth was and backed that statement up: he’s looking to spend more time with his stepmother at City Hall come October 26th.

Layton is the son of late federal NDP leader Jack Layton. Jack’s widow, of course, is Toronto mayor Olivia Chow. So, this is a true family affair. Mike Layton has held public office in great part because of who his father was. He stepped aside four years ago, and now he wants to reclaim his job at the family office.

It may be lost on partisan supporters of Layton, but there is a strange hypocrisy at play here with the ideals that underpin modern Canadian progressivism. Nepotism and progressivism ought to be like oil and water. Revolutions happened exactly because power was centralized among a special few born into noble houses without merit.

Today, with fears about Trump undermining democracy in the United States, the “No Kings” protest has emerged as the buzzword and gold standard for progressive protest movements. Like anything American, this has overflowed across the border and has popped up in Canada with tremendous support from leftists.

The irony of “No Kings” (in case no one has paid with cash lately) is that Canada has an actual hereditary king. His name is Charles. He is on our new coins, and his mother Elizabeth is still on the $20 bill. New citizens swear an oath to him. Yes, in 2026. But that nepotism is at least ceremonial.

More practically speaking, the hereditary rule of fathers, mothers, and sons abounds within Canada, an extremely progressive place. All this despite it being antithetical to the very ideals that progressivism seems to espouse. It is extremely hard to square the circle that is diversity, equity, and inclusion when one matrimonial home and their progeny get to rule Toronto.

You can hardly support equality of opportunity or equality of outcome while also voting for someone because of who their dad was. This is a core contradiction that hits at the heart of the most basic tenets that drive the NDP and the left wing writ large.

This paradox extends far beyond the 416. Just this past spring, the NDP nominated Avi Lewis as their federal leader. Lewis, of course, is the son of Stephen Lewis, former leader of the provincial NDP. He is also the grandson of David Lewis, former leader of the federal NDP in the 1970s.

If the NDP is looking for the best person for the job, it is technically possible that Lewis, Layton, and Chow are the most fit. But what are the chances really that the prominent sons of prominent politicians are constantly being tapped for leadership?

This at some point needs to be acknowledged as rank favouritism and nepotism. Despite all the hullabaloo about the NDP convention’s equity cards and diversity statements, they still managed to pick a rich white guy who comes from a political dynasty and attended one of the most expensive private schools in the country as their avatar. The dissonance is difficult to comprehend.

In their defence, the NDP does not have a monopoly on the matter of nepotism. Of course, the most prominent example in recent years is that of recent Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau. Trudeau was a schoolteacher who just so happened to be the son of the most famous Canadian prime minister in living memory. The last Liberal prime minister before Trudeau was Paul Martin — who was himself the son of a federal cabinet minister (Paul Martin Senior). The result: in a country of 40 million people, Canadians are frequently governed and/or represented by the exact same power families. While there are valid criticisms that may be lobbed at Mark Carney, nepotism is not one.

While the trend is particularly noteworthy on the left, the Conservatives in Ontario do have their own dynasty — the Fords. Doug Sr. was an MPP, Doug Ford is, of course, the current premier, and his brother Rob was the mayor of Toronto.

They are all “conservatives,” yes, in theory — but remember that in Ontario they aren’t simply that — they are “Progressive Conservatives.”

While most egregious on the left, nepotism might be the one matter that Canadians seem to agree on. To be clear, Canadians say they don’t want nepotism, but they will vote for it. The more progressive they are, the more comfortable they are with hereditary rule.

The “Divine right of Kings: Ford, Layton, & Trudeau.”

Organizations like the NDP and Progress Toronto will tell you that “diversity is our strength” and then turn around and endorse Mike Layton.

Layton is the focus of this article, but he is just another in a long series of people who have no problem telling other people to “earn it” while conveniently ignoring the fact they’ve caught a special updraft. The result of this kind of nepotism is not victimless. Many would-be leaders are cut back in service of these pseudo-royal families. Layton’s decision is locking out several other hard-working Canadians from realistically participating in municipal politics. This time around, the political casualties will be many Toronto progressives. People who believed they could dare challenge the king for his throne.

Layton is running in University-Rosedale, Ward 11 in downtown Toronto. He is challenging incumbent Diane Saxe and eliminating young progressives including Diana Yoon and Gabe Blanc.

