A stranger, unfamiliar with the local landscape is looking for a place to eat. They arrive at a block with two restaurants open. The first is a McDonald’s jam packed with people. Next door there is a gourmet burger bar, but there is only one couple currently inside.

That stranger would probably reasonably assume that McDonald’s was the better choice. They could be forgiven for thinking that, as that’s what the majority of people are doing, it is likely to be the better option. Under scrutiny however, the gourmet burger bar is going to be a much better choice.

That, in a nutshell, is social proof bias. Your LLM is the stranger. Counting the people in the McDonald’s is how it is deciding what to report back to you.

This has real implications on how Canadians define truth. Only with a commitment to truth can we achieve a just society. So, in a conversation I had with Claude (my AI of choice), I was troubled to see some serious bias in what it was reporting back as facts.

This is a clearly documented phenomenon, with major studies popping up, and it is a major flaw in what LLMs are returning to chatbot users. Frankly, not enough people are talking about it.

This began because I wanted to run a thought experiment to contrast the framing of the Nakba to the framing of the treatment of German civilians after World War 2. The context is not particularly relevant, but this is a hot button topic among some circles in Canada these days. It gets right at the heart of biases of omission.

So looking to explore how we might compare and contrast some similar scenarios, I asked Claude to frame the atrocities committed against German civilians as a German Nakba. I was looking to contrast why no one seems to care about the plight of the German citizens after their government declared war with the plight of the Palestinians.

While I had gone looking for a thought experiment, I was exposed to a flaw far more nefarious and relevant. Canadians are becoming more reliant on LLMs all the time, and our people, especially our young people, don’t have the media literacy to detect that bias.

The bias is there, and demonstrable. It is reproducible. Initially when I asked about the Nakba, the AI gave me a one sided account about the atrocities. As I pressed the AI about its responses, it increasingly admitted that it was in fact presenting a one-sided version of history.

So if a simple question or two dispels the partiality. The AI even apologies. So why is it there?

Anthropic (the parent company of Claude) doesn’t have a political bias as far as I can tell. So it is not intentional. Nevertheless, bias is inserted because of the fundamental mechanism of how LLMs work. LLMs comb the Internet and look to certain sites more commonly, like Wikipedia or Reddit for their information. Models cited Reddit is reference in 40% of instances and Wikipedia in over 25%, per this Semrush analysis of 150,000+ citations last summer.

In a way, that makes sense. Wikipedia has been a widely trusted source for decades. It was oftentimes better than the science textbooks I was using when I was an undergrad. For fact based disciplines, this isn’t a problem. When you’re talking about math or chemistry it is very difficult to insert bias: 1 + 1 is always going to equal 2.

Where this doesn’t apply nearly as cleanly though, is in the humanities. Any history in which the narrative hasn’t been completely settled is particularly exposed. On Wikipedia (as well as Reddit) and more expansively the Internet writ large, there are tremendous biases at play. Millions of data points that can be crawled, all of them without requisite context. But as Ivan Bassov put it here in the summer of 2025: “open to all” has quietly morphed into “dominated by the most organized and persistent.” In other words, these source sites are extremely susceptible to falsehoods.

Once the misinformation has its foothold, and is masquerading as the “source of truth” there is opportunity for social proof bias. Remember our McDonald’s example from earlier? Social proof bias comes into play where you believe something to be true because other people believe it to be true. There is a good base of logic there, we are a species that communicates and shares information. The trust we have in others shortcuts and eliminates the need to examine if the underlying premise is factual by trusting the masses. Ie, everyone says not to eat the poisonous mushroom, so I don’t eat it.

This is sometimes also referred to as the wisdom of crowds. But that wisdom has a clear counterpoint, echoed in the familiar refrain from your parents: if your friends jump off a bridge, will you jump off it too? Like in the McDonald’s example, just because something has been adopted widely, does not mean that it is good for you. Or, if a claim is widely circulated like “vaccines cause autism”, no one examines the base claim - it just lives on, propelled by the momentum of thousands of lies.

This is a sharp analogue for how chatbots are picking up data points. They are looking to see if there is consensus, and therefore quantity matters much more than quality. LLMs are built on pattern recognition. So the more something appears, the clearer the pattern.

In other words, the more popular an opinion is, the more likely it is going to be picked up by an LLM and regurgitated to a user. This matters because even though we all should know better, most users default to trusting their AIs. This is only increasing as time goes on. It’s an inevitable byproduct of using technology.

For example if Claude reports 1 + 1 = 2 accurately, that starts a feedback loop training the user to believe that it is right. So when you ask Claude about the Nakba, you are primed to believe it without pushing back. The same for any kind of politics, or disputed historical grievance. Claude presents a best guess, but it doesn’t really know what it is saying.

Most alarmingly, this presents a glaring hole for bad actors to exploit. Nefarious goals can ultimately be achieved. Those villains can bypass going through the trouble of hacking the source code of the chatbot, they can simple attack the much more exposed “facts” that the chatbot is relying on.

The playbook is simple enough to understand. Hijack organizations like Wikipedia that are not equipped to handle sophisticated brigading. Flood Reddit with fake facts or with facts that are biased or contain glaring omissions. The LLM crawls Wikipedia Reddit, Al Jazeera, or a personal blog with a critical mass of backlinks. It says “this is probably good” and reports it back. Repeat a lie enough, and it starts to soundsan awful lot like the truth.

What’s most glaring is that we know that foreign state actors are already doing this. It has been well documented that this is happening in Canada. In Warren Kinsella’s book, the hidden hand, he provides ample evidence about how western state institutions are being influenced.

Truth tellers cannot play whack-a-mole fast enough to fight the disinformation, and it is being codified, one wiki edit and one reddit comment at a time.

So we need to sound the alarm.

We need to ensure that the companies building and operating LLMs are accounting for this kind of bias in their algorithms. According to Pew Research, half of American adults use chatbots to search for information. This cannot be ignored. Correcting course here will require strong guidance from the government to ensure that biases are not leaking into the information our citizens are consuming. We need federal powers to reaffirm a commitment to truth in these models.

It is common wisdom that anything you know about AI will be irrelevant in a couple of months. So it is of course reasonable that there are some gaps given the speed at which AI capabilites are evolving. But this needs to be addressed. The risks are clear: Reddit is an anonymous forum that anyone can post on. Wikipedia can and is well documented to be the subject of brigading — when users coordinate together to overrun moderation by sheer force of numbers.

These sites, as currently policed, cannot be the sources of truth. This is information warfare, and it needs to be taken extremely seriously. That is as good a place as any for federal institutions to start. There needs to be safeguards in place to prevent this kind of subtle influence from manipulating public opinion.

To demonstrate how these conversations go, I am providing below the full unabridged transcript of my conversation with Claude. The front half is not as relevant (it’s the bit about comparing the Germans and the Nakba), but I’m including it for posterity. To save you a bit of time, I’ve placed the quotes that I believe are most salient at the top of that document. But of course, feel free to read the whole thing here: Claude Transcript

To overcome small sample size bias, and to prove that this is not unique to Claude, I replicated this experiment in Google AI mode. The results were essentially the same. It was more balanced than Claude, but still defaulted to telling one side of the story until pressed.

The transcript of that conversation can be found here: Google Transcript

Needless to say, this was an eye opening experience.

AI is the new frontier of human ingenuity. Systemic bias like this is one of the most obvious ways it can go astray. This risk is especially dangerous for minority populations. When “truth” becomes a numbers game instead of grounded in fact, that is a path towards a heavily compromised society. There will always be propaganda, but we have to at least try to fight it from becoming accepted as fact. There has to be an agreed upon shared understanding of what these models can and can’t do. There is a precedent as well, LLMs already block potentially criminal or racist conversations. Despite valid objections around freedom and free speech, these guardrails do need to be in place. The potential consequences of bad actors wielding this power are just too severe.

At the end of our conversation, Claude provides some potential solutions to prevent this from happening. One of them is simply sending a signal to Anthropic (or whichever company’s AI you are using) and reporting the conversation as biased. We need more good people doing that at the very least. Rewriting history to achieve a political goal is a dangerous precedent to set.

You can easily run similar experiments in your own conversations with AI. I’d love to see some more of them.

In 2016, I worked the Christmas season at the LCBO.

Ten years later, two things still stand out from that job.

The first - every morning I opened the store, two men were waiting. One was a French businessman who’d buy two mickeys of Smirnoff and quickly stuff one into either pocket. The other was a scraggly vagabond who went straight to the fortified wines and grabbed a bottle of Kelly’s — the best bang for your buck, alcohol-content-wise, in the store. The lesson: addiction can impact anyone.

The second standout was the training seminar. Specifically, the one directive broke my mind at the time: if someone is stealing from the store, do not intervene. That’s what security is for, and your safety is not worth a couple bottles of scotch. As a 25-year-old with a bit of a temper, I knew this would be a challenge.

The one time I witnessed a robbery in broad daylight, a man walked in with two large backpacks and began shovelling bottles of Oban into them. One of my colleagues tried to stop him. She screamed. The manager restrained her. Despite the adrenaline, I kept my cool.

My colleague was disciplined with a warning.

We were reminded that the only acceptable move in that scenario is to ask the thief: “Sir, can I help you pay for that?”

This policy remains in place today. I knew that it happens with some regularity — videos surface online from time to time. Recently, a friend of mine was fired from the LCBO. Their offence: failing to report a colleague who’d tried to intervene in a robbery.

Then the other day, I got to relive my youth: while heading into my local liquor store, I noticed four grungy looking people outside. It’s not uncommon to see a poor soul and their dog panhandling by the entrance of this location. But these four stood out — I was pretty sure they were smoking crack. This store is next to a school.

A few minutes later though, while exploring the vintages section, I noticed my four friends from earlier out of the corner of my eye in the store looking at buying some whiskey. I suppose I’d misjudged them. Then it happened. Straight to the scotch: two of them cramming bags full of bottles, the other two keeping watch. Everyone in the store stood by. The customers, the employees, even the security guard. The guard it seemed had actually cleared a path so the group could get out without friction. An employee asked, “Can I help you pay for those?”

I got the final moments on video.

After watching this go down, I approached the employees and expressed my sympathy for their plight. I explained that I used to do their job. They confirmed it. The directive hasn’t changed: don’t intervene. The employee’s safety isn’t worth it. As it turns out, the security guards operate under that same directive.

What floored me about that conversation with the young cashier is that she mentioned that this happens every day. I pushed back — “literally, every day?” “No, but like five or six times a week is totally normal.”

This is the part that’s so soul-crushing: the resignation of our citizens to the normalization of this kind of criminality. The quiet acceptance that this is simply a fact of life. That there’s nothing they can do about it. That there’s nothing anyone else will do about it either.

Then comes the surreal moments after — standing in line for the privilege of paying for your own wine. Those four walked out with dozens of bottles for free. We pay $20 for a bottle of wine that costs $3 in Europe, because that’s what the social contract asks of us. That’s the civil thing to do. But for a fleeting moment, you picture it: walking out the front door yourself, bottles in hand, not paying, as an act of protest. A glorious little act of defiance. This injustice cannot stand.

I tap my Mastercard. “Would you like to donate $1 to the children’s hospital?”. “No thanks”. No revolution today.

You can get over that double standard quickly enough. You get over the feeling of danger. But what hurts the most is that the LCBO — the Liquor Control Board of Ontario — is a provincial institution, funded by taxpayers. We are the ones who are paying the taxes. So all of this theft can and should be considered as directly stealing from all of us.

This normalization is insidious precisely because it is the first crack in the social contract. Those cracks lead to a frayed society. When you see this low-level criminality happening in plain sight, you begin to wonder who else is watching, and what lesson they’re taking from it. For some, the lesson will be that breaking the law does not lead to consequences. In other words, there is no deterrence.

Now, on any individual account, the policy of non intervention by liquor store staff makes sense. No employee should be encouraged to physically stop a robbery. You never know how out of their mind a thief is, or whether they’re armed. Their lives are not worth a couple bottles of Oban.

There is also the broader civic argument: some would say this kind of low-level theft is cheaper, city- and province-wide, than funding the policing, jail time, and rehabilitation these people would otherwise need — people driven to criminality by unfortunate circumstances none of us can fully account for.

We can sympathize with these people, but it has gotten out of control. This needs to stop because it is wrong, but even more importantly because of what it represents.

Without a social contract, we have no shared reference point. When the institutions meant to enforce the law visibly fail to do so, when they fail publicly, again and again, citizens stop trusting them at all. It’s part of why private security has become such a booming business in Toronto. Walking through the more affluent neighbourhoods in the city, you can see that many have already lost that trust.

So where is the leadership on this? Who is or who should be responsible for stopping it?

There are some likely candidates that might logically be held accountable. You can picture their responses though. The CEO of the LCBO? He’d simply call it shrinkage, The same way any other retailer prices in theft and damaged goods. The Premier? He’d call it a local issue. The OPP doesn’t police Toronto after all. The Toronto Police Chief? He’d say it isn’t a priority, that the crime is victimless, and no one is getting hurt. The police will be focusing on using their limited resources on other files. The Mayor? She would surely say that this is a policing matter, and because she doesn’t sit on the police board, she couldn’t possibly be held accountable.

A grand exercise in finger-pointing. “It’s not my responsibility.”

And yet the Premier is happy to turn American booze at the LCBO into a political football. The previous CEO was plenty proud of his sustainability record. The Police Chief and the Mayor keep advertising the apparent record lows in crime.

None of them take the responsibility. All of them take the wins.

This has become the standard retort to any systemic issue. “That’s not my job” has become the default answer.

Perhaps no one is injured, but what about the ruined lives of the people doing the stealing? The mental health of the employees and the witnesses? The dollars stolen that could have gone toward healthcare, treatment, or addiction care instead?

All of it gets forgotten, but none of it is unrelated. Taxpayers are footing the bill either way. They are doing their part, working hard, and being asked to ignore what their eyes and ears are telling them about the grand bargain. That is what’s really at stake here: the social contract.

If you do not have faith in the social contract, it promotes corruption. If there is no rule of law, it promotes criminality. Some empathy for criminals is warranted, but that empathy cannot override the basic tenets of a democratic society. We are a long way away from failed state territory, but we are flirting with the first step towards failure - apathy towards state institutions.

The solutions are not complicated, but they require courage. First, a real commitment from leaders to stamp this criminality out. Long term solutions that prevent the theft, and diminish the conditions by which people are driven to criminality. Second is the shorter term solution. Actual law enforcement with simple principles: The law needs to apply to everyone, equally. Criminals need to be arrested. Arrests need to lead to charges. Charges to convictions (where appropriate). Convictions to sentencing.

This kind of scenario is the tip of the spear. It might look small — a few hundred dollars of scotch don’t move the needle on their own. It doesn’t really affect our day-to-day lives. So it is easy to move past. But the trends and forces of apathy towards criminality slowly erodes our social compact.

Trust in institutions matters.

Let’s do something to restore it.

“A sacred circle is drawn around those whom the progressive modern left are prepared to go into battle for, and it seems as if the Jews aren’t in it.”

― David Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count

In the previous edition, we looked at the historical proof for systemic Judeophobia and traced a surface level chronology of the phenomenon. Judeophobia’s two primary manifestations: An aversion to Jews and Judaism. An aversion to a Jewish state. This section will look at the modern context of systemic Judeophobia along those same lines, with a sharp focus on its core manifestation in the west: Anti-Zionism. Given that I am Canadian and the Canadian context is what I can best speak to, that is where I will focus my efforts. Readers in other jurisdictions will be able to graft their own local experiences onto this framework I am sure.

Jew hate and antisemitism (two key manifestations of Judeophobia) are clearly and dangerously on the rise in Canada. This is so pernicious, that a list of 100 business leaders recently put a call out to put a stop to it. Hate crimes are increasing. Jewish businesses are being targeted and vandalized. Synagogues are being shot at. It is so bad that the Prime Minister of the country flew into Toronto and made a speech addressing this very issue.

With such a clear problem manifesting within Canadian society, it would therefore follow that keen awareness and sympathy for Jews would be top of mind. Especially so given that Canada is in a particularly empathetic era: one of intersectionality and corporate diversity training. Canada has clear quotas for marginalized groups in public service. It has a population largely focused on the horrors of residential schools. It keeps a constant eye towards the perils of colonization. This way of thinking is particularly keen in Trudeau era leftist and progressive spaces.

Given the presence of the antisemitic incidents alongside the apparatus seemingly ready to support victims, we would expect the left to have a keen awareness and strong reaction to any and all Jew hate. Yet, the constant episodes and news articles do not move the hearts and minds of left wing ideologues. To make it more stark, the Judeophobic tendencies are not only ignored, they are actually reinforced by those same progressives. In other words, addressing the hatred of Jews and/or anything tangentially related to Israel is mysteriously and conveniently absent from the most sympathetic parts of society. The left wing cultural zeitgeist just doesn’t address Jews.

The omission is as glaring as it is nonsensical without the underlying explanation of systemic Judeophobia.

As an analogue and control group, we can look at the LGBTQ+ populations and compare them to Jews writ large within Canadian society. The comparison is potent for a number of reasons: both groups experience equal rights in law and theory but run into difficulty in practice. Neither are monoliths: Both contain tremendous diversity within their populations. Both populations are discriminated against for their immutable characteristics. Those characteristics are hard to define, they break out into many different personal and sub-group identities. They are therefore oftentimes lumped together under the umbrella of being “Jews” or “Queer” respectively.