Yoon has a grassroots campaign, buoyed by years of service raising money for local housing. Yet progressive nepotism is ostensibly blocking her path, all for the sin of not being born into a political dynasty. The Toronto Sun reported that Layton asked her to step aside after Yoon had been campaigning for months — she registered officially to run on May 20th.

Gabe Blanc for his part has a strong air game — but his candidacy is essentially being told by the establishment progressives to go sit at the kids’ table. Progressive royalty like Layton needs to be accommodated. If gatekeeping young progressives from holding elected office is the price, then so be it.

Other progressive candidates include cycling advocate Keenan Courtis, community health advocate Dana Fisher, arts leader Terri Hawkes, and artist Alice Li. Each of them is worse off due to the Layton candidacy. On the one hand, that’s politics. On the other hand, it’s a cruel reality check for many who believed affecting change was simply an equation of effort and ideas.

On that matter we must acknowledge the role that the mayor plays here. We can reasonably infer that Olivia Chow endorses all of this — she would need to provide her blessing to her stepson before Layton jumped in. The NDP, CUPE, Progress Toronto, and all their supporters will have no choice but to fall in line with an endorsement.

With Yoon, Blanc, and co ostensibly dispatched, Layton is still not quite a shoo-in to win. To restore the Chow-Layton city hall paradigm, he is still going to have to face off against incumbent progressive Diane Saxe.

Saxe has now been put into an extremely tough position vis-à-vis her relationship with the mayor. She is a downtown progressive and has by all accounts been supportive of all Chow endeavours. Now her boss’s stepson has shown up to the family office and is threatening to take her job. This could have some wacky political implications, as Saxe may be forced to seek new allies and buddy up to mayoral challenger Brad Bradford. If Saxe is spurned enough to retaliate, Bradford would do well to accept the political refugee.

Bradford, funnily enough, is also the son of an MP. The key difference, though — and it is enough to exempt him from this trend — is that Brad Bradford was actually in politics before his mother was. After serving on council, he encouraged his mother, Valerie Bradford, to serve in public office. Eventually she became a Liberal MP for Kitchener-South Hespeler.

With regard to Toronto, the fallout from the Layton decision could provide real political risk for Olivia Chow. Supporters will brush off the friction in the name of the coalition, but Yoon, Blanc, and Saxe supporters have to be pretty unhappy with this development. They would be within their rights to ask: why is the mayor okay with her stepson entering the race at the eleventh hour and spoiling all the work these progressive campaigns have done over three months and more.

Ultimately, Canadians, but especially progressives, will have to reckon with a pretty basic question. Can progressives be progressive if they are constantly nominating the same few (usually white and male) political families? Can a progressive Canada be a democratic and equitable place while the sons and wives of politicians keep ascending to public office at the expense of grassroots candidates?

If Lewis, Chow, Trudeau, Ford, and now Layton are any indication, that reckoning does not seem to be coming any time soon.

In other words, until something changes, we can understand that when progressives say “No Kings” they really mean “No Kings... unless it’s my King.”

I have approximately 16,308 days left on Earth according to Statistics Canada’s average male life expectancy. I’ve lived 44% of the time I’m likely to get.

It’s a strange thing to see your life in terms of a number that only goes down.

I’m pretty healthy, a former competitive athlete, don’t really drink, and workout frequently, so the real number is hopefully higher, but doing the math is still a sobering experience.

While “what I wish I knew” articles like this often feel like narcissistic navel gazing, I tend to still like them for three specific reasons.

1. I spent a large part of my 20s throwing darts at the wall hoping something would stick. I wish I had enjoyed it more and felt better about myself in the process.

2. When you are starting out, you feel like everyone knows some secret you don’t, and the proxy for that is the size of their bank account relative to yours. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

3. I believe the value of experience is to use it for the benefit of others, and since I’ve done a lot of random and stupid stuff, maybe someone, somewhere can learn something from my mistakes.

Since I did one of these a few years ago, this is incremental and additive. Five things that have become more crystallized since.

What You Must Subject Yourself To Is a Function of How Much Cushion You Have

Whenever someone reaches out for career advice, I often ask how much of an emergency fund they have. This is a personal and intrusive question, but it’s the most important thing that matters for career optionality other than your skills and reputation.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t spend money and enjoy yourself when you are young. I believe in that more now than I ever did. What I’d suggest is you work as hard as you can to build a cushion of at least a year’s savings. Worried about getting fired? It will help you sleep. Want to try something new? You can. Something big breaks? You can cover it.