The comparison is most salient though when we look at these two groups of people as “others” who can, in the right circumstances pass as “normal”. Of course there are key differences between the Queer and Jewish experiences, but the historical treatment of homosexuals and Jews in the west are similar. These two groups ought to form a natural alliance built on a shared experience of historical exclusion. Yet one is included, and the other is not.

This exceptional status can only be explained by systemic Judeophobia. Both groups have long been victims of right wing and religious fundamentalist hate. But only Jews are also excluded from left wing ideology. Where a queer person can find refuge in the left without compromising their identity, Jews are asked to hide their views on Israel, or risk alienation from precisely the refuge they would typically look towards for succour.

Ultimately, this is the equivalent of being psychologically surrounded by the systemic aversion to your identity and peoplehood.

As an historic and cultural group, Jews have been a significant minority in Canada for over a hundred years. Like many other ethnic groups, Jews came to the country primarily as economic migrants and refugees. Over those hundred years, Jews have had the staying power and good fortune to achieve prosperity. Yet, no other group of individuals is ostracized in the same way. In Toronto, where over half of the 400,000 Canadian Jews live, there are control groups to further demonstrate systemic Judeophobia.

An easy comparison is one with the Italian population. Italian migrants and Jews arrived in the country en masse at approximately the same time. They faced similar discrimination, they struggled as all migrants do. They understood each other’s plight, and stood up for each other when it mattered. This was perhaps best elucidated by the famous Christie Pitts riot in Toronto of 1933 where Jews and Italians literally fought Nazi supporters in a city park. Nearly one hundred years later however, the communities’ paths have diverged. While there used to be specific racial slurs for Italians, and a genuine dislike of the Italian way of life, any aversion to Italians has dissipated. There is rightfully no concept of prejudice against Italians in Canada anymore.

How can we possibly explain the difference? After their arrivals, both populations were forced to overcome a normal amount of newcomer aversion. Both populations established ethnic enclaves, older downtown boroughs packed with culture, and newer suburban cities a highway away from those cultural artifacts. In other words, Jews and Italians have seemingly assimilated and are operating and thriving in Canadian society.

Italians are also an apt comparison because Italy is no ancient country. Italy was only fully unified in 1871, four years after the establishment of Canada. Canada has considered Italy an enemy, in active combat with each other: Canada fought against Italy in the second world war. Yet, there is no question of the validity of Italy as a nation state.

There is no country’s diaspora, nor is there any legitimate Canadian minority whose support carries even close to the same compromises and qualifiers in Canadian society. There is political and social risk for supporting Jews and Israel in Canada. Heads of institutions either need to qualify their support before providing it, or balance it with platitudes to other minorities in the same breath. There are no such conditions for Italians.

None of this is to ignore legitimate criticisms of Israel’s foreign policy, Israel is a nation state just as flawed as any other global power. Yes, some of its national politicians are as contemptible as any awful global leaders. But the double standard used to classify Israel as a singular driver of the world’s problems is so extreme it borders on absurd. We can see this when we compare the Israeli-Iranian, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other conflicts of the day. The lowest hanging fruit is the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Despite widespread enmity towards Russia’s actions, there is not a single sane person that would argue that Ukraine or Russia should not exist. Of course, in this comparison, Israel is more like Ukraine - defending itself against attacks and threats from abroad. Democracies that are allies of NATO. Yet, somehow, that narrative has been flipped.

In a country like Canada, packed full of multiculturalism, there can be only one explanation - systemic Judeophobia. Something intangible and unique about the Jews and Israel makes it permissible to question their very existence. To debate borders and historical rights is one thing, to debate the legitimacy of the one Jewish state is another altogether. The double standard is the same as jew hatred is the same as antisemitism - all clear symptoms of systemic Judeophobia.

The examples of those double standards are endless. When other minorities overcome challenges to reach elected office, their diversity is lauded. When an Italian is elected as a mayor, or a Lesbian is elected Premier, their minority status is seen as an asset. It shows an ability to overcome stigma, or an ability to galvanize a community and reach out beyond it. It would be ludicrous to hear accusations of a globalist Italian or homosexual plot designed to seize Canadian institutions. Yet for Jews in positions of power, there is always talk of Zionist ambitions, incentives, handlers, and double loyalties. This is particularly alarming to modern Canadian Jews. While this rhetoric has always been a subtle feature of Canadian society, it used to be limited to private conversation or the darkest corners of the internet. Now, these points of view are common in the public discourse and rampant online.

As we leave these two comparative populations, each of these examples are ultimately evidence of a systemic problem: the inexplicable aversion to Jews, Judaism, Israel, and Israelis. In other words, systemic Judeophobia.

This is of course not a new phenomenon in the Canadian context. In the era of William Lyon Mackenzie King, “None is too Many” was the government’s immigration policy. The systemic Judeophobia was so overwhelming that Jews needed to create their own institutions — places like Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, or the Jewish Hospital in Montreal. This was not done out of preference, it was done because Jews were excluded from the mainstream. Growing up, my grandfather told us stories of his life as a doctor in the 1950s where there were signs at water fountains that read “No Dogs or Jews”.

The sense of normalcy we see today, where Jews do have hospitals and universities named after their communities, is a testament to the overcoming of systemic oppression, not the removal of it. Systemic Judeophobia never disappeared. Jews had beaten it back. This was a temporary victory. The virus that is antisemitism was incubating and morphing into something new.

At last we must address directly the primary contemporary manifestation of systemic Judeophobia: the unique contempt for Israel, or “anti-zionism”. Anti-zionism has picked up such ferocity and purchase in left wing spaces it defies logic. It has achieved that prominence in part because of its unique positioning as a judeophobic movement resistant to the taboos of antisemitism that came out of the Holocaust.

While post World War Canada was reckoning with antisemitism, it failed in addressing the underlying cause, Judeophobia. Antisemitism’s shortcoming was its inability to incorporate Israel. Advocates of the day cannot be blamed however, as the world has not known a Jewish state for two thousand years.

This change in the angle of attack – that Israel is a uniquely devilish entity – has become a societally appropriate manner to discriminate against Jews. As we saw in part two this is not new - it is a return to the ancient manifestations of Judeophobia: Discrimination against the one Jewish state in the land of Israel.

The blanket hate, the constant and total presence of anti-Zionist rhetoric, accusations of genocide, and double standards is severe. Further, the central tenets of the ideology defy any logic. It has become an omni-cause that can be used to explain any injustice.

This newfound outlet, an orgiastic compilation of Judeophobia disguised as being in the name of hating Israel, scratches at some primal itch. The hateful relish and take advantage of the double standard. Well meaning progressives are either ignorant of the facts or too afraid to point out the logical confusion.

Somehow a nation state of 10 million people is the root of all progressive grievances. There is no rational explanation for this besides systemic Judeophobia. According to Israel’s enemies, all of these are rational positions:

• Israel is committing a genocide against a people who’s population is increasing.

• Israel is a repressive theocracy despite it having the most liberal rights for Gays in the Middle East.

• Israel is an ethnostate despite it being composed of less than 30% Ashkenazi (white) Jews.

• Israel is an apartheid state despite Muslims and Israeli Arabs enjoying full rights within the country - including holding elected office.

• Israel is a colonial entity despite it being made up primarily of an indigenous people returning to their ancient land.

• Zionists control the media despite constantly being accused of atrocities and painted as villains in that very same media.

Then there are the comedic accusations that come and go, already forgotten since Algeria, Iran, and Egypt exited the world cup. Some soccer analysts and federation members declare that Zionists are influencing the outcomes for FIFA. They omit however, that those same Zionists are not sophisticated enough to rig the competition for Israel to qualify.

The example that hits closest to home is demonstrated by the reaction to this piece published on accordingto.ca - a story about Israelis migrants living in Canada.

Feedback to the piece included responses that neatly described this hate movement in its entirety: Canadian anti-Zionists would say that there is no place for zionism or Zionists in Israel, but they would also say that there is no place for Zionists here in Canada. In other words, there is no place for Zionists anywhere - thus the anti-Zionist movement reminds us why Zionism was ever necessary in the first place.

Despite all the contradictions in their thinking, progressive movements are relentless in their energy for despising Israel. The flames of hatred are fanned by religious fundamentalists. The most passionate anarchists relish in Anti-Zionism rooted in Judeophobia. Judeophobia is their lingua franca - Jews can be their scapegoat, no matter the issue of the day. Israel is often described as the global Jew, and there is unfortunately an understandable allure to this positioning. It plays on the human need to have simple solutions to complex problems. Digging deep for answers is painstaking when one could simply tap into the latent Judeophobia in the aether, like mana from heaven.

Finally there is the fact that there is relatively little social or political capital expended when blaming Israel or Jews for a problem. This is a systemic feedback loop that further normalizes Judeophobia. Leaning into this conflict is so popular that entire Canadian political careers become focused on it, despite it having next to no bearing on Canadian life.

Israel could make any number of policy decisions, it could double in size, or cease to exist entirely, and the facts on the ground for the vast majority of Canadians would not change one bit. Yet Israel is a focal point for every news outlet, the headlines take up so much oxygen it baffles the mind. Anti-Zionism is a focal point for every progressive movement. With no cost besides abandoning some loosely held ephemeral principals, it is all upside. The ends justify the means perhaps.

This is why the existence of Judeophobia defies logic. Human beings desire a target for othering, and these prejudices are deeply enmeshed into the western psyche.

There is a tremendous amount of well documented transgression. The sheer volume of hate, the constant sapping of energy, and the base level of discomfort and fear all add up. Ultimately this presents a pretty logical search for an escape route. Forgo the downsides of Jewish identity entirely. Explore the idea of abandoning your identity and assimilating. The pull is strong. The grass is greener perhaps without the Jewish anchor.

As we will see in the next edition here though, assimilation is never really possible.

With just four countries remaining, the World Cup is coming to an end, and the summer fling Canadians had with the beautiful game is already fading into memory.

As mid July gives way to the dog days of summer, and with hockey training camps just over the horizon, most Canadians will forget about football. But before we move on, before we get our hopes up about Conor McDavid, Nick Suzuki, or Auston Matthews, it’s a perfect time to take a look at the state of the union of the men’s national program. What exactly did hosting (part of) a World Cup mean for this country? Was it worth it in the end?

In time, with a fond nostalgia, history will look back on this tournament as a resounding success for Canada soccer. The most optimistic Voyageurs might have been disappointed that their team went out in the last 16 against Morocco - especially so given Canada’s first half performance. But with the perspective of a little time passed, we can see the context of this program’s run in 2026. Coach Jesse Marsch may have been right, “we’d rather be us than them”.

By the time they bowed out, Canada was without their three best players, Schrodinger’s Alphonso Davies (hamstring), Qatari casualty Ismael Kone (broken leg), and the hollow performance of Jonathan David (just plain awful). Beyond that, the Canadians were playing hurt with key players compromised due to injury: Moise Bombito, Promise David, and Stephen Eustaquio. Then there are the two omissions of Sam Adekugbe (remember him?) and Marcelo Flores, who missed the tournament entirely. Altogether that is eight cards short of a full deck. Fans can see that Canada was far from the height of their powers during USA ‘26, and they can dream on about what might have been.

Despite all the obstacles though, the team redefined the conversation on what a successful men’s program can look like in the great white north.

Ahead of this World Cup, feckless Canada had been anemic on the global stage. They had never even tied a World Cup match, let alone pick up a full three points. They had a grand total of zero wins, zero ties, and six losses. This record had been complemented by scoring a meagre two goals in those six matches, (one of which was an own goal), while conceding twelve.

All of those ghosts are now banished. The glass ceiling pressures are remnants of the past. Canada have won a World Cup game, crushing Qatar six nil. They were victorious in a do-or die knockout game, a hard fought match against a resilient if not mundane South African side. They overcame the pressures of hosting, and grew into themselves after tying it late vs a Bosnia & Herzegovina side playing with house money.

The only two games they lost were to two quarterfinalists, Morocco and Switzerland. Neither of those teams were truly threatening to take home hardware, but both sit comfortably within the upper echelons of world football. For stretches, Canada was the superior side in both defeats.

With Canada’s breakout and arrival on the world stage, we can contrast them with their neighbours to the south. Prior to ‘26, even calling themselves little brother to the United States or Mexico might have been charitable. Those two nations hardly think about the rouge et blanc at all.

The Americans and the Mexicans have forever been the giants of CONCACAF. Those two behemoths have dominated the confederation’s landscape for a century. The USA and Mexico qualify for the World Cup with regularity - and it is a national crisis in DC and Guadalajara when they do not.

Yet, despite these augmented standards, neither country has had any bonafide success on the world’s biggest stage.

Canada’s modest achievement of reaching the last sixteen falls just one win short of matching the zenith of both American and Mexican achievement at the World Cup.

Over the hundred years since the tournament began, those two countries have a combined two wins in the round of 16 or later. Humble Canada therefore, with its harsh climate and relatively tiny population is punching above its weight.

While Canada was breaking new ground in Toronto, Vancouver, and Los Angeles, its two main rivals were unable to take any kind of meaningful step at this World Cup.

Both Mexico and the USA expected to be quarterfinalists on home soil.

Particularly delusional USMNT supporters were convinced that the trophy would stay in New York until 2030. As it played out, the US crashed out after a paltry performance against Belgium.

For the Mexicans, despite their very best efforts to channel the worst of the CONCACAF dark arts, Mexico could not muster a win at the storied Azteca when it mattered most against England. Even being up a man for half a game after a red card was shown to Jarell Quansah, El Tri were unable to banish their round of sixteen demons.

For Canada, the round of sixteen was paradoxically both a minimal expectation and a resounding success.

Expectations at this stage must always be moderated. None of these mighty European nations have won the World Cup: Netherlands, Croatia, Portugal, or Belgium. There has never been a champion from North America, Africa, or Asia - no country from any of those regions has ever even contested a World Cup final.

As a matter of fact, since the tournament in France in 1998, of the 32 final four spots, only 15 countries have produced a semi finalist. It must be kept top of mind, that while Canada is improving, so are Spain, France, England, and Argentina.

So achieving eternal glory by winning a world championship should not, and frankly can not be a reasonable goal. Without that heavy weight of expectation, we can redefine the bar of success. Any pressure that might have been present is suddenly released, and Canadians can instead focus on the process. That process though has significant shortcomings.

Ultimately, Canada is an immature footballing nation. The domestic league is amateur. Top sixteen at a World Cup was a pipe dream less than a decade ago. Every aspect of Canadian football has potential to improve in quality. The players, the team, the management, even the supporters need to be better.

But they also need to relish this moment. They need to enjoy the journey for what it has been and what it will become. Any win at the World Cup should be cherished. Any goal should be celebrated. When you frame 2026 this way, the tournament was a tour de force.

With an immature program, it must be said that Canada has a sometimes immature coach. Despite that criticism, Jesse Marsch remains the correct choice to lead this group.

Candidly, Canada is not a top side. There is no tactical mind on earth that can remove the physical limitations of aptitude. They are lightyears away from beating a side like England.

Canada can however, begin to slowly close the cultural gap between them and the premier footballing nations. England as the gold standard is the destination for global football. It is its zenith. The biggest clubs in the world are in London, Liverpool, and Manchester, and British culture often revolves around football and footballers. The consequences of that social calculus is that if a player is eligible and talented enough, they will do whatever it takes to take the field, sing “God Save the King”, and represent England.

That limit may never be reached, but Canada needs to continue to orient itself toward England as true north. The national team needs to establish a good name and build a strong reputation. It needs more young talent dreaming of singing “We stand on guard for thee”.

If those measures are the top incentives, a bombastic manager that is an expert recruiter and a motivator of men does need to be the priority. Growing the game and the program within Canada, despite all of its growing pains, is the most suitable path forward.

The way the Canadian squad responded to the injury of Ismael Kone speaks wonders about what Marsch, and John Herdman before him, have been able to achieve. When those players speak about brotherhood, it is not hollow platitudes. International football, we must be reminded, is not the players’ primary vocation. This is essentially their side hustle.

Marsch, for his part, absolutely deserves criticism for many of his choices. His bizarre handling of not disclosing Alphonso Davies’ availability, his unyielding loyalty to Jonathan David, and the puzzling timing of his substitutions are all legitimate questions that demand answers.

Changing any of these details however, would not suddenly morph Canada into a serious contender. Canada Soccer’s shortcomings are far more foundational than one man choosing the team while he gleefully pumps his arms on the sideline.

The trend as it stands is that Canada Soccer is ascendant – so why would you consider changing the coach?

The sad reality of Canada Soccer’s ascendance however, is that it is occurring despite itself. Historically, the CSA is an awful institution. Recently, under intrepid CEO Kevin Blue, the organization is starting to turn things around. They are slowly improving. But there is a tremendous amount of work that remains to be done.

Rome was not built in a day, and the lengthy list of change candidates demand attention. There are too many to tackle in one cycle, but Blue and his brain trust have to start somewhere. So as a partner article to this one, in our next edition we will examine some of the lower hanging fruit. In that examination, we will dig into what Canada Soccer fans should be looking towards, hopeful of, and respectfully demanding over the next qualifying cycle.

In the meantime though, we should pour a cold one, light a cigar, and savour the positives in Canada’s coming out party.

They should now be considered a mainstay of the beautiful game.

“Antisemitism is not a unitary phenomenon... Antisemitism is not a belief but a virus. The human body has an immensely sophisticated immune system which develops defences against viruses. It is penetrated, however, because viruses mutate. Antisemitism mutates.”

- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

In the introduction of this series, I introduced the concept of internalized Judeophobia, which is the internalization of systemic Judeophobia — the fear, hatred, or aversion to Jews, Israelis, Judaism, and/or Israel.

In order to understand the consequences of this internalization and how it becomes internalized, we must first understand the systemic origins of the problem. What exactly is systemic Judeophobia? How is it different from antisemitism?

First, “antisemitism” is a manifestation of Judeophobia. It is an outdated term coined in the 19th century by antisemites. Judeophobia, which I wrote at length about here, is the far older, constant thread of the Jewish experience.

Judeophobia predates antisemitism by millennia. It has gone by different names, but the aversion to Judaism and Jews, Israel and Israelis, whether by the name Hebrew, Jew, Israelite, Zionist, or otherwise, is firmly embedded into Jewish history. The accusations change era to era, but there is always that core aversion and discrimination. Like Sacks says, the virus mutates and shifts to fit the times in which it exists. Among others, that historical journey has manifested Judeophobia in terms of tribalism, religious oppression, racial discrimination, and political othering.

There are two historical threads that need to be tracked to reach a comprehensive understanding, first the manifestations of Judaism, and then the thread concerning a Jewish state.

In ancient times, Judeophobia was a question of peoplehood, a disdain and aversion to the Hebrews as a tribe and a people. This is first documented in biblical times, though it is cemented throughout history. Just about every Jewish holiday consists of some form of addressing Judeophobia. Thus, the well known pre-meal adage “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat”.

As history progressed, the hate morphed into monotheistic sectarian strife. Jews have been tolerated throughout history, their presence is self evident of that, but this ancient hatred inevitably flares up, and turns into violence and persecution. There are the well known epochs of the Crusades, Christian pogroms, and the Spanish Inquisition. In the Arab world there are the less well known but just as brutal Islamic conquests, the Almohad caliphate, and recently the 20th century grand exodus of Jews from the Muslim world.

In the post Napoleonic era, as Judaism morphed from being primarily an ethnic peoplehood into a religion in a post enlightenment sense, the hatred began to express itself via political mechanisms. With society geared towards reason and the scientific method, Jews thrived in enlightenment Europe. But eventually, the convenience and utility of Judeophobic tendencies become irresistible. In the short term, blaming Jews has proven to be a winning formula.

Most famously and successfully of course, the Nazis found a convenient target in Jews, and were able to convince Germans that Jewish betrayal was responsible for losing the first World War. Corrupting enlightenment ideas of science and reason, and borrowing from 19th century social Darwinism, the Nazis framed their hate as racial antisemitism. This of course was the foundation for the Holocaust, and there is no event more emblematic of systemic Judeophobia than the murder of six million Jews.

Politically right wing regimes do not have a monopoly on Judeophobia. On the left, the Marxists and Soviets were able to target Jews (eventually Zionists) as the scapegoat for their problems. In the Soviet case, this was in part inherited from Tsarist Russia; Jews had been subject to violence and political othering while confined to ethnic and religious enclaves. After the Russian revolution in 1917, and until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the aversion carried on. The USSR had the 20th century distinction of manifesting Judeophobia in all of its plentiful forms, a kaleidoscope of hate: tribal, ethnic, religious, and political. The very existence of Jews was completely antithetical to communist goals.

None of this is new information to anyone with a basic level of understanding of Jewish history. But it bears repeating in the framework of Judeophobia. Systemic aversion to Jews and Judaism is much better understood as a cultural and historical throughline. The second half of the Judeophobic blanket, the aversion to Israel and Israelis, is also a feature of history. “Anti-Zionism” is not a new phenomenon. It was simply dormant because it lacked a target for two thousand years.

Ancient Israel, the kingdom of Judah (Judaea) was a constant target of invasion, conquest, and oftentimes forced assimilation. The Babylonians, the Seleucid Greeks, and the Romans all attempted to destroy the Judean way of life in their own way.

The Romans were particularly successful with their ultimate conquest and absorption of Judea as a Roman province. This was followed by the expulsion of most Jews from the region. Were the Romans antisemitic? They would not have considered themselves so. But the Romans would have looked at the Jewish way of life as inferior. They were certainly Judeophobic. They had an aversion to the Kingdom of Judah, its citizens, and what it stood for. They wanted to end the customs and rituals of Judaism, and they knew the best way to do that was to remove the native population from their land. They were so committed to this line of thinking that they renamed the province entirely.

These two key manifestations of what it means to be Jewish at all are tightly knit. The intangibles of the relationship with the divine, the customs and tradition of the religion, as well as the tangibles of the ritual, which oftentimes specifically revolve around architecture and geography. Israel or any historical analogue of Israel is the grounding conduit for Judaism. Temporarily removing a Jewish state in the land of Israel did not eliminate Judeophobia, it simply turned that aspect of the hatred dormant until a Jewish state was reformed. As it happened, this episode of dormancy lasted for two thousand years.

So, we can see clearly that these two primary streams within Judeophobia are well established. Hate, fear, and a general aversion to Jews and Judaism, as well as Israel and Israelis (or their ancient analogues). History shows us that Sacks’ virus analogy holds. That infection can manifest via any of the tribal, religious, racial, or political access points. With Israel, the next mutation occurs. It is a different spin on a classic case: the geopolitical.

It bears mentioning that this is where this idea differentiates itself from the emergent popular term “Jew Hate”. “Jew Hate” is another manifestation of Judeophobia, in this case the obvious and overt hatred of Jews. “Jew Hate” however, does not address Israel in any meaningful way. It therefore suffers from the same semantic shortcomings of “antisemitism”. Jew hate is a visceral term, therein lies its power. It hits at the core manifestation that Jews are dealing with on the surface. It is a symptom however. The root cause is the more useful “Judeophobia”.

Understanding the systemic conditions for Judeophobia is the key groundwork for understanding the “self-hating” Jew. This segment focused on the past, and it orients us in the correct framing. This primes us to understand how systemic Judeophobia manifests in western society today.

In the next edition of the series, we will explore the core manifestations of systemic Judeophobia on a more practical level, specifically in the Canadian context.

Tuesday evening, at the offices of Toronto tech startup Ada, Ontario Liberal party leader hopeful Eric Lombardi gave a presentation on the future of Artificial Intelligence titled: “Should we fear an AI future?” The Liberal leadership election is in full swing, and Lombardi chose to tackle one of the most hot button issues facing Canadians.

What stood out most about that room was that the audience was made up almost entirely of people under the age of forty. For provincial politics, that is an incredible feat. It’s particularly salient because it shows genuine energy behind Lombardi’s campaign.

Millennials and Gen Zs have grown up in an era where politicians tend to have a lot more in common with their parents than with them. Voter turnout has always been lower in younger demographics, but the worm turns, eventually.

This is the fundamental energy behind Zohran Mamdani in New York, and is perhaps a contributing factor in the emergence of a candidate like Brad Bradford in Toronto.

When someone born after 1985 can finally see themselves in a candidate, politics can reposition from something observed to something participated in. For a Canadian electorate whose politics consumption is primarily American, it’s no wonder that they feel that Canadian politics are out of reach. The United States is the jurisdiction that they know the most about, and they literally can’t vote there.

While their policies and auras couldn’t be further apart; Mamdani, Bradford, and perhaps now Lombardi offer an elimination of that barrier. Making politics accessible and tangible.

The Ontario Liberals, for their part, have been disorganized, divided, and rudderless since the Wynne era. Having that youthful energy as the centrepiece to build around is something that has been long lost in provincial politics. So perhaps the lane is open for OLP strategists and voters to take a good hard look at this candidate.

One of the greatest challenges for aspiring politicians is showing credibility and expertise on the issues of the day. This is especially so with a younger candidate like Lombardi. On the matter of artificial intelligence, expertise evolves month to month. Lombardi studied engineering at the University of Waterloo and spent time working in Silicon Valley — he walked the walk, as it were, and the tech workers in the crowd were there to validate that.

Lombardi went at this issue with a thesis: the province is at a crossroads when it comes to AI. Technology evolves, and is only becoming more integrated into our lives. The choice, therefore, is how to approach that future: will Ontario happen to AI, or will AI happen to Ontario? Will we make decisions that lead to a world where technology serves humans, or where humans serve technology? In other words — should we fear an AI future?

The discussion was framed as a choice to be positive and ambitious about the province. Lombardi made the observation that dominant narratives around AI change according to whatever most incentivizes the AI companies and their leaders. When seed funding was required, AI execs were ringing the alarm bells of AI as a disruptive technology that would destroy jobs. Fear of missing out on a revolutionary idea also drove the feeling of scarcity. Today that framing persists in North American sentiment towards AI. Now that it is no longer financially or politically prudent for AI to be positioned that way, the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world have changed their tune. It’s a pattern that Lombardi relates to other high-tech trends like those seen in Crypto and NFTs.

The ability to demonstrate nuance and think deeply is a feature of Lombardi’s campaign. He has plans and principles, but he also does not pretend to have all the answers. During the Q&A, when met with complex questions such as how to prevent the brain drain in tech — the 60% of his Waterloo classmates who no longer live in the province —Lombardi’s response was direct: “I don’t think anyone can really know the answer to that question.” Instead, he was pragmatic about solutions. He is seemingly unafraid to say: “I have to think about that” His answers and ideas tend to be geared towards the long-term, and they usually concern foundations. To Lombardi, the way forward for the province is exactly that: a focus on foundations. Doing the boring, deep work, with policy as the tool to reshape incentive structures, and ultimately, behaviour. In a room full of software engineers, product managers, and company builders — the kind of people who often live by a mantra of “move fast and break things” — that was an interesting dichotomy. Lombardi is suggesting we create the conditions for those builders and their risk appetites to be able to push Canada into the next generation. In sum, he does not think we should fear an AI future.

Therein lies perhaps the greatest opportunity for the OLP. Tech workers specifically have a reputation of being the kind of people who will manage a product, hop on a sales call, rock climb, and sing in a choir, all in one day. In Canada, they don’t seem to be captured by any specific political party. So if the provincial Liberals can harness that kind of persona they suddenly have some valuable skills in their arsenal: creativity, talent, and capacity are a powerful mix. While it is the same field, Ontarian tech workers are not cut from the same cloth at the Silicon Valley tech bros; they tend to be Torontonians who are just as interested in their hobbies as they are making money.

For an underdog like Lombardi, it makes a lot of sense to engage with these builders and with the young people that flock to these companies. Today’s youth are oftentimes painted as screen-addicted, isolated, and lazy. But the truth is, they are talented, informed, and deeply passionate about equality and living in a society that works for all. The problem is, historically, young people just don’t vote. Building a movement that works for them, and addresses the concerns of their parents, might just be the winning path.

The biggest fear of the young is being locked out of potential economic prosperity. That capitalism will move into a frozen state that promotes wealth inequality and prevents class mobility. That scenario can be referred to as neo-feudalism - where, like medieval populations, inherited wealth matters far more than merit, and only those whose parents own homes will in turn own homes themselves.

Identifying that bad AI future and using policy to avoid it is Lombardi’s message. Restoring attention to the fundamentals. Eating the political vegetables that allowed western society to thrive. It remains to be seen if this message will resonate with the kids.

Rudderless and leaderless as the OLP is, they still poll well amongst Ontarians. The next head of the party has a legitimate shot at being Premier. In the last leadership race, Bonnie Crombie became leader with only 11,000 votes. So momentum based on a young energetic and motivated segment of the population just might be the winning way going forward.

You can watch and listen to Eric’s full talk here:

Anna Bronshtein, President of I-CAN (Immigration Collaboration Alliance Network)

October 7th 2023, 6:30 AM and the alarms start to blare.

For Israelis, this is not an uncommon experience. We are used to a certain routine of tension and fear. Usually, you are prepared, the news gives you a warning that tensions are high. You can feel that conflict is coming, so mentally you are ready. You can understand why.

This time, there were no warnings.

We woke up completely confused. My husband and I ran into the shelter with our three young boys, they were still half-asleep, crying, and terrified. As we sat in that suffocating room, we opened our phones to see where the missiles were coming from.

We expect and are hardened to a missile bombardment, but this was not that. This time, it felt like the gates of hell had opened up. Everywhere, all at once.

As the footage started appearing online, I watched a live kidnapping of a colleague’s cousin. The terrorists were live streaming from their phones while they abducted victims into Gaza.

Shortly after, we heard that a coworker’s daughter was killed at Nova.

My employee’s niece was taken hostage.

Another colleague’s young relatives were discovered hiding alone in a closet, their parents gone.

The stories were endless. The tragedy was everywhere. Any sense of normalcy we had had was completely shattered, the life we had built was broken into pieces. We were totally disoriented.

After October 7th, many Israelis fled around the world. Most went to Europe. We chose to come to Canada.

I will never forget our first days in that Toronto Airbnb. We walked into the apartment, and one of my son’s looked around and asked, “Where is the shelter room? Where do we go when the alarms start?”

I told him, “There are no shelters here. Canada is safe.”

He looked at me, trying to process a reality he had never known, and said, “Okay, so if something bad happens, we just go to the staircase like we do in buildings without shelters.”

It took months for my children to adapt to this new way of life, and finally put their guards down. Today, when a loud motorcycle speeds by or a heavy object drops, my heart still freezes in fear. But my kids are unfazed. They have moved past their sense of panic. As a mother, I am deeply grateful for that.

Our children have become Canadian. They have friends and play on their local sports teams. Our family is integrating, we are building connections. For the kids, this is their home.

But there is an agonizing uncertainty lying beneath our quiet lives. A heaviness that is calling into question the sense of normalcy and safety that we feel.

The Israeli community in Canada is highly complex. Some came earlier to escape the political strife that had been gripping Israel before the war. But most of us arrived after October 7th out of fear. To a person uninterested in the legal definition of such things, we could easily be considered refugees. We were afraid for our lives. So packed what little we could carry and fled a dangerous situation to protect our families. Legally though, this is not the case. We are here as what the government calls “economic migrants”.

Professionally, and economically, most of us do not fit the typical immigrant profile.

Data shows that 70% of Israelis living in Canada hold post-secondary academic degrees. Nearly half work in high-tech. Most of us brought significant life savings to sustain our families. Despite our new location, we continue to work remotely for the same companies we did before we left, whether those are in Israel or elsewhere.

We are not a drain on the system; we are actively contributing to the Canadian economy.

Some of us have even bought homes despite the heavy non-resident taxes. Others have started small businesses that are already creating jobs for other Canadians.

We are a diverse group—mostly Jewish, but we have many mixed families, non-Jewish families, and Israeli Arabs. But despite our skills and our deep desire to give back to Canada, we feel entirely invisible to the system.

We are incredibly grateful to Canada and to the Canadian government. They created a special measure; open work permits that allowed us to flee here and find a sense of safety. But an open work permit is temporary. It was a band-aid solution, and next year, the permits will begin to expire.

For those who arrived here on these open permits, Canadian employers were able to hire us with no friction. But now, with the expiries looming, we are faced with a frightening situation. In order to remain here, to continue to build our new lives, those employers must sponsor us through closed work permits or complex LMIA (Labour Market Impact Assessment) processes. Given the difficult administrative burdens, the legal costs, and the hassle of dealing with the immigration authorities, most companies are simply refusing to pursue this option.

As a result, this community of highly skilled, deeply resilient, and profoundly grateful people are being neglected and passed over. While we have proven to be valuable contributors to the Canadian economy, there is no clear path forward to continue building our lives. Because of the technical method of our arrival in Canada, we have no realistic path to Permanent Residency. Our work permits are expiring, and because of recent changes in the thresholds to qualify for those same permits, we have no way to renew them. This means that we are being pushed out.

When we fled a war zone, we thought it would be temporary. But the situation in Israel is not improving. Returning is not a viable option. The war is ongoing. The unpredictability feels just the same as it did when we left after October 7th.

Most importantly, psychological trauma for our families remains our most critical concern. Our children have finally begun to recover. Returning them to an environment where the constant threat of violence is a daily reality would reverse this progress and inflict profound psychological damage.

We cannot go back there. For our children’s sake. For our sake. Yet, as it stands, we cannot stay here.

So we are asking for help. From all Canadians, Jewish, Israeli, or otherwise. We cannot navigate this situation alone.

We do not need charity, but we do need support. We need acknowledgement, professional connections, and advocacy. We need leaders and employers who recognize our value. We need people to understand our legal bottleneck. Most of all we need people who are willing to stand with us to help build a predictable pathway to permanent residency. The exact same way good people stood for your ancestors when they arrived in Canada.

Canada is an amazing country. It is understandable that so many desire to become Canadians. For us, our values align here. We contribute to this wonderful country. We give back.

So if you can, please help. Share this article, tell friends, family, and coworkers about our situation. We need to spread the word, we need unity and assistance in convincing the immigration authorities that we deserve to stay. We are already doing the work at I-CAN, and if you want to, you can learn more at our site: https://i-can.info/

Many other groups have come to Canada via these same open work permits, and have justly been able to become Canadian. Our children deserve the opportunity to live in peace and safety.

We want our families to continue to thrive here.

Please help, because we already call this place home.

Anna Bronshtein is thet President of I-CAN (Immigration Collaboration Alliance Network)

Attending the first and only World Cup knockout game to ever be played in Toronto, with the game reaching a fever pitch, in the 90th minute I tried meditating. I wanted to soak it all in, be totally aware of my surroundings. I wanted to truly internalize the atmosphere, and make sure I remembered what that brilliant moment felt like.

It was a sweltering Toronto summer night, 48,000 people. Croatia and Portugal. Modric and Ronaldo. Two legends with their international careers on the line. At BMO Field of all places. In my home town.

A World Cup swan song for Toronto, the metropolis that Canadians from outside the GTA like to glibly label the “centre of the universe”. Canada, I hope we made you proud. Beyond our borders, there might have been a Billion people watching from around the world. From Lisbon to Dubrovnik, Tokyo, to Rio. They were all looking at the “Big Smoke”. Well, for those precious two hours, Toronto absolutely was the centre of the Universe.

This was a spectacle I never thought remotely possible. 20 years ago in 2006, I was parked in the Don Cherry’s Sports bar in Parry Sound (the middle of nowhere), Ontario watching Portugal take on England. Cristiano Ronaldo scored in the Penalty Shootout. Last night, I saw him score a penalty in person.

Portugal is moving on, so their fans can be happy. Croatia will always feel they got robbed by the VAR. Partisans and Neutrals alike will remember the night for the game on the pitch. For me, the result hardly matters. Simply being in the room was like my own personal World Cup final.

As I tried to soak in those moments the 91st minute now, I was met with a profound sense of pride for Canada. This feeling of identity — that elusive idea of what it means to be Canadian — came directly into focus. It was a product of the environment, but most importantly the small conversations I had when I said hello to dozens of strangers throughout the evening.

Croatia and Portugal have enormous diasporas in this city. Both sides had thousands of fans in attendance. To zoom out though, these two populations were proxies for many Canadians. They were representing every long established ethnic community that calls Canada home. Greeks, Mexicans, Italians, Brazilians, Jamaicans, English, French, and all the rest.

This was the cultural mosaic on full, glorious display.

That night proved that we can in fact be half Portuguese and half Jewish and still be 100% Canadian.

As the 92nd minute came, several vignettes from the evening came to mind:

I went to the game with one of my younger English cousins, who went to school in Guelph of all places. We’re both named after our Avô (grandfather), Sebastiao. When I found out we were going to the game, Avô was my first call. He is 95 and lives full time in Portugal now. When I got up the morning after the game, he was my first call again. Being able to share those moments and reporting back on the sights and sounds put a smile on his face. His hard work and sacrifice are why we were there at all. Sharing the photos with him, and making sure he knows that we were thinking of him is the most meaningful thing for me about the entire experience.

There was a Portuguese woman I met who had come in from Montreal - right around the corner from where my Portuguese mother grew up. Montreal was Canada’s first great city, it’s where my family landed in the ‘60s. My mother grew up there. That story is told in millions of different ways. It is profoundly Canadian.

There were the Croatian fans everywhere, in their signature checkered jerseys. Constantly in full song, singing and speaking in Croatian. When you spoke to them though, most had no discernible accents. They were usually from somewhere like Hamilton. 100% Canadian, 100% supporting Croatia. Genuine in holding both.

93rd minute. Paying almost no attention to the game, lost in thought and feeling.

There were a pair of South Asian men behind me - a thirty year old uncle and his eight year old nephew. The kid was an enormous Ronaldo fan and having the time of his life. I asked if they were Portuguese, and the man said they were Pakistani and he loves Portugal because of his nephew. Turns out they live out west in Calgary. He works in oil and gas. How many Canadians can relate to exactly this? Moving across the world for a better life, better prospects, and having the absolute privilege of sharing success with family.

I told the kid he had the best uncle ever, remembering all the times my uncles and aunts were there for me when I was young.

Then there were also the Colombians. A diaspora that always shows up. Perhaps unnoticed by many, there were probably a thousand yellow shirts in the stadium. Colombia were expected to play this game after all. They ended up winning the group, so many Colombians had tickets.

There was a man in yellow sitting next to me watching the game with his elderly father who I said a few words to in broken Spanish. I asked him, with ticket prices being what they were, and Colombia not playing, why didn’t you just sell them for thousands of dollars?

He simply said: “This is my dad. He still lives in Colombia. There is no way we would ever pass on this.” I spent my entire trip home thinking of my late father and how much I related to this stranger I will never meet again.

Finally there were the four Italian-Canadians sitting in front of me. They were just there to soak it all in, cheering for every goal, being a part of the fun. Facilitating, participating, and encouraging this crazy mosaic all around them. They were just as much a part of it. They were wearing Canada hats and Ronaldo jerseys, and waving a big Croatian flag. A mess of support, four identities adopted, all in harmony.

94th minute - Goncalo Ramos with a glorious header. Portugal take the lead. I lose my mind and watch the drama play out.

I soaked it all in. My country in my country. While the crowd was enjoying the crazy swings in the game, I was enjoying the crowd. I realized that this was Canada at its absolute finest.

Grandparents, friends, husbands and wives, sons, sisters, cousins, communities.

50% Portuguese, 50% Croatian, 100% Canadian.

Is it ok to write using AI? I think so. Well sort of… The following is 4 separate artifacts in reverse chronological order.

1. The final “draft” of this piece
2. The preliminary “draft” of this piece
3. The conversation I had with Claude (The AI) to help draft this piece
4. A context file to be plagiarized if you’d like. (Context files are the reference AI has - like basic operating instructions)

This is the weirdest thing I have ever put on the internet, so I hope you can follow along.

Part 1 - The Final “Draft”

I Used AI to Write This Piece

I wrote this piece using AI. More accurately, I dictated it on my phone while sitting at my desk on a Wednesday morning.

It’s a bit of a silly article, but it’s here to demonstrate my process for potential writers or anyone struggling with leveraging AI.

Step 1 is setting up the context file, some strict ground rules with Claude (my AI of preference) to keep myself honest. I tell Claude quite clearly, do not write anything for me, but help by being my thinking partner.

Step 2 is to create the outline for this piece. Which is exactly what I am doing at the moment. If you’ve ever seen Spaceballs, this is my own little “Now is Now” scenario.

Step 3 is the drafting/dictation process. I like dictation because it allows me to ramble on instead of agonizing over every single word. Stream of consciousness is the whole cloth that I cut back from to create the piece. I find it much more efficient than my former strategy: self-editing in real time.

Step 4 is the external editing step. My greatest advice at this stage of the process really is: “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good”. Your writing will never be perfect, that’s exactly why editing exists. The AI thinking partner will help with any preliminary gaps and/or structural problems with the writing. After the AI has a pass, a human editor will comb through the piece and ensure it hits its stride.

Step 5 is publishing. This is a mental hurdle more than anything else. Many writers, when they’re first starting out, are terrified that they might ruin their reputation, alienate friends, or be exposed as fraudulent.

So the elephant in the room: the nuance, morality, and tastefulness of using AI. My advice is that the most important thing in writing is to maintain your unique voice. Ultimately that is the thing that cannot be replicated and that will set you apart. Keeping your voice in control can be likened to working out and eating your vegetables. It is time consuming and the allure of laziness is there, but it is much healthier in the long run.

AI is a tool, it all depends on how you leverage it.

So that’s essentially the whole process in a nutshell. This was a strange one to write, but my goal here is to encourage younger Canadians to dive in, and add their voices to the chorus of Canadian discourse. Hopefully you’ll take the leap.

Part 2 - The Original Dictation/”Draft”

I Used AI to Write This Piece

I wrote this piece with AI. Perhaps I’m not writing it at all. I’m dictating it into my phone while sitting at my desk on Canada Day.

It’s a bit of a silly article, but it’s here to demonstrate exactly what my process is for those looking to learn how to write. The next step here is the outline for this piece. There were five or six different pieces I’m building it out of right now. It’s like that scene in Spaceballs — “Now is now.”

There’s a context file that exists to keep myself honest. I’ve set up rules that Claude will simply not allow itself to write anything for me, which is really important. I’m attaching the context file to this piece.

On the dictation — again, we’re very much in the meta here, because I am speaking this into my phone. But I find it really simple to ramble on about something to get my ideas down in a quick manner instead of agonizing over every single word. Oftentimes, people let perfect be the enemy of the good, and that is quite detrimental. That’s what editing is for. That’s why I, as editor in chief, exist — to help ensure pieces are hitting their stride. A lot of my writers, when they’re first starting out, get worried that they are going to either alienate friends or look silly, but really it’s just a question of taking the leap, like jumping into cold water.

The next step is editing it with Claude. Claude gives me this as one long document, and then I bring it into Google Drive to edit. I’ll probably edit it very lightly, if at all, just so you can see what we spat out here.

I want to close with a call to action to anyone who’s been attempting to write, or who’s feeling guilty about using AI: your voice is the most important thing you have, so keeping it intact is vital. That’s true regardless of whether anyone can tell you used AI. In the long run, it’s better, it’s healthier — it’s just like working out and eating right.

Part 3 - My Conversation With Claude

The Full Conversation — accordingto.ca

This is the conversation between Jacob Citron and Claude that produced the article “I Used AI to Write This Piece.” The conversation itself is the article.

Jacob: I wanna write an article on how to write an article leveraging AI in a way that maintains creative integrity and ownership while demonstrating to readers and potential writers how I use AI to assist me in creating my pieces. First, can you give me a list of the context and the rules around what you can and can’t do while we’re writing? Then I wanna build a structure and outline, and we’ll go from there.

Claude: Here’s the rundown of my role, straight from the editorial context file.

What I don’t do:

• Write any part of the article, or generate arguments, theses, or positions

• Rewrite your paragraphs or sentences (minor grammar/typo fixes are the exception)

• Add facts, stats, or references you haven’t introduced

• Push the piece in any ideological or tonal direction

• Change your voice

• Reframe things to seem “more balanced” — that’s your call

• Comment on whether a position is right or wrong, only whether it’s argued well

What I do:

• Take your draft chunk by chunk and hold the thread of the whole piece

• Flag logical gaps, non-sequiturs, or places where something’s assumed but not established

• Point out underdeveloped sections

• Silently fix clear grammar/typos, and light-clean dictated text without touching meaning

• Ask questions instead of assuming and rewriting when something’s unclear

Voice I’m protecting: conversational, analytical, nuanced, logical — lands somewhere, doesn’t moralize, never extreme in either direction. If a fix I suggest would make it more formal, neutral, or generic, it’s the wrong fix.

Canadian conventions: Canadian spelling, Canadian framing unless the piece calls for something else.

One nice bit of texture: this piece is about how you use AI, so the process itself — me flagging things, you deciding — is basically the demonstration. Worth keeping that in mind as we build the outline, since the structure might want to show, not just tell.

Whenever you’re ready, give me your working title or angle — or just start dictating and we’ll build the outline as we go, whichever you’d rather.

Jacob: I want to call this piece “I used AI to write this piece.” It’s actually gonna be framed as a tutorial. Step one is the context file, which we’ve already discussed, making sure that there are ground rules in place using Claude. Step two is to demonstrate the thesis and then build an outline. So my thesis is that you can use AI in a way that is respectful and preserves the integrity of the humanity within the writing. I also want to point out that I’m dictating everything going on right now. That’s why my writing oftentimes seems conversational. Anyway, the structure of this article will be: one, setting up the context file — I will actually ask you at the end to export that so I can give it to people for their own safeguards. Step two is come up with a thesis and the outline. Make sure you include timestamps. At the start, I wanna make sure that this is a data point that people can understand. I think that’s part of the jarring nature of it all. In this case, the thesis is simple: it’s an intro, as well as showing the outline, then the dictation piece, then editing with Claude, and then human passes in Google Drive to go from there. And that’s it.

Claude: Got it. Here’s the structure as I understand it — reflecting it back before we lock it in.

“I Used AI to Write This Piece”

1. Intro / Thesis — the piece opens by stating the thesis plainly: AI can be used in a way that’s respectful of and preserves the humanity and integrity of the writing. You’ll note upfront that you’re dictating, which is why it reads conversationally.

2. The Outline — shown to the reader as a structural artifact (what you’re building right now)

3. The Context File — the ground rules doc, exported at the end for readers and writers to take and use themselves

4. The Dictation Piece — the raw process of you talking it out

5. Editing with Claude — showing the flagging and questioning process in action

6. Human Passes in Google Drive — the final human-only revision layer, outside AI entirely

[Jacob selected: one timestamp at the very start only]

Timestamp locked in: 9:19 AM EDT, July 1, 2026. That’s the skeleton. Whenever you’re ready, start dictating the intro and I’ll hold the thread from there — flagging as we go, not writing.

Jacob: I wrote this piece with AI. Perhaps I’m not writing it at all. I’m dictating it into my phone while sitting at my desk on Canada Day. It’s a bit of a silly article, but it’s here to demonstrate exactly what my process is for those looking on how to write. So the next step here is to come out with the outline for this file. There were five or six different pieces. I’m building it right now. It’s like that scene in Spaceballs — “Now is now.” There’s a context file that exists to keep myself honest. I’ve set up rules that Claude will just not allow itself to write anything for me, which is really important. I’m going to attach the context file to this piece. On the dictation — again, we’re very much in the meta because I am speaking this into my phone. But I find it really simple to ramble on about something to get my ideas down in a quick manner instead of agonizing over every single word. Oftentimes, people let perfect be the enemy of the good, and that is quite detrimental. That’s what editing is for. That’s why I exist, to help ensure that pieces are hitting their stride. A lot of my writers, when they’re first starting out, get worried that they are going to either alienate friends or look silly, but really it’s just a question of taking the leap, like jumping into cold water. The next step is gonna be editing it with Claude. You’re gonna give me this as one long document, and then I’m gonna bring it into Google Drive and edit it. I will probably edit it very lightly, if at all, just so that we can see what we spat out here. I wanna close with a call to action to anyone who’s been attempting to write or is feeling guilty about using AI. First, when you use AI to write things for you, people can tell. There are artifacts and fragments and sentence structures. And also, I found that people check. Finally, your voice is the most important thing you have, so keeping it intact is vital. Give it a shot.

Claude: Got it — holding the thread. Two flags before you move on.

1. The closing pivot — you move from “people can tell / people check with AI detectors” straight into “your voice is the most important thing, keep it intact.” Those are two different arguments (getting caught vs. integrity for its own sake) sitting next to each other without a bridge. Is the CTA “protect your voice because you’ll get exposed” or “protect your voice because it matters regardless of exposure”? Right now it reads like both, unresolved.

2. “That’s why I exist, to help ensure pieces are hitting their stride” — the “I” here is ambiguous. Is that you speaking as the writer, or is it meant to read as Claude’s voice?

Everything else is tracking fine — the meta framing lands, and the context-file and dictation sections connect cleanly to the outline we built. Keep going whenever you’re ready.

Jacob: The thrust is the latter. Your voice matters regardless of exposure. In the long run, it’s better, it’s healthier, it’s just like working out and eating right. The I here is about me being the editor in chief for the site. That’s the service I provide and why it’s valuable to have collaborators in general — human ones, that is.

Claude: Clear — noted on both.

One more flag on the CTA now that the throughline is confirmed: if “voice matters regardless of exposure” is the actual point, the detection material currently reads as the lead argument with voice-preservation tacked on after. Worth considering whether detection should be framed explicitly as the lesser reason — something like “even if you never got caught” — so the piece doesn’t accidentally land on exposure as the main stake. Your call.

Jacob: I think I’ll probably take it out actually entirely, that AI checker piece. It’s not relevant and distracts from the main point that it’s really about personal, professional integrity.

Claude: That tightens it — cutting the detection bit puts the weight fully on integrity as its own reason, no hedging on getting caught.

Jacob: Please do put it into Google Drive.

Claude: Draft uploaded to Google Drive as “I Used AI to Write This Piece - Draft.” Assembled from exactly what you said, with only light cleanup of dictation artifacts — nothing added or rewritten. Ready for your human pass.

Jacob:[First human pass — edited draft returned]

Claude: Clean pass — the structure landed well. Two small flags.

1. Step 4, “a human editor like me” — since you’re both the author and editor in chief, “like me” is slightly ambiguous. A reader could reasonably wonder whether you’re speaking as the writer or as the editor.

2. The jump from Step 5 into the voice/integrity paragraph — you go from “worst case, no one will read it” straight into “the nuance, morality, and tastefulness of using AI” with no transition. The bridge is missing.

Jacob:[Second pass — bridge added, “like me” addressed]

Claude: That bridge works — “the elephant in the room” picks up the publishing anxiety and pivots cleanly into the integrity argument without over-explaining the connection. Flag resolved.

The “like me” ambiguity in Step 4 is still sitting there from the previous pass — worth a look, but not a blocker.

Jacob: I removed it. Let’s get this published! [Final draft submitted]

Claude: Two small things before you hit publish.

1. “Which is exactly what I am doing at the moment” — this is present tense and works perfectly as a meta moment while you’re writing it, but once it’s published it’ll read as frozen in time in a slightly odd way. Worth deciding if you want to leave it as an intentional artifact of the live-writing conceit, or adjust the tense.

2. “nut shell” — one word: nutshell.

Otherwise this is clean and ready. Great piece — the process demonstrated itself.

Jacob:[Final edits — intro revised, Spaceballs line smoothed, nutshell fixed]

Claude: Clean. One flag still outstanding: the present-tense “which is exactly what I am doing at the moment.” Your call whether that’s an intentional artifact of the live-writing conceit or something to smooth out before it goes up.

Jacob: Let’s trust that the reader gets it. I will link to a Spaceballs clip. Great.

Part 4 - A link to the context file:

https://www.accordingto.ca/p/accordingtoca-context-file-for-writers

Cheers and Happy Canada Day!

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“Israel has converted Jews from people who were not harmful to anyone, to people who are harmful to the whole planet. Who are the chaos engine of humanity, and of the west.”

— Haim Bresheeth, June 2026

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What brings a person to hate and fear their own identity? How does a person get to the point where they are making accusations so farfetched, so hateful, that they are calling their own race of people harmful to the entire planet?

This quote is shockingly very real, and was said this weekend at the “Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress” in Dublin, Ireland.

I do not know this man, I had never heard of him until this weekend. But I absolutely recognize him for what he is. I know his story.

The self-hating Jew is a trope that has been a part of Judaism, the Jewish faith, and the Jewish culture since the times of the Torah.

In Exodus chapter 32, the Israelites left unsupervised, abandon their faith and adopt the rituals of their oppressors. They melt down their jewelry and forge a golden calf. They reject their monotheism. These might have been the very first recorded self-hating Jews.

In Numbers chapter 13, some Jewish scouts come back to the tribe after a mission to investigate the land of Canaan. Many of them actively try to sabotage their own community and prevent them from entering the land of Israel and prospering. Perhaps these were the first Jewish anti-Zionists.

Neither is a new phenomenon.

Today we can easily recognize both of these ancient stories with a modern coat of paint. Echos of our past. We have some self-hating Jews, those who reject certain or all attachments to the religion or culture. More insidiously, and far more commonly we have a very potent kind of Jewish anti-Zionist.

History tells us that this is a feature of Judaism. But how do we go about explaining the origin of someone who hates their own people? How do we explain a self-hating Jew?

We all know a Jewish person that we either grew up with or knew in high school who has since become vocally antagonistic towards Israel or Judaism. We wonder, perplexed, what has happened to them. What experiences or people sent them on the path that landed on such a stark rebuke of their own culture? How could they possibly arrive at a different set of facts, and a different set of conclusions than we have on what is right and what is wrong? Why are they letting themselves be tokenized, their identities hijacked by elements who so clearly hate Jews? It does not compute.

When we look hard enough, and in the right frame, we can begin to see a common path. A logical flow. This is not a random occurrence. There are mechanisms at play that need to be named, acknowledged, and hopefully acted on.

In Western society, there is an acceptance that marginalized groups have varying degrees of patterns of trauma derived from cultural experience. While I do not subscribe to a holistic idea that group identity necessitates trauma, I do believe this idea should be met with nuance. There is some truth to understanding cultural incentives and how those incentives can impact an individual’s world view and life experience.

This acknowledgement is key to the framework as it connects the Jewish experience to that of other minorities. Other minorities also face prejudice and difficulty. They also have their own populations of “self-haters”

There are gay men who hate gay people. There are people within all racialized groups that look down on their own racial identities and cultures. There is significant academic literature on this phenomenon. The key difference is that these groups are not referred to as “self-hating”. Instead, these people are describe by well-established terms as having internalized homophobia or internalized racism.

There are clinical frameworks built around these phenomena. There are therapeutic responses and community movements in place to assist people who are confused, insecure, and hateful about their identities. But until now, no one has connected the dots in quite the same way for Jews. Jews, like in many aspects of discussion around intersectionality, are omitted.

As a parable, we can examine the following: When a gay man is growing up in a society where, for whatever reason, he feels like being gay is not acceptable or makes him a lesser person, it is not unreasonable to imagine that man espousing homophobic behaviours. This is what is called internalized homophobia.

When we encounter a person who has absorbed their surrounding culture’s contempt for their own racial identity, we call it internalized racism, and we try to empathize with them. When we see someone distancing themselves from their community, who deflects or minimizes indicators of their culture, who has come to see their own skin tone as something to be overcome — we have the tools to recognize that person as a victim and help them overcome it.

When it comes to Jews, we do not yet have those tools. We uniquely have “self-hating Jew.” This is not accurate enough to be useful though. “Self-hating” is an incomplete term. Besides, a majority of the hate espoused from these people is directed against other Jews. They hate Jews, or Israel. Not always themselves.

We require more precise language for a precise phenomenon. There is a model for this, and thus the term to use is Internalized Judeophobia. Exactly the way a gay man can have internalized homophobia, a Jew can have internalized Judeophobia.

Judeophobia, is the fear, hatred, or aversion to Jews, Israelis, Judaism, and/or Israel. All are fundamental aspects of what it means to be Jewish, though their expression varies greatly among Jews. The delineation is when the expression crosses the membrane of dormant, to actively prejudice.

Specifically, to have internalized Judeophobia is to take the external forces of anti-Jewish discrimination, stereotypes, and prejudices, and — for a number of reasons that I will explain — truly feel and believe that those are legitimate positions.

Notably, like any radicalized group, Jews experiencing internalized Judeophobia cannot be debated. Logic does not move the needle when an idea has attached itself to the soul. Internalized ideologies cannot be argued away. The remedy starts with an acknowledgement of the cognitive dissonance. That’s why naming it is so important. After recognition, we must be able to provide empathy. Once you understand the triggers as well as the fight or flight responses that are underpinning their behaviour, we can begin to see a path to return to a state of harmony with a person’s identity.

Just like the gay man who has built up a set of behaviours to come to terms with his homosexuality, someone with internalized Judeophobia did not arrive in their predicament out of contempt. They arrived there because of fear. The world told them, in a hundred ways, that their identity was a problem — and they found a way to survive by agreeing.

While their conclusions do ultimately need to be rebuked, their experience deserves explanation, recognition, compassion and pity.

There is a lot to say on this matter, so I am penning a seven part series with my theory of the case.

After this introduction, I will elaborate on the framework of internalized Judeophobia via the following ideas:

• The history and scale of systemic Judeophobia — the oldest and most persistent form of discrimination in Western history

• The illusion of assimilation and why it fails

• What internalized Judeophobia looks like and how it manifests

• The inevitability of the cycle, and why it is so insidious

• How internalized Judeophobia translates into tokenization — and how it has been weaponized from the outside

• Potential solutions: how the Jewish community can prevent this from continuing, and how to support Jews who are experiencing the internal struggle

This series is a culmination of a year of research, discussion, and reflection on internalized Judeophobia. It is further informed by 30 years of lived experience, oscillating between different levels of enfranchisement within the Canadian Jewish community.

These articles are not about any one specific person, though there are many individuals who I have used as case studies to validate the framework.

It is broken into sections so that readers can digest it in smaller pieces.

Ultimately, I am optimistic that with the assistance of this framework, we can emerge from these times as a community the way that Jews always have: united and strong.

Yesterday marked the end of matchday two of the World Cup group stage. This is the tournament’s halfway point and a great opportunity to look back at the first 48 matches. It’s time to analyze what’s working, what isn’t, and what we can expect to come next.

The World Cup is Unimpeachable

Like every world cup, there was doubt and criticism being lobbied at FIFA before the tournament started. But even with all the problems, it is a guarantee that the tournament will be a success. The games are going to sell out. This will be the summer that a nation will remember for eternity. The world cup is simply the best. Football is the world’s lingua franca, this occasion is its zenith. The contenders are intriguing. There is parity at the top, and variance in the game that means a good eight to ten nations have a serious shot at glory. The World Cup’s super power is how it manages to cancel out the noise. Even in an age of rising tensions and global conflict, spectators, fans, and casuals forget about it all and gleefully watch the games. The World Cup in Qatar was great. This North American World Cup is great. The World Cup in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco in 2030 will be great too.

When a business has a monopoly like FIFA does, it is hard to parse what is working and what isn’t. But ever suggesting that a World Cup won’t be a successful endeavour is foolhardy.

A Big List

That being said, there are too many teams in this tournament. When it was announced that the World Cup would be expanded to include 48 teams, it was framed as an exciting opportunity to showcase more of the world’s diversity. From a technical perspective, it means that a strong region like South America can offer more chances for its strong teams to make it to the big stage. Prior to 2026, CONMEBOL only had 4 spots. Given that two of those were always taken by Argentina and Brazil, it meant that there was very little margin for error for strong nations like Colombia that were in tough due to their geography. This was also a major factor for Europe. Despite having the most spots in the tournament in the older format (13) some great teams were missing out. So increasing the numbers by 50% was certainly appealing.

After some experimentation, it is clear that expanding to 48 teams was too many.

The list is too big and it is impossible to follow everything that is going on. There are four games every day, too many to be able to follow the tournament holistically. It’s lovely to be able to tune in to football at all hours of the day and night, but you can’t follow the tournament legitimately. There are twelve separate groups, so even the most enfranchised fans can’t recall who is matched up with who.

For those trying to anticipate and plan for the knockouts, the third-place playoffs, make that extremely difficult and nearly impossible. There are far too many variables to predict who will be playing who in the knockouts. Because of that, a lot of the stakes are missing. Typically placing first in your group would be a huge incentive. This time around, it is no longer the case. Hopefully, that changes as the third match day finally arrives, but a country like Canada — even with two games played — has so many potential round of 32 opponents that it’s difficult for them to have any idea of what’s coming after Switzerland. That’s going to be really hard for their preparation and for fans’ investment.

The expanded fields mean that many of the matches are missable. If Jordan plays Algeria, does anyone notice? It’s wonderful for each of those individual countries — but watching New Zealand play Iran is not exactly what the world’s sports fans are yearning for.

Even the games involving big teams are, for the most part, relatively uninteresting. In some sense, these big games are satisfying. Seeing football powerhouses like Portugal (5-0 vs Uzbekistan) and Germany (7-1 against Curacao) destroy their opponents is nice for fans of those teams, but what was the point of having this matchup in a tournament about the world’s best? There are always a couple of blowouts at the World Cup because one or two minnows will sneak in after a strong or lucky qualifying campaign. But there is almost one terrible team in every group now, and it has functionally compromised the stakes of the group stage. It means you’re essentially just playing for seeding — and that’s not even a big deal, again, because the path forward might be so random.

Of the 72 group stage matchups, there are only a few that are appointment viewing. France against Norway, Morocco against Brazil — these are tangibly different kinds of games than the Netherlands versus Sweden or Argentina versus Jordan. This early intrigue is the biggest loss for the tournament.

It was fun to see Cabo Verde hold Spain and Uruguay to a draw, but those surprises still existed in the old format – Saudi Arabia beat Argentina in 2022. There is blowout fatigue, poor Tunisia got destroyed by Sweden, fired their coach, got destroyed by Japan, and now they get to play the Netherlands. Goal difference matters, so the Dutch won’t be holding back. All of this has made the first three quarters of the games feel like exhibition matches for the most part.

Not all hope is lost for 48 teams, but FIFA will need to address this in how it allocates spots if they want the group stage to matter again moving forward. When they went from 32 to 48 teams, the field increased by 50 per cent. All confederations were not given the same proportional increase, so Europe went from 13 - 16, while North America also picked up three spots – grabbed by Panama, Haiti, and Curacao. Hopefully those nations are enjoying themselves, but Denmark, Italy, and Ukraine, would have been far more competitive in those spots.

Functionally, the group stage just doesn’t really matter anymore. When Portugal tied the Congo — which ought to have been a massive issue — it just didn’t matter, because Portugal and their supporters knew that as long as they beat Uzbekistan – who qualified by beating out the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kyrgyzstan, and North Korea, they were going to get through no matter what. If we look past the blowouts however, there have been some very welcome changes to the tournament.

The Way of the Dodo

Perhaps the greatest thing about this World Cup, is that there is far less diving, and no, it is not because Italy isn’t there. FIFA implemented a key rule change regarding injured players. If a player requires treatment from off the field (ie, medical staff have to enter the field of play to help them), that player is forced to leave the field of play and is not allowed to immediately return.

The risk of playing a man down is too great, so this has translated into a much appreciated near absence of diving and shenanigans of players writhing around on the ground in pain.

For this, we must give FIFA their flowers, this rule has tremendously improved how the games themselves are managed and played. Before this rule, players were incentivized to bait the referees into calling fouls, might as well embellish a foul - there was no downside and the opponent might end up with a yellow card. In hindsight, it suggests that a huge percentage of these injuries were acting jobs. Suddenly, footballers have learned to fight through the pain.

This deeply impacts what happens on the field. Without the rolling around, it means that there’s more actual football happening. This is an underrated reason as to why there are so many blowouts occurring. Lesser teams can’t artificially shorten the game via clock management. This has always been the downside of running time, it can be manipulated.

Most importantly, a key underrated tactic has been removed from a player’s toolkit. In past tournaments, a wily player could call timeout by faking an injury. This would give their mates a chance to catch their breath, reset, and maybe even discuss some strategy. Now, the flow of the game is much harder to interrupt by faking an injury. It will be fascinating to see if this rule comes into play during a key moment in the knockouts.

Football

Of course, FIFA giveth, and FIFA taketh away. That same flow that was much improved by the rule change, has been equally compromised in the other direction by the infamous hydration breaks.

While as a fan it is admittedly useful to have a minute to grab a beverage or run to the lavatory, these breaks are simply advertising spots for FIFA to make more money. They turn the game into quarters, which is of course fitting for Football in the USA. Unfortunately, they are a programmatic way of doing the job that embellishment did prior. They give a team on the backfoot an opportunity to regroup, gather their strength, and discuss strategy. Hydration breaks have actively limited the flow of games. This break can alleviate sustained pressure and provide an opportunity to regroup.

It will be interesting to see how these breaks are leveraged as the tournament heats up. Football doesn’t have time outs, so this is a new wrinkle that will allow the most tactical managers to seriously impact the game.

The best strategists suddenly have three whole minutes to switch up strategy, correct weaknesses, or motivate a flustered team. This was the case in the Canada Qatar game. After the Kone injury in the second half, the Canadians looked rattled. After the hydration break, they returned focused and purposeful.

There will surely be a knockout game where a team turns the tide after a hydration break. Managers better have contingencies in place - not a skill that many would have exposure to.

Attending the opening Canada match in Toronto, the hydration break allowed me to spend a few moments appreciating the experience. A valuable few minutes given how expensive it all was.

Pricing Problems?

It costs an arm and a leg to attend any game at this tournament, but the pricing, to FIFA’s credit, was largely right. As a personal anecdote, I ended up winning the ticket lottery and had seats for all three of Canada’s group stage games. I only could afford to attend one, so I chose the opening match against Bosnia. That match was priced at three times what the other two games cost. At match time, the prices dipped, but the 3x cost was not too far off from what the tickets were actually worth on the resale market on match day.

The other two games were more complicated. Against Qatar, Canada was coming off a draw, momentum hadn’t really arrived yet, and it was difficult to move those tickets. I considered myself fortunate to offload them a few days in advance for precisely what I paid for them.

A week out from the tournament, the match vs Switzerland was similarly risky. I sold at a small profit to a friend of a friend, but hardly the haul I was hoping for by reselling. Once Canada beat Qatar however, those prices went through the roof. A day before the match, and the cheapest ticket online was 2x what I had paid. The resale game is not for the faint of heart.

For most North Americans, there is real sticker shock. But when presented with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, many have simply pulled the trigger and paid up. There likely will never be another opportunity to see Canada play a World Cup match at home as an example. People remain willing to pay top dollar for unique live experiences.

Now, It Gets Interesting

With the last group stage matchdays upon us, intrigue is on the horizon. Canada for example has a lot to play for in their final group match. Once the groups are settled up, the tournament will really get going. Over the course of three weeks there will be 31 win-or-go-home matches. There will be upsets, heroes, legacies forged, frustrating penalty shootouts, and heartbreak.

In the end, it will almost certainly be one of those top 10 teams - a European giant, Brazil, or Argentina. Just like it always has been. In the meantime, FIFA will make their money, the enterprise of global football will continue to forge ahead, and we’ll all miss our bedtimes watching Paraguay play Australia.

On Sunday I opined on Eric Lombardi being the centre of the Twittersphere. I even posited that he could be the next Dalton McGuinty.

Two days later, and the discourse continues to rage on. It’s actually picking up. Prominent writers of all political stripes are weighing in. A popular narrative that has emerged is an idea that Eric Lombardi is not really a Liberal. Critics are saying that he is actually clearly a conservative and should therefore not be considered to lead the Ontario Liberal Party.

So the question became obvious: Is Eric Lombardi a Liberal?

I wanted to know the answer so I took to Twitter and asked 3 questions that would hopefully solve the matter:

1. What exactly does the Ontario Liberal Party stand for? (The starting Point)

2. How is that different from the Ontario NDP and the Ontario Progressive Conservatives? (What makes them unique, ie “Making Ontario Better” can be ignored)

3. Does Lombardi fit into that box?

I tagged many Canadian pundits but obviously don’t yet have the Twitter following to get responses. So I did what no one else wants to do: I looked for myself.

I spent hours pouring over the websites and platforms of the Ontario Liberals, their rivals, the PCs and the NDP. I even looked at the Ontario Liberal Party’s election laws. You can check em all out for yourself hyperlinked above.

Here is the summary of that analysis:

Question One: What Do the Ontario Liberals Actually Stand For?

For this I looked at two sources: the Ontario Liberal website and the Bonnie Crombie 2025 platform.

The party’s own self-description is, to put it charitably, broad. “Strengthen public health care. Deliver quality education. Grow a stronger economy. Protect the environment.” These are the four tent pole issues. They seem great. They also appear, in some form, on every party’s website.

Bonnie Crombie’s platform got more specific. Some of the big ideas included:

• No tax increases

• Cuts on development charges

• Guarantee every Ontarian a family doctor within four years

• Permanently double ODSP.

• Add mental health professionals to be part of OHIP

These are concrete commitments, and taken together they point toward something specific: fiscally cautious social liberalism. As a matter of fact, that is what Crombie was known for as mayor of Mississauga. Her wikipedia page calls her a “Blue Grit” on the centre-right. In other words, Socially Liberal but Fiscally Responsible.

So all this being said, the Liberals, in their own words stand for expanding the safety net (things like mental health), but paying for it through restructuring rather than new spending. Finally, they want to make things more efficient so that they work better. These principles, are, more or less, what we might call classical liberalism.

Question Two: How Are The Liberals Different?

Comparing the three parties, it is actually difficult to find large ideological daylight. The NDP want to protect jobs, build affordable homes, and strengthen public health care. The PCs, under their 2025 winning “Protect Ontario” plan, want to build the economy, protect jobs, and invest (strengthen) in health care and education. The Liberals want to do all of the above, with perhaps a fiscal responsibility overlay. So we have to dig a little deeper.

To get into individual policies, the NDP are arguably the most distinct of the three — they support electoral reform, anti-scab legislation, a provincial luxury tax on homes, and a grocery subsidy. They are more structurally interventionist, which makes sense for the left wing of our spectrum.

The PCs, as the incumbents responding to the tariff crisis, leaned into economic nationalism and promises for law and order. The PCs have actually moved considerably toward the centre under Doug Ford — they hand out subsidies, which is not traditionally conservative.

Relatively speaking, the Liberals sit in the middle, taking some policies from each side.

So what we are really talking about, at the provincial level, is not hard ideology. There was and is no single wedge issue that sets the Ontario Liberals apart from the other parties. They borrow from both, and disagree with both. Each party seems equally concerned about Donald Trump, tariffs, jobs, and healthcare. This lack of differentiation is a huge contributor to why voter turnout was so low in 2025.

That being said, given the above, the Liberals fit closer to the PCs as is, but definitely are in the middle. The range is just compressed. We can therefore say, they are still centrists. Moving into the future, we can say that their angle for differentiation will have to be policy changes.

Beyond that, the Liberal difference is really going to be the personalities leading the way. What will have to set them apart is trust and management. When the policies are not all that different, trust is the only thing left to tell you.

Question Three: Where Does Lombardi Fit?

Well, Eric Lombardi listed these as his core values:

Each of these is a classically liberal value. Lombardi you can see in the above tweet notes that “our” ie, “Liberal” politics have wandered far from them.

His policy positions have not yet been officially released, but he spoke about them in a fantastic conversation with Andrew Miller here. Please read it if you want to be able to speak intelligently about Lombardi.

On my read, the biggest takeaways are that Lombardi subscribes to the “Housing Theory of Everything” and an “Abundance Agenda”

The “Housing Theory of Everything” is the idea that everything flows from the cost of rent and housing. His solution to this: YIMBYism (Yes in my back yard) which is typically seen as the progressive approach to this problem. Ok, so we can say he’s not conservative on that matter.

The “Abundance Agenda”. This is referring to ideas popularized in the book “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Abundance is about something called Supply-Side Progressivism. Ie, the notion that building and producing more options is better for everyone. That’s the “supply” in the economic “supply and demand” equation. The key term there is “Progressivism”. Klein and Thompson you may have heard of, are known progressives. So I think we can safely say he’s not a hard right guy at the very least. Conservatives don’t typically jibe with Ezra Klein.

While both of these ideas are not necessarily pro-Ontario Liberal Party, they certainly aren’t antithetical to the group. More importantly perhaps, neither fits in with the Ontario NDP or the PCs. So I think that calling Lombardi a conservative can be ruled out. Doug Ford is not talking about Ezra Klein.

The Verdict

So, does Eric Lombardi have the characteristics that make a Liberal a Liberal?

We mentioned Bonnie Crombie’s “Blue Grit” approach; socially liberal and fiscally responsible. That seems to be exactly what Eric Lombardi stands. This makes sense, given that he literally advised her on the housing file in the 2025 election. A good start towards "Liberal”.

None of his policies align with any opposition parties in any meaningful way. So he definitely would not be a better fit to join the NDP or the Conservatives.

Finally, the point that should really put this discussion to rest, is that the party itself has authenticated Eric as a Liberal. The party has a “Green Light Committee” that explicitly exists to vet potential candidates. It is made up of the top brass of the party, those who you figure would know best as to whether or not a candidate would be suitable for party leadership.

In other words, the Ontario Liberal Party’s establishment vetted him and approved him. This candidate was actively in the trenches supporting the previous leader as an advisor on one of the most important files.

Given all of this, we cannot reasonably say that Lombardi is not a Liberal. He’s got new ideas, and they’re intriguing to say the least, but they certainly haven’t been claimed by any of the big 3 parties in Canadian politics at this point.

Ideas change. Tastes changes. Lombardi is definitely challenging some norms, but upon investigation, he is doing it in ways that seem like a natural evolution for the party.

The critics calling him a conservative masquerading as a Liberal either misunderstand the man, or more likely, are concerned he will upset their apple cart. The Liberal party is the Centrist party.

If Lombardi isn’t a Liberal, if Lombardi isn’t a Centrist, then no one is.

After the longest Ontario winter in living memory, with a news cycle being dominated by Iran, the Knicks, and the FIFA World Cup, something remarkable happened on Canadian Twitter this weekend.

Sleepy old provincial politics are popping up on Ontarians’ newsfeeds in a way no one could have predicted. Newly declared candidate Eric Lombardi is making a splash.

Eric announced his candidacy for leader of the Ontario Liberal party last week and people are paying attention. His campaign announcement video is on its way to racking up half a million views. He raised $100,000 in the first two days, has drawn the ire of some establishment Liberals, and is actively engaging on real policy matters with the electorate online. Twitter is its own ecosystem, but could we be witnessing the beginnings of the next real political player in Canada.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme and Lombardi could echo the rise to prominence of another provincial Liberal titan, Dalton McGuinty.

So who is Eric Lombardi?

Eric is self-described as “a finance and technology entrepreneur turned civic builder, and a leading voice on housing reform, institutional renewal, and economic opportunity for Ontario’s next generation”. Those who have been following him see him as a pragmatic policy wonk who wants to put the “classical liberal” back into the Ontario Liberals.

He says he believes in:

Now none of these declarations jump out - they aren’t exactly “man the barricades” rhetoric. But that’s where the comparison to McGuinty becomes apt.

Lombardi echoes McGuinty by being the 2026 version of a dependable, trustworthy person who actually seems to know what he’s talking about. He is not interested in hot takes, not prone to insulting his political opponents. He is calm and pragmatic.

But to understand the potential for Lombardi moving forward, we need to look back to how Ontario arrived at this moment, and why Lombardi might be primed to take the OLP back into relevance.

A Birds Eye View of the Last 25 years:

Before McGuinty started leading the Ontario Liberal Party in 1996, they had only won one election in 50 years. At 41, he was able to win the leadership by convincing delegates that he was the best person to fight the Progressive Conservatives on economics and ideas. As leader, he won three elections, and resigned in 2012.

He was succeeded by Kathleen Wynne who carried on as Premier and won another majority in 2014. Eventually however, incumbency caught up to the provincial Liberals. Scandals and a desire for change shifted the mood of the electorate; Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives won a landslide in 2018, and have been cruising ever since.

Ford is almost a decade into his premiership and hasn’t had to face any legitimate challengers. He has oscillated on policy, and scored many own goals. Issues like the green belt, the Science Centre, and most recently the private jet have gone on without any real punishment. Try as they might, NDP leaders Andrea Horwath and now Marit Stiles just haven’t been able to capitalize on the slipups.

Ford’s government has existed in a federal context that is important to examine: The Justin Trudeau era was defined by a progressive shift for the federal Liberals. Trudeau capitalized on a desire for sunny ways ahead: He tapped into a national appetite to do good, which manifested in identity politics and for the human yearning for change.

Then 2020 hit. The COVID years granted federal and provincial governments permission to run massive deficits in the name of emergency. Both Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau opted for government handouts.

After nearly a decade of Trudeau, many Canadians began feeling the pain of lockdowns and tougher economic times. The left pivot inspired a tougher, more pragmatic leader in Pierre Poilievre on the right. Poilievre’s constant attacks and appeal to common sense resonated with voters who were worried the government was getting carried away. The cracks were beginning to show. Before Trudeau resigned, Poilievre was a lock to be the next prime minister.

Then the federal Liberals had a stroke of genius and pivoted to Mark Carney. They saw what appealed about Poilievre, borrowed it, and made it better — without any of the baggage. No COVID-era trauma, and Carney just seems like a much nicer guy than Poilievre demonstrates himself to be in the media.

A miraculous comeback ensued, and a few months later, Carney was PM. Carney’s greatest strength is that he evokes a feeling of trust; he is seen as intelligent. Like he actually knows what’s going on. This is incredibly popular with Canadians. Perhaps most impressively, Carney’s aura has been able to carry the party through a year of record deficits, a “technical” recession, and more promises than actual action. This hits precisely on the zeitgeist: Canadians’ desire for calm, pragmatic leadership.

So What’s at Stake:

With that context in mind, we can return to the provincial Liberal leadership race and Eric Lombardi. What Carney says he stands for is ostensibly what Eric Lombardi says he wants the Provincial Liberals to stand for. The key difference is, that if this is the direction for the OLP, there won’t be the same baggage holding the provincial Liberals down. The feds are composed of an established coalition and infrastructure. That comes with competing needs, old promises that need to be fulfilled, and a decade of warts.

Given the clear appetite among Canadians to get back to pragmatism. We can see why Lombardi is so intriguing to so many. People have been calling for a return to meat and potatoes politics for a long time. That audience is finally being served.

The highest profile Liberal candidates (declared or assumed) for leader thus far have been Trudeau-era federal holdovers who seem to think they can fall upward into provincial politics. Navdeep Bains and Nate Erskine-Smith are relics of an era the electorate has seemingly already moved on from. It was telling that Erskine-Smith couldn’t win the recent nomination in Scarborough-Southwest.

Lombardi, on the other hand, offers an alternative that sounds pretty good to the common sense voter who wants change at Queen’s Park.

We’ll see how Lombardi tracks with voters. But in sleepy provincial politics, where voter turnouts are microscopic on a good day, a little momentum could translate into a massive edge.

Can Lombardi channel the early days of Dalton McGuinty and be the pragmatic, thinking Ontarian’s candidate?

Early responses to his candidacy seem to indicate his message is resonating, especially with younger voters who are feeling the pinch of the affordability and housing crisis.

But what is most remarkable, is that anyone is talking about this nomination at all.

We’ll have to see what’s next.

.

We put the call out on Facebook, Reddit, and to the biggest Canada Soccer fans we know, and here is what you need to know ahead of the FIFA World Cup:

1. Everyone’s Welcome on the Bandwagon!

No matter how much of a fan you’ve been, no matter where you come from, whether this is your hundredth Canada Soccer game or your very first soccer game ever, you are welcome! This was the clearest point. Above all else, sports are about bringing people together, so don’t let anybody gatekeep you away from supporting this country and this team. You’re just as wanted and valuable as the guys who show up shirtless to January games in Hamilton.

2. The Golden Rules of Fanning

There are three simple rules to get started:

First, wear red. Canada coach Jesse Marsch said last week that he wants everyone wearing red on Friday. Don’t have any merch? You can still find gear at affordable prices on Fanatics.ca.

Second, stay positive. No matter what happens, keep the good vibes going. That’s your job as a fan. Don’t get down, stay up, be supportive. This isn’t the Toronto Maple Leafs, so leave your trauma at the door.

Third, show up early. If you’re watching at a bar, get there at least an hour before kickoff to make sure you get a seat. If you’re going down to the game itself, go even earlier. You do not want to miss anything because you’re stuck in a line. (And don’t forget to tip your servers!)

3. This Moment Is Genuinely Historic

Pause for a beat and realize that playing a World Cup game at home is a very big deal. Only eighteen countries have ever hosted the World Cup, and Canada’s co-hosts — Mexico and the United States — have both done it before. That makes Canada the only first-time host this time around. We’ve never been a soccer powerhouse, which makes the fact that the world’s biggest sporting event is being played on our soil even more remarkable. So when Canada plays their first game on Friday June 12th against Bosnia-Herzegovina, savour it, and be proud!

4. Know a Little Bit of the Team’s History

In summary: Canada has only ever been to two World Cups before this one. They’ve lost every single game. Even though this country has been producing genuinely good players for years, they’ve never been able to establish themselves as a legitimate program on the world stage. The low point came in 2012, when they lost 8-1 to Honduras in a must-win qualifying game. Since 2021, though, things have turned around significantly. They were finally able to overcome the shenanigans that come with playing qualifying games in Central America, and topped the qualifying group in the lead up to the 2022 World Cup. Canada has lost only five games since the start of 2024, two of those coming against World Champions Argentina. This really is the golden age of Canadian soccer, and it might be as good as it ever gets.

5. Keep Your Expectations Low

That said, Canada is not pegged to be a serious contender at this World Cup. They’ve come a long way, but don’t expect them to be world beaters. Keeping your expectations tempered is also what allows you to stay positive (golden rule number two). And remember: Canada has never won a game at the World Cup. They’ve never even tied one. Now this needs some context, the 2022 tournament in Qatar ended up having Canada play in the toughest group: They had to play two eventual semifinalists (Croatia & Morocco), and the #2 ranked country in the world (Belgium). They played really well in that tournament but came up short, so fans still haven’t had a chance to celebrate on the world stage aside from a few exciting moments.

6. Every Single Goal Is a Very Big Deal

The World Cup was first played in 1930. In all that time, Canada has scored two goals — and one of those was actually an own goal by Morocco, meaning Canada has scored exactly one goal of their own in World Cup history. So when Canada puts one past the opposing keeper — that’s soccer slang for goalie — treat it as the massive occasion it is. A Canadian World Cup goal is a culmination of literal decades of hard work. Go absolutely crazy.

7. Here’s What Success Actually Looks Like

One win — especially in that first game on Friday — would be a huge accomplishment and change Canada’s soccer reputation forever. If they can get out of the group stage, that would be a legendary achievement for this squad and for this country. Beyond that, well here’s where it gets a little technical.

This World Cup works in two stages:

First there is a group stage where four teams battle it out for the top spots. Then there are single-elimination knockout playoff games - the knockouts. Once you’re in the knockouts, anything can happen. If Canada can get a win on Friday, there’s a very real chance they get out of the group, and that is a gateway to a true Cinderella story. Host nations tend to overperform, so if this team catches fire, a surprise could very well be in order.

In addition to Bosnia (who beat powerhouse Italy for their qualification spot), Canada will have to get through 2022 hosts Qatar, and group favourites Switzerland to advance.

8. We’re Banged Up

The biggest risk heading into this tournament for Canada is injuries, and that starts with Alphonso Davies, who is currently not expected to play in the first game. Starting defender Moise Bombito is also battling a lingering issue from a broken leg and is not expected to play — a significant loss. Jacob Shaffelburg, nicknamed “the Maritime Messi” during the Copa America in 2024, is also hurt. There are a lot of bumps and bruises across this squad coming in. Soccer players don’t get much of a break, so this isn’t unusual — but it doesn’t help Canada whatsoever.

9. Get to Know the Players

Despite their injuries, Canada has a lot of really good players. Mentioning some will inevitably leave others out — but here are the ones to watch:

Jonathan David is a striker who plays for Juventus, the biggest club in Italy. Canada is counting on him to come through. His job is to put the ball in the net and score those goals Canada has been yearning for.

Alistair Johnston is a defender who plays for Celtic, the biggest club in Scotland. He deserves a mention because his aggressive (in a nice way) style is emblematic of how Canada likes to play — don’t be surprised if tempers flare a little. A lot of these players have a chip on their shoulder, especially given how Canada has been treated by opponents and referees in the past.

Maxime Crepeau is the starting goalkeeper. He missed the 2022 World Cup after breaking his leg making a save in the MLS Cup Final for his club, LA FC. He started Canada’s last warmup game in his hometown of Montreal and you could tell he was feeling the passion during the national anthem.

Stephan Eustáquio is the vice-captain, recently of Porto in Portugal. Eustáquiou has a unique ability to distribute the ball, and is the best facilitating passer on the team. A lot of Canada’s attack flows through his playmaking ability. He also has a knack for set pieces — corner kicks and free kicks.

And then there’s the big one:

Alphonso Davies — the captain, a defender who plays for Bayern Munich, arguably the best club in the world. Although injured at the moment, Davies is the best male Canadian soccer player of all time. He is the heart and soul of this team, and brings energy, talent, and legitimate threat. He’s also from Edmonton, home of the infamous 2022 qualifier against Mexico — affectionately known by Canadians as “The Iceteca.”

10. Jesse Marsch — The Coach

Coaches get a lot of attention in soccer, and Marsch has been in charge for the last two and a half years — meaning he’s been steering the ship during that period where they’ve only lost five games. He’s American, but we won’t hold that against him. He publicly criticized Donald Trump last year when Trump was threatening to annex Canada, which earned him some goodwill north of the border. He also has a bit of a temper — he was once given a red card during a Canada game for his conduct on the sideline. It’s worth noting that Marsch was at one point in the running to become the coach of the United States national team, who later came to regret passing on him. He’s known for playing the ball forward quickly and for creating an environment where players genuinely play for each other. If you love a good bromance, a Jesse Marsch team is the team for you. Here’s hoping he becomes the first Canada coach ever to earn a victory at the World Cup.

All in all, this is truly a historic moment for soccer in the country. So put on your red shirt, whip out the flag, and enjoy it!

Liked this article? Feel free to share or try the next one below for a deeper dive into some of the higher level stakes for Canadian identity ahead of the tournament. The “Why” behind this articles “What”.

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The World Cup is coming to Toronto this week. If you’re from away and curious about the most junior partner in this tournament, or simply a Canadian who hasn’t been paying attention, then this article is for you.

Like so many Canadians, soccer (football) has been a key part of my entire life. I played growing up, but I can trace the moment I got hooked on the beautiful game back to 2004. I was twelve years old, and my father had just passed away. While our family was grieving, I found a temporary escape watching the European soccer championships in the basement. I am half Portuguese, and Portugal made it all the way to the finals that year. Retreating into soccer and connecting with that part of my heritage was like therapy getting me through the hardest stages of bereavement.

There are a million unique Canadian stories like this. Powerful moments connecting Canadians to their childhood, to their families, and to their cultural heritage through this one global sport. Canada is a country of immigrants. Toronto, its biggest city, especially so: More than fifty percent of Torontonians were born outside of Canada.

Most Torontonians have steadily fading connections with our countries of origin, but we can temporarily re-atune through the World Cup. We don’t necessarily know, hear, or see the geopolitics in our homelands, but we know who the best footballers are. For example, most Portuguese Canadians couldn’t tell you if Portugal has a Prime Minister or a President (They actually have both). But they certainly all know about Cristiano Ronaldo.

Prior to 2022, Canada simply wasn’t a legitimate international outfit. That meant that most Canadians could easily keep a firm attachment to the old country when it came to soccer. There was no local competition. Immigrant families woke up early and booked time off work to watch their countries play on the international stage. Argentinian, French, South Korean, etc. In a country of immigrants, everyone is from somewhere.

Toronto is the frontier for maintaining distinct cultural enclaves while part of a national whole. This is the proving grounds for the Canadian experiment. Finding a paradigm wherein those cultures can be nurtured, emphasized, and folded into the fabric of the nation’s greater cultural mosaic. All this while working towards the higher goal as laid out in our constitution: peace, order, and good government.

The key to living together in this way is generally staying humble, and keeping the cultural demonstrations to the background (notwithstanding your one assigned weekend for a heritage street festival). In that sense, the World Cup has always been a moment where people are allowed to simultaneously let their hair down a bit and go a little wild, drinking their Peroni, Guiness, or Raki.

International soccer tournaments are a sudden desert bloom in the concrete jungle of Toronto. Partisans get to show off their heritage in a way that just isn’t typically done in Canada. When June hits, you will notice flags flying from every country in the world on the hoods of cars, in restaurant windows, and on apartment balconies.

It’s a glorious feeling to feel like you are in the centre of the universe, as if everyone was there all at once. The world comes to us, and we can go and experience a sampling of the world. Toronto has distinct cultural neighbourhoods that become hubs for supporting national teams, and emphasizing cultural traits. Little Jamaica, Little Italy, Little Portugal, etc.

The cultural enclaves, spanning a few blocks, are also evidence of a chronology of individual diasporas. The neighbourhoods are little time capsules that hint at the waves of newcomers adding and adding to the fabric of the country over decades.

Canada doesn’t have grand botanical gardens, castles, temples, or monuments. But we do have a little bit of everything, and that is extremely special in its own right.

When you combine these rich heritages with the fact that the Canada team was feckless for so long, most soccer fans support their grandparents’ teams. Therefore, if Argentina was playing Canada, Argentinian-Canadians would rather Argentina win. For me, the greatest sporting moment in my life thus far was when Portugal won the Euros in 2016. This is a common sentiment. I would be extremely hard pressed to pick a favourite if Portugal played Canada in a meaningful game.

This is the first thing that someone from away really needs to know: Canada is most Canadians’ second favourite team.

The next thing to be aware of, is we’re having a bit of an identity crisis at the moment. Pinning down a Canadian identity has always been difficult. We have an immense geography — Canada is bigger than the entirety of mainland Europe combined. This means that it’s a challenge to find commonality with people living in the north, in French Canada, or on the coasts. Our motto is “Mari Usque Ad Mare” “From Sea to (Shining) Sea”. Between those seas, there is a lot going on. One thing we tend to have is this idea of humility. Humility is a guiding principle for Canadian character — we typically don’t like to show off.

You may notice that internal circumstances are a little tense. So much so, that two of our provinces (there are 10) are currently actively discussing leaving Canada. We have trouble agreeing, to say the least.

One thing we can agree on however, is that we are in a bit of a fight with our next door neighbour. You may have heard, but the president of the United States — he who shall not be named — has been messing with our minds and wallets. So much so that his threats to annex the country last year completely reversed the direction the country was going politically. People are worried about the impact of the trade war, and saliently they feel slighted. Because by all accounts, we think that we have been excellent neighbours.

Then this past week, the Prime Minister had to get up in front of the entire country and explain why it’s not okay to hate Jews. So yeah, there’s some stuff going on.

Despite all that, Canadians still feel like we live in the best country in the world. We don’t tend to do riots or civil strife (at least not yet). There is nowhere any of us would rather be. We do tend to feel like we’re superior to America, and there’s an impetus to prove it. It is our duty to politely welcome you, and treat you like the valued visitors that you are. Guests are going to have a great time, despite any background problems.

But the second thing you’ve got to know about Canada is that we’re kind of going through it right now. For many of us, hosting this world cup feels like when you are hosting a party but haven’t started cleaning the house soon enough. As a solution, you throw all the dirty laundry into that upstairs bedroom and keep doors closed and everyone downstairs. The guests aren’t going in there, but the host still feels guilty and unprepared. We’re sorry for any inconvenience.

As far as the actual game, soccer is Canada’s most played sport, but it is by no means the most popular to consume - that would be hockey.

This is partly due to the fact that Canadian soccer history has been disappointing to say the least. Prior to this year, Canada has qualified for two world cups. We’ve played six games. We’ve lost them all. We have scored two goals (One by us, one an own goal from Morocco).

Despite that, Canada’s men’s program is actually in its golden age.

The Canadian roster is made up of legitimate world class players. Men who play for big teams in top leagues — Germany, England, Italy, etc. We are a serious team. Canada isn’t necessarily a threat to win the whole tournament, but we’re not just happy to be there anymore either. This is a stark departure from the dark ages that were the 2000s and 2010s. For the first time ever, there are real expectations. Which means that there is potential for disappointment. The games are interesting. They need a win to kick it off.

And so we arrive at Friday’s opening match of the World Cup. Canada vs Italy Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Off the pitch, there is real promise to what this World Cup can bring: a safe environment for us to dip our toes into nationalism, something we are highly uncomfortable with. Canada Day (which falls exactly within the tournament window on July 1st) is never marked by big rallies in seas of red and white. We celebrate by enjoying a day off of work and savouring our short summers. Few Canadians have ever been to a Canada Day party. We aren’t oriented that way, our Protestant roots discourage outward passion.

That’s the last thing you need to know. Canadians are not going to lose our minds for Canada. Our people are not going to go all in, not at the start at least.

Those are the real stakes of the World Cup for Canada: Whether or not Canadians can go all in for the home team.

This World Cup has a chance to be a flash point, a unifying moment wherein our people can come together with real positive purpose. We can be unifying towards something instead of away from something. In other words, we have an opportunity to proudly unite around being Canadian, as opposed to our default mode of “At least we’re not American.”

So, on Friday, eleven young men — most of whom are immigrants or sons of immigrants — will take the field to represent a country of immigrants. This isn’t just their opportunity to make sports history and finally win a game: they could be the match that ignites a fire: inspiring a country and reminding us all what it actually means to be proud of Canada, and to feel profoundly Canadian.

It can go either way. We’ll see how 40 million react. Welcome to Canada, and we’re sorry if it isn’t what you expected.

After Mark Carney’s announcement this week in Toronto on antisemitism, Rabbi Steve Wernick penned an op-ed in The Globe and Mail. It’s a great piece, and I wanted to share it. Unfortunately in Canada, that is not a simple matter. There are restrictions in place. On some platforms, sharing articles from major newspapers is no longer possible. Not all of them though.

In August 2023, the Canadian government passed the Online News Act, requiring platforms like Meta and Google to negotiate and pay Canadian news publishers for linking to content on their platforms. While Google paid up in response, Meta decided to remove its news content from Facebook and Instagram for all Canadian users. They didn’t want to play ball with the government, so took their toys and went home.

Almost three years later, the big Canadian publications are still bleeding subscribers. Print continues to trend towards extinction, yet more and more content is being created than ever before.

So what happened to all the news-seeking individuals on social media? Where do they go to get their information?

The answer is a social media platform called Reddit.

Reddit is an online forum wherein users can post ideas, photos, articles, and videos within certain topical contexts based on interest - sports, politics, video games, and so on. Reddit divides its content into individual forums called subreddits. Each of these is a mini ecosystem with its own culture and rules.

The platform is designed to amalgamate content that is widely liked, or more precisely “upvoted”, and then serve that content to more people. So when something has mass appeal, it becomes a self-perpetuating feedback loop.

The big caveat with Reddit, however, is that the platform is completely anonymous. You do not know who anyone else is, where they are coming from, or what their expertise is on a given subject. This isn’t an issue when you’re asking for gardening tips. Trust for a stranger on the internet is pretty high when you’re looking for advice on lawn care. With these more niche subreddits, Reddit does a genuinely good job of pushing authority and legitimacy. It is an extremely useful tool, especially on the smaller subreddits where hobbies and special interests are discussed.

A huge problem arises, however, when you start considering wider issues like politics, finance, and public safety. The site is mysteriously absent from the online news act, so sharing news is fair game on Reddit. A nice loophole for the information-hungry, but an issue when you realize that Reddit is, for the most part, not accountable or policed in any meaningfully legitimate way (more on this below). Further, the site has a habit of becoming a massive echo chamber.

This happens because of the way that the up and downvoting operate. It’s a basic popularity contest, so groupthink ideas tend to be overemphasized, especially on larger subreddits.

For example, we can see this clearly in the Toronto subreddit: r/toronto. The population on r/toronto is extremely progressive, fair enough, the majority of chronically online Torontonians lean left. But when a post or article about municipal politics is shared, the sub has tremendous sympathy for the mayor, Olivia Chow, who is of course also left-leaning. For provincial politics, this population reflects hostility toward Premier Doug Ford (who is a Conservative).

Because of the upvote and downvote system, bias is rampant, but not obvious. Further, it is all hidden behind anonymity. So if you try and post anything on r/toronto in favour of Olivia Chow’s biggest challenger for the next mayoral election, Brad Bradford, you are “downvoted” into oblivion by unnamed masses. It is polarization on steroids. This is a major problem as reddit frames and presents these online communities as good, objective places, when in reality they are loaded. Having a balanced discourse on r/toronto is impossible but it’s still the best free place to get amalgamated news on the internet.

Getting downvoted feels bad. There is an emotional sting when a stranger thinks your comment or idea sucks. However, there is also an actual loss of online currency when someone downvotes you on Reddit. There is a feature called “Karma,” which is a rough measure of how much authority your anonymous profile has on the platform. Karma is a wonderful idea in isolation, but it has a major flaw: it is just a summation of other people’s encouragement. This can be achieved by being the first to announce a headline. “Joe Biden wins the Presidency” would have picked up hundreds of thousands of upvotes in the r/news subreddit. Alternatively, it can be achieved by grinding it out, with hundreds of posts and comments on your local sports team over time. The flaw here is that that authority can be achieved by arbitrary means, and that the community deciding what’s best has messed up incentives. Karma also translates across the platform, which means if you are the guru on r/gardening, you have more authority when chiming in on r/physics and vice versa.

This is particularly salient because Reddit is designed to feel objective. It is a masterfully simple and effective psychological trick. Because of the anonymity, when you’re reading a Reddit post, you are inclined to think that the person you are interacting with is just like you. Human brains fill in the blanks.

This illusion of objectivity and truth is central to Reddit’s perceived authority. Because of this mirror effect, people are inclined to trust what they read on the internet, no matter how many times they are told not to. When this starts to move into the realm of topics like geopolitics, you can easily see how this can be problematic. What’s more, because you cannot know or validate who anyone is, there is no proof that they are telling the truth, or that they are a member of the community they claim to represent. There is nothing stopping me — a Canadian living in Toronto — from chiming in on the inner workings of a social issue happening in and being discussed in the subreddit r/Vancouver.

Again, a Reddit user defaults to trusting what they read unless the words themselves are raising serious flags. This is the wonderful original promise of the internet: that the words and ideas are the only thing that matter. But they say that 90% of communication is nonverbal. There is no tone, no insight into the “why” someone is saying something. What’s more, even though you think that your discussion is happening with someone similar to you, it’s just as likely that you are arguing with a child, a bigot, someone with psychosis, or maybe a whacky homeless man. There is a great appeal to this democracy of ideas, but the perception of objectivity that Reddit provides is completely unlike reality.

The primary safety mechanism is fundamentally just a popularity contest.

This matters because when visiting a subreddit like r/toronto, you get served content that is popular in the sub. If there are more upvotes, you’re going to get more servings of that particular piece. A pro-Olivia Chow piece will be served to more people, making the popular more popular, whereas a pro-Brad Bradford piece might get a few views but will certainly be downvoted by the average population of the subreddit. This speaks to immense incumbency bias.

Then there are other more explicit risks. There is nothing stopping a brigade of biased actors from coming into the r/toronto subreddit and using their numbers to control the narrative. The user thinks they are working with an objective platform, but there is no way to know who the person on the other end of the conversation is, or just why they are there.

It would be one thing if it was just the wacky homeless man sitting at the bar downtown, but what if it was a legitimate bad actor from political opposition, or some kind of foreign state. There are no boundaries. Citizenship and location do not control whether you can participate in a nation’s primary subreddit. This is not to imply that Reddit is solely a means of propaganda for foreign states and entities, but if it was, there really would be no way to stop it. If I were such a bad actor, that’s exactly where I would go — especially in a place like Canada, where there are severe limitations on where people actually get their news. It’s free to join, free to use, and it is completely anonymous, that’s dangerous in the wrong unregulated hands.

There is one more key intended failsafe on reddit that needs to be mentioned: the moderators. In each and every subreddit, there are moderators — essentially the judge, jury, and president of each individual sub. There can be one moderator, or many. This scales with the amount of activity in the subreddit. Most of these people, I presume (especially those in the smaller subreddits), are well-meaning volunteers. They are people who are passionate about a certain topic: a TV show from the nineties, a hyperspecific subculture or fan page. Those people are there to police the sub, keep the peace, and make sure that no one is breaking any obvious rules, removing things like racism, hate, and irrelevant content.

Imagine a scenario where two baseball teams find themselves in a final. One is a mighty franchise like the New York Yankees with millions and millions of supporters, and the other is tiny, like say the Milwaukee Brewers. What’s to stop the Yankees fans from going into the Milwaukee subreddit, causing chaos, insulting the team, and making the space intolerable for Brewers fans? In the ideal scenario, that’s what moderators are for — to police those bad actors and prevent that behaviour.

With something as blatantly transparent as sports fandom, it’s pretty easy to see who’s on which side. Moreover, there is a clear understanding of right and wrong.

But what about a subreddit like the one for The New York Times? It is considered the most popular newspaper in the world. You’d figure that the NYT sub would be dedicated to sharing articles from the newspaper. Unfortunately, because of the incentive structures of Reddit, that simply isn’t the case. The subreddit is saturated with hyperpartisan articles that get pushed to the top. Look at the top posts from this year on the r/nytimes subreddit and you see several articles critical of Trump and Pete Hegseth, each with thousands of upvotes. But there’s another subreddit, r/nyt, which brands itself the exact same way: it’s ostensibly all about The New York Times. With r/nyt however, the majority of the top articles have four times the upvotes, and curiously, almost all of them have headlines that demonize Israel.

Thus there are two distinct New York Times reddit realities, both focused and biased in different directions, seemingly representative of the publication on Reddit. For a casual user, it is impossible to know which reality is correct, if at all. A naive news seeker could not be blamed for subscribing to either of those subreddits and seeing the top headlines, with thousands of upvotes as benign the dominant narratives. From there it is a short trip to form opinions based on this shifted reality, Reddit is a pretty well respected site, after all. Compounding this pattern over millions of users, and thousands of subreddits, can have serious implications. The mob mentality is strong on Reddit, and it is not at all obvious to most users.

To dive a little deeper, the two descriptions for the two New York Times subreddits mentioned above are: “Unofficial subreddit to share, highlight, discuss, and comment upon New York Times content, features, staff, and management” versus “All things about the New York Times — now with the allowance of offbeat and sometimes spirited news discussion.” Which is real? Both? Neither?

Then what happens in another scenario when there is only one dominant subreddit for an important topic, and it is firmly ideologically captured?