When I was 27, I spent a lot of money on a one-bedroom shoebox in midtown Toronto. I could easily have gotten something less nice and saved more. I wanted to be in a cool, new condo with a gym and near nice restaurants but worked in consulting, so I was never there. You don’t realize how much a choice like that shapes every decision that comes after it until you’ve made it. If you want optionality, keep your housing and transportation costs as low as you can stand until you’re ready to give it up.

Your Success Is the Inverse of Taking Injustices Personally

There have been many situations over the last 10 years where the work world has not been fun. Stuff happens at work. It’s a feature, not a bug. It’s going to happen to you more than once too.

Jeff Bezos once said you should aim to enjoy 50% of your job. I think I’m doing much better than that.

When difficult injustices happened to my younger self though, my first instinct was to leave. New company, new manager, new industry. In retrospect that wasn’t always the right call. When you’re subject to any form of professional injustice, take a step back and ask what you want from your current situation and whether it’s aligned to where you’re trying to go longer term. If it is, the question becomes how to make the situation work until enough data or a genuinely better opportunity arrives to make leaving an option you can’t ignore.

The part nobody tells you is what leaving costs. Every restart buys you a year or more of relearning who matters, how decisions really get made, and where the bodies are buried, along with questions about your ability to hold down a job. I’ve made this mistake and would rather you didn’t.

The Higher You Go, the Trade Between Growth, Comp and What You Give Up Can Converge

If you want to become more senior, make more money, and accumulate more professional relevance, you’re going to have to give up other parts of your life. You cannot have everything at once.

I work a lot more now than I did when I was younger. I’m more senior, I make more money, I manage people, I have a side hustle, and there is more pressure to perform. I’ve given up things I once enjoyed doing and I’ve been ok with that up to this point.

At some point in the climb though, the incremental increase in responsibility and the incremental increase in what you’re paid to carry it can start to separate. A lot of people don’t think about that. A VP I met with recently framed it in a way I keep coming back to: At every jump, you need to evaluate if that incremental increase in comp and responsibility is worth what you are willing to give for it. It’s completely fine to decide you don’t want to be a C-level or a VP or a Director. You just have to actually decide.

You Need to Become a Good and Accurate Self-Critic

One of the most important parts of being a leader is holding other people accountable for actions and results. The worst thing you can do is wait for someone else to make you accountable to yourself.

As you grow, you learn when criticism is warranted, when it isn’t, and how to take feedback productively. Whenever you screw something up, there will be things inside your control and things outside it. One of my old managers told me you should be the hardest critic of yourself, but only when there’s something to be critical about.

Have Goals Beyond Money and Reassess Them Often

I never wanted to be in business. I wanted to be a fighter pilot. After that didn’t work out, I had no real career goal other than getting to a certain annual salary number by a certain date. When it happened earlier than I thought, I got thrown for a loop. Psychologists call this the “Arrival Fallacy”. I call it Aubrey’s big f-ing existential wake-up call.

Money is important. Probably more important today than ever because everything is so freaking expensive. But money on its own is not as important as what you use it to do, and whether what you use it for actually matters to you. You are going to trade a lot to get it.

I still care a lot about how much I earn and expect to be paid appropriately for what I can do. However, with only 16,308 days left in my life account, I’m thinking a lot more about what the money is for and how I can use it.

A Bonus: Don’t Be a “Me vs Them” Person

Almost all of my career has been spent in cross-functional or advisory roles, which invariably means having to get things done through people who don’t have to listen to me. Younger Aubrey got frustrated when a colleague didn’t do what he wanted and started thinking about the relationship in adversarial terms.

Older Aubrey has come to realize being a “Me or Us vs Them” person is incredibly unproductive in every respect. It hurts you and it hurts others. Scott Galloway calls this insanity. I agree. It doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t agree with you or won’t do what you want initially. If you think they are your enemy, you will never get anywhere. That is true in business and it’s true in life. Start with a positive assumption. Be a good teammate. Assume everyone is doing their best until you have reason to believe otherwise.

Here’s to the next 16,308.

Aubrey Chapnick is a Toronto based professional with a background spanning Product Marketing leadership roles, financial writing, management consulting, sales and capital markets. He has over a decade of experience across fintech, banking, SaaS and holds an MBA from the Sauder School of Business at UBC and is a past Globe and mail business education contributor.

I watched the Ontario Liberal leadership race debate. Twice.

You probably don’t need to. And you likely haven’t. As of the publishing of this article, the YouTube stream has yet to hit 10,000 views. There’s something about Ontario politics that just does not seem to resonate with Ontarians.

It’s a sleepy industry, and the debate was sleepy. What’s frustrating as an observer who has met most of these candidates personally, I can attest to the fact that in reality, they are anything but sleepy. They are smart and passionate and energetic, but something about the presentation of this event did not hit home. The technical production of the debate has done the Ontario Liberal Party no favours.

The video was grainy. The questions were dull. The candidate interaction was missing. By my count, there were a grand total of 0 disagreements during the debate. Even the moderator, Tina Yazdani — who is an incredible reporter — was sleepy at times. She barely asked follow-up questions and never pushed back.

Ultimately, the party is not doing itself any favours with this kind of presentation. It was no wonder that the Globe and Mail’s report on the debate was just as dull. Their chief takeaway was that shockingly, the candidates who sit in the legislature think it’s important to sit in the legislature while the others don’t. During a sleepy news cycle, there was practically 0 coverage. There was no live audience, there was no candidate profiling. This is essentially a semi-final for who is going to run the Province of Ontario, the most indebted sub-sovereign state in the world, and just about no one is paying attention.

Yes, it’s early, and there’s a long way to go. But the central issue with provincial politics — and one that the Ontario Liberal Party can certainly think about attacking as an opportunity — is the lack of awareness and buy-in for this kind of event.

If a leadership debate happens in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

The party can perhaps be forgiven for not delivering a Netflix special. It is leaderless and relatively speaking still decimated, recovering from the Wynne cataclysm. So perhaps this production was (re)growing pains for an institution that ought to have a little more flair.

Who won? Nobody, really (I do have a winner listed below). Doug Ford, probably.

All that being said, There is real value in actually paying attention to the substance of this debate. Each candidate brings to the table a wealth of skills and traits that make them suited for public office.

The race is wide open.

So here’s my rundown of the five candidates, how they performed, and what they might need to do to next.

1. Lee Fairclough

On her best days, Fairclough has a Churchillian quality to her. She comes across as suited to be a wartime politician. She has the bona fides. She was considered a favourite early on in this race. She has a strong message and wants to frame her MPP experience alongside a strong healthcare record as what should carry her to the leadership.

She is the MPP for Etobicoke-Lakeshore and positioned herself as an expert on healthcare. Before government she was the president of St. Mary’s General Hospital in Kitchener senior vice-president at CAMH. She also now has over a year under her belt of understanding the inner workings of the legislature. But the takeaway from the debate is that she really despises Doug Ford.

While all candidates took various digs at the premier, Fairclough might have been the most guilty of focusing on the negatives of the premier as opposed to her own positive qualities. In a crowded field, being the anti-Ford candidate doesn’t resonate when that is table stakes to being leader of the OLP. That being said, the people who vote tend to be entrenched partisans, and they really hate Doug Ford — so perhaps this is intentional.

2. Eric Lombardi

Lombardi is the longest shot to win this race given his age and experience. But he does have the most thought-out platform and a real vision for change.

The policy wonks in the Liberal base and those across partisan lines have been paying close attention to Lombardi. This can be a strength or a weakness for the candidate. Supporters would suggest this opens up the Liberal tent, while detractors would suggest this compromises “Liberalness.”

Lombardi is attempting to position himself and the Liberal party writ-large as going through a renaissance for the future. He clearly believes that the Ontario Liberal Party needs to set itself apart and cannot just be an alternative to Doug Ford and the Conservatives. Rather, they need to have a positive purpose and build out a vision. Lombardi is taking a gamble that voters actually want substance and not just platitudes.

Paradoxically, to win over more die-hard Liberal voters, he might actually need to simplify the message a little. People reading this article are the 1%. They like to know exactly what the precise target for costing and policies around budget cuts is going to be. But that is not the masses. So Lombardi needs to distill his message into plainer language for certain broader audiences. “I have it all figured out, take my word for it and check receipts if you doubt” is different from “Here is exactly how I have figured it out.”

3. Navdeep Bains

Bains has an aura best likened to a wise, kind uncle. He has a calm demeanour and often referenced his heavy federal experience in his time on the mic.

Of all the candidates, Bains perhaps focused most on the economy. He, however, did not get into detail on any of his statements, something that was a criticism of his platform that had been released earlier on Monday — vague promises with no details, which in his defence is exactly what all three Ontario major parties presented in the last provincial election.