This brings us full circle to the news of the past week: Mark Carney on antisemitism, and my attempts to share an article in the r/canada subreddit. There are 1.4 million members in that forum. The article I was trying to post was penned by the senior rabbi of the biggest synagogue in the country. It was blocked by one person.

In other words, an article from a prominent Jewish figure published in the biggest Canadian newspaper, about the Prime Minister making a speech about antisemitism, which he attended live, was banned. It wasn’t allowed to surface because the moderator(s) of r/canada believed it to be breaking a rule.

They said: “The language in this headline is inappropriate for it to be discussed reasonably” — and the post was removed for Rule 7: No Trolling / No Brigading.

This censorship hits directly at the core issue with Reddit. I disagreed with that decision, but there was no recourse, no true way to appeal. There is one person on the other end who gets to decide. They weren’t elected, and they aren’t getting paid. There is no one to escalate and raise this to. This matters more because plenty of Canadians are on Reddit and are looking to the r/Canada sub as a community run, non-partisan, objective place where people can share ideas. But there is a very human, and very biased filter on the front end, literally moderating the content for better or for worse. This is happening at scale.

Now, I don’t necessarily think the specific moderator who denied the post has a political agenda or is an antisemite. But the point is, I have no idea who that moderator is, or what their incentives are. Having a cursory look at the list, it could have been any of the people who go by: u/haggis_boy, or u/data_error, or u/voteoutofspite (these are some of their real handles). They could be anyone in the country. They might not even be Canadian at all. They bring their own biases, which are not reflected or made clear in an environment that is headline focused and presented as objective. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether antisemitic bias — or one individual’s view on Israel — played a role. Who is watching these watchmen? Is anyone even aware of this hidden hand tipping the scales of the discourse?

Run afoul of the moderators, and they can ban you from the subreddit for any reason. Getting banned means you can’t participate. There are no rules except those that the moderators decide. There is real irony in the fact that the more open the platform appears, the more hidden gatekeepers there tend to be.

Reddit, for its part, is very clever about dodging criticism for this. They will not take responsibility, because from their perspective, this is a private, individual subreddit that is completely controlled, operated, and moderated the same way the rest of the subs are. Who are they to define how successful communities should operate?

The philosophy is grounded in well-meaning free internet ideals. But humans ruin everything - see: enshitification/platform decay. There are dozens of access points for bad actors, bots, biases, unfairness, lack of justice, and propaganda to enter the Reddit ecosystem. Whether it’s echo chambers, bad moderators, misinformation, harassment, or brigading — all of these can easily happen on Reddit, and there is no recourse for anyone. This is a free platform. They don’t owe you anything.

The problem is particularly acute in Canada. Globally, Canada is the most captured audience when it comes to Reddit. According to the platform, there are 18 million active users in Canada alone each week — this is the highest market penetration Reddit has in any country in the world. This is almost certainly because news-seekers have been forced to look elsewhere, given that news is no longer being serviced by Facebook and Instagram.

When we look at why Canada has some of the worst antisemitism in the world, we must ask whether it is a coincidence that a huge portion of its young people are on Reddit.

There are solutions available. The Canadian government could treat Reddit the same way it treats Meta, and demand that it be looped into Bill C-18.

Something could also change on the platform’s side. Reddit could implement rules around having the company moderate subreddits that reach a certain size, or they should have to at least be held responsible if/when users are subject to harassment and written abuse.

On a global scale, the problem gets a lot worse as AI and LLMs become more and more entrenched in day to day life. Reddit openly advertises that it is the single largest source of citations for LLMs. When you ask Google, or Copilot, or Claude a question, it has been trained on highly upvoted Reddit posts. These models cannot actually know what the true answer is: they don’t think. They operate on probabilities and upvoted Reddit posts are most probably true. This is the end game we must worry about. The feedback loop that starts with opinion is supercharged with bias and potential for bad actors, and then viewed through a prism of computers and robots. This results in popular opinion being reported as fact. That frontier is the grey area that humans struggle to stay vigilant about over time. When you ask AI a question, eventually you stop asking for the source. It will not tell you the difference between fact and opinion.

There is optimism in the latest pivot being realized online. Long form platforms like Substack, independent podcasts, Youtube video essays, and emerging third party sites like The Hub continue to pick up steam and eyeballs. Just as large swaths of the young population are captured with dopamine quick hitters via Tik Tok, Instagram Reels, and Youtube Shorts, substance thirsty people are seeking better content. To be self-serving, this was one of the key inspirations in starting accordingto, getting real discourse front and centre in the Canadian consciousness.

These ideals are antithetical once a platform like Reddit reaches a big enough scale. The gatekeepers, however well intended, will inevitably stifle good discourse. Perhaps it is as simple as a paywall making all the difference. There is a good maxim in the tech world: if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. This is never more true than with Reddit, a multibillion dollar social media platform that has to this point been ignored by the Canadian government. Banning news on Facebook didn’t solve any problems with the news industry, it just moved them to somewhere with even less transparency. You cannot fight human nature.

One avenue that absolutely should be pursued: an actual study on what impact Reddit is having on antisemitism and polarization in Canada. Similar to this one published last April by SamaraCanada. Canadians should be aware where that traffic is coming from, and how the conditions might have been supercharged by the Meta news ban.

It’s time we started paying more attention.

Keep your expectations low, and you’ll never be disappointed.

So it was for me on Monday evening, watching Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivering remarks on antisemitism in Canada. He was joined by Leslie Church, the MP for St. Paul’s, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon, and Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree.

Leslie Church deserves real credit. By all accounts, she is the one who pushed this up the Federal Liberal Party chain and made it happen. St. Paul’s is one of the most Jewish ridings in Canada. The threat its constituents are facing right now are among the most serious of any area in the country.

Church told an anecdote about her young daughter walking into a synagogue for the first time and being struck by the intense level of security. For diaspora Jews, that security is a benign fact of life - so familiar for so long that they have stopped noticing it at all.

That apathy; the acceptance of a new normal, is exactly why Monday’s announcement matters. It is a signal that the needle might just be moving in a positive direction.

So — did Carney deliver?

That depends entirely on what you were expecting.

If you tuned into the speech hoping for a rousing condemnation of Islamic extremism, a direct naming of anti-Zionism as antisemitism, or a pivot in this government’s posture toward Israel - then you would be sorely disappointed. Mark Carney’s Middle East politics, and that of the “New” Liberal government have been clear since he slipped up during the election campaign last year when asked about a Genocide in Gaza. If that hadn’t tipped you off, then his unilateral recognition of the state of Palestine should have clarified the matter. Evidently, a pivot with sweeping changes should never have been expected. None of that was coming, and none of it came.

But if you came in with reality top of mind, and understood where this government sits, then what happened Monday can be interpreted as highly meaningful. Carney said clearly that “Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians”. He cited the statistic that over two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes in this country are directed at Jews, who make up just one percent of the population. He said antisemitism has surged to levels not seen in the post-war period. He said these things out loud, at a synagogue, as Prime Minister. That is not nothing. Being noticed helps. It does not solve the problem, but it matters.

There is a maxim in politics: identify where an issue is going, and get there as quickly as possible. The Liberals have been doing exactly that. That was the impetus for recognizing Palestine, a decision that drew considerable criticism from within the Jewish community as an abject betrayal. But understanding that decision is essential context for understanding Monday. The Liberals can see the Canadian demographics. They know that Muslims outnumber Jews by five to one. They see where the political centre of gravity has moved, and they have positioned themselves accordingly. That is politics, and it is fair to say so plainly.

Notably, Carney did not mention Israel once. That was deliberate, and it signals clearly that this government is not changing its foreign policy posture anytime soon. Those hoping for that pivot will be disappointed. Again, it all depends on expectations.

The most predictable moment of the evening came about two-thirds of the way through Carney’s speech. To his credit, the Prime Minister held out longer than I expected. But eventually the magic words came out of his mouth: “mosque”, “transphobia”, and “Islamophobia” in a speech that was supposed to be about antisemitism. He gave us that all too familiar eye roll moment that comes when Canadian officials bookend their condemnation of antisemitism with platitudes to other groups. He at least had the wherewithal not to take the opportunity to mention Anti-Palestinian racism on this occasion.

Carney also called out immigration as a source of hate in this country. That was significant but I would have liked him to go one step further and name the problem more directly. I certainly did not expect him to. The political capital required for a move like that is far more than this government — or frankly most governments — would be willing to spend.

The headline policy announcement was the creation of the “Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion”, to be chaired by former senator Marc Gold. It is yet another promise from Mark Carney. So the proof will be entirely in the execution. Antisemitism being the first order of business is encouraging, but we will have to wait and see. The optimist in me believes this might have the potential to mark a watershed moment in Canadian progressive politics. Jews have always been curiously omitted from woke culture, and from the concept of intersectionality. When the Prime Minister is setting up an entire council about inclusion with combatting antisemitism as the crown jewel, we might just be breaking new ground.

The other promise made was that of Bill C-9 — the Combatting Hate Act, currently before the Senate after passing the House in March. The internet is where antisemitism lives now. It is where it germinates and spreads, where it radicalises, and where it finds new and susceptible minds. Trying to do something about that is meaningful, even if the legislation is imperfect.

I have real concerns about the free speech implications of C-9, they are not trivial. But the impulse is right. There are assumptions baked into the Canadian social contract, and when those assumptions are constantly being trampled online, governments have an obligation to act. The West has been remarkably slow to try anything. This government is trying something, or at least promising to. I hope it is leveraged carefully, but I cannot fault the intention.

I think about antisemitism all the time. After listening to Carney’s speech twice, here is where I land:

I believe this Liberal government is finally listening to Canadian Jews. I believe they understand the severity of what is happening in this country. I believe they see the social fabric of the country eroding. I believe they want it to stop.

But whether they are willing to make the tough decisions that will inevitably be required is still an open question. Intentions and promises are not enough. Antisemitism is a millennia-old disease, and it will not be cured by an advisory council and a speech at a synagogue, however well-delivered the rhetoric. What is required now is leadership and courage - the willingness to name things directly, and to actually spend that political capital in the name of justice, morality, and Canadian values.

Until then, the expectations of Canadian Jews should remain low.

** This piece debuted in the Times of Israel on May 14th, 2026. You can read it here: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/its-time-to-retire-zionism/ **

They say that Israel is never allowed to win a war. Jews generally, it would seem, are unable to ever claim public victory. But if we examine history, we can see with clarity that we are more than capable of being winners. None of these wins was more important than 1948.

Think beyond just the war of independence. Jews were finally victorious in an ideological and political battle that had been waged in Jewish prayer and custom for thousands of years: The restoration of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. The realization of the Zionist project.

Zionism (it seems we must constantly be reminded), in its most basic form, is simply the right of the Jews to have a state in their ancestral homeland. By those terms, the movement fulfilled its mandate. It won. So let’s stop dwelling. Let’s retire the word “Zionism”. 

It is no longer useful.

Zionism is unique in that there is no other political movement still using aspirational language so long after it succeeded in its goals. Take for example the absurdity of using terms like “universal suffrage”, “abolition”, or even “prohibition” in 2026. Those movements, successful or not, have had their debates settled. Those are past-tense issues. In the American context, Prohibition was settled in the US in 1933. Just 15 years before Israel was established. Then there is a movement you’ve likely never even heard of: the Korean Independence movement. Which concluded with the establishment of the Republic of Korea, in 1948. There are very few people in the world who know enough about Korean independence to debate the dates, political motivations, or efficacy of the movement. But that’s exactly the point: the debate is settled. Despite its relationship with its northern neighbour, South Korea exists. 

Unlike these other political ideas, the key differentiator is that the term "Zionist" has been hijacked by enemies of Jews worldwide. A cursory look at a site like Wikipedia will show you just how toxic the word has become. The definition you find there bears little resemblance to what Herzl intended - it has been rewritten, contested, and poisoned in real time by people who want the question of Israel's legitimacy to remain permanently open. We cannot fight the editors fast enough.

This is not at all theoretical. When I recently told a non-Jewish friend that “of course I was a Zionist”, she told me in hushed tones, “Isn’t that like being Hamas, but the other side?” That is where we are. No amount of education or Jewish pride will turn the tide on this matter in the global public square. There will always be a large contingent of hostile actors online criticizing “Zionists” as evil, as colonial oppressors, and then retreating behind the phrase  “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism".

This act of mental piracy, (raiding, pillaging and then hiding), is the fulcrum for why the Anti-Zionism discussion is so maddening to those of us still wanting to defend the term. Technically speaking, Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. There is a legitimate logical Judo move there. A person can love Jews and believe a Jewish nation state is not a good idea. Of course, there is almost always alignment in the Jew hating Venn diagram between antisemites and Anti-Zionists.

Speaking of antisemitism, for its own reasons, there is already much discussion and effort to phase that particular term out. “Jew hatred” and “Anti-Jewish bigotry” are starting to circulate, but they suffer from the same fundamental flaw: being non-inclusive of Israel. For me, the clear path forward is to start using “Judeophobia” as the term of choice. 

While contemplating this idea, I came across a past version of this debate. Alana Cooper and Sharona Hoffman, writing in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in October of 2024, argued something very similar in "For the sake of Israel, it's time to retire the word 'Zionism'." Zack Bodner published a response in the Times of Israel Blogs a few days later. 

Two years on, we can revisit the exchange. In my estimation, Cooper and Hoffman were right, although their conclusion is perhaps misoriented. We shouldn’t retire the term “Zionism” just for the sake of Israel, we should do it for the sake of Jews everywhere. “Zionism” is like the star athlete with several championship rings still playing ball well into their 40s. We should let the term enter the hall of fame and call it a career. 

So what’s next then? Where do we go after fighting for this term’s soul for so long? For starters, we can look to the product of Zionism for direction: While not a monolith, Israelis use the term far less than diaspora Jews. It is already becoming archaic within the Jewish state, while it still holds as a central term in diaspora discourse. As an Israeli friend of mine put it, "It's kind of a phased out word. When we talk about love for Israel, we use the Hebrew word for nation — Le'om." 

Thus, nationhood or peoplehood, seem to me to be the best path forward for describing love and support for Israel. As in, support for Israel isn’t Zionism, it is a commitment to and manifestation of Jewish peoplehood. 

While nationhood is understandable by the world over, peoplehood is a bit more specific to Jews. It speaks to and covers the diverse set of ideas, experiences, skin tones, religiosity, and political views. Within the homeland, and without.

Outside of Israel, the narrative is being rewritten by enemies so that the State of Israel is suddenly in question. They want to revive the Zionist debate. This is disingenuous: no serious person would ever start a movement debating whether other countries have the right to exist. The Judeophobe (think Homophobe) will surely adapt. They will find another angle of attack, a foothold to try and delegitimize the only Jewish state. No matter, this is a long dance and we must move forward with language better suited for this stanza of the struggle. 

Bodner argued we should reclaim the word Zionism rather than retire it. But to what end? At what cost? When we get it back, what are we going to do with it? He might have been right two years ago, but as Israel’s credibility and support continue to erode in the west, we need to reorient ourselves. Rather than being a signal of strength, holding onto this debate is giving permission to the world to question the results of a physical, political, and ideological war that was won over seven decades ago.

They say that Israelis and Jews are never allowed to win a war. Well, sometimes we might be the ones stopping ourselves from enjoying the spoils. It's time to retire the term Zionism. 

Retire it, and Anti-Zionism loses its power. 

Israel exists. It is a fact of life. Like death, taxes, and gravity. On that matter at least, the world should move on, and we would do well not to engage in rhetorical battles we have already won.

For many Canadians, just thinking about this topic is a no fly zone. We tend to have an aversion to such negative things. It is a necessary conversation though, So this is my attempt to describe how I think about MAID and the conclusions that I do (or don't) come to.

Talking about Medical Assistance in Dying ("MAID") is divisive, emotionally charged, and extremely personal. Discussing it is scary, riddled with pitfall traps, and likely to offend people. So naturally, I want to dig into it.

For many Canadians, just thinking about this topic is a no fly zone. We tend to have an aversion to such negative things. It is a necessary conversation though, So this is my attempt to describe how I think about MAID and the conclusions that I do (or don't) come to.

MAID is especially difficult because it short circuits the Canadian psyche. It’s justifying philosophy sits at the nexus of fundamental values that underpin Western ideology, and pits them against each other.

The first value is the sanctity of life - We must preserve life in all instances, and do everything in our power to prolong it.

The second is the notion of personal autonomy — giving people control to do what they want with their lives and their bodies. This idea is the foundation for the basic premise of consent.

Thus, MAID can be looked at as the battle for supremacy between the sanctity of life and our respect for personal autonomy. It is where the unstoppable moral force meets the immovable moral object.

In addition to these two fundamentals, MAID necessitates deep consideration and attention to suffering (quality of life) and a fourth more abstract metaphysical fear around the concepts of death and dying.

Yes, it is a big conversation.

To orient myself, learn more, and to help educate my local community, I facilitated a symposium on this topic back in February. The speakers panel included a palliative care doctor, a legal expert, and a faith leader. That experience taught me that this issue is constantly evolving, and that most people don't feel comfortable asking questions about MAID.

The issue is far from settled in the hearts and minds of Canadians. There is little clarity or common language on how to approach the conversation: when to have it, if you should have it, and how to navigate the social taboos. Then there is much unknown on how to best approach friends, family members, and love ones who are considering the avenue.

The medical expert