Despite his assurances that it was a misconception, Bains is likely the favourite as of today and has the most momentum. He has the longstanding connections to the federal Liberal party apparatus, and he has spent lots of time working in corporate Ontario, which means deep pocketbooks and strong personal relationships.

As a frontrunner, Bains is the most likely to receive criticism, so he will be happy with the sleepiness of the evening. I would like to see Bains opine on why he feels he can drop into provincial politics after being in the federal cabinet. There is also an exploration to be done on why he thinks Ontarians should be interested in returning to a Trudeau-era staple. The federal Liberals have been spending their time the last year and a half trying to distance themselves from anything related to Justin Trudeau. The status quo is great for Bains.

4. Stephanie Bowman

Stephanie Bowman is the MPP for Don Valley West. She spent the debate drawing on her track record of winning, having served in the legislature for four years. Bowman has the most provincial legislature experience, having been an MPP since the ancient year that was 2022.

That is rather indicative of Bowman’s appeal. She is the elder stateswoman within this group, and has more provincial legislature experience than the rest of the lot combined. I say that last part in jest, but it does go to show just how open this race can be.

Bowman’s best riffs were when she focused on the mechanisms of actually winning a provincial election. Bowman seems to best understand, or at least talks the most about, demonstrating tactical acumen when it comes to actually forming government. Whoever wins this race needs to make sure that this is top of mind for the party.

Bowman spoke about her economic background, having been an executive in the finance sector as well as sitting on the Bank of Canada board of governors. Bowman mentioned a tax cut, but did not elaborate.

Similarly to Fairclough, she needs to remember who she is debating — i.e., not Doug Ford.

5. Dylan Marando

If I had to declare a winner for this debate, I would ultimately tap Marando, simply because, as the kids say, “he’s got that riz.” (Riz is Gen Z slang for charisma, I am told.)

Marando pushed his back office experience in both the Prime Minister’s Office and the Premier’s Office. Marando’s narrative is an attempt to draw a parallel to Dalton McGuinty. He believes the path ahead is to emulate the rise of the McGuinty Liberals in the late nineties and early two-thousands. Rhetoric-wise, Marando did the best, and that’s why I suggest he “won” the debate. If that means anything at all.

Marando played some classical politician greatest hits. He did it with gusto, and he was by far the most entertaining person to listen to throughout the debate. He was, however, also guilty of the Doug Ford bashing, and the chief criticism is that his proposed policies were high level.

The Takeaways:

All the candidates should remember that thinking Doug is doing a bad job is table stakes. While a dig here and there makes sense, it’s not a particularly good use of mic time.

There were hardly twenty thousand people who voted in the prior Ontario Liberal leadership race. So do debates even really matter?

Moving forward, here’s what each of the candidates will need to do to give themselves the best shot at success.

Bains will need to stay the course and try and keep this race sleepy.

Fairclough and Bowman need to figure out how they’re going to differentiate themselves. Bowman’s entrance crowds Fairclough’s lane specifically. Competition over the narrative of “the woman who has the experience fighting Doug Ford, having sat in the legislature” means both need to communicate why they are uniquely situated to win.

Marando and Lombardi will need to learn from each other if they want to be successful moving forward. Both could be strong youthful figures of change — “echo politicians.” Marando could borrow from Lombardi’s substance. Lombardi could borrow from Marando’s charisma.

All that being said, nobody has taken control. No one has yet emerged as a clear favourite, and the OLP would do well to think about how to galvanize the race a little.

The final wrinkle that needs to be addressed is the friction that comes with the format of runoff voting. It is difficult to project who is everyone’s second-favourite choice. The format complicates the strategy tremendously, because attacking another candidate comes with the risk of alienating their supporters. Candidates kept their powder dry last night, and a hesitation to make enemies might be the real explanation for why the debate was a bit of a snooze.

Moving forward, candidates who feel they need a spark will need to point out and leverage their differences. The key will be to find the right avenues of attack, but do so in the most respectful way possible.

For politics nerds, this race is fascinating. But for the vast majority of the sixteen million or so Ontarians, there is not nearly enough energy for this race to permeate the membrane of the collective consciousness or the news cycle.

If that is going to happen, it means that the party needs to do a better job. It means that the candidates need to do a better job. It means the media needs to do a better job.

The OLP leadership is there for the taking, and with Doug Ford’s popularity plunging, the premiership is there for the taking. Will one of these five find a way to break through?

You can watch the debate yourself here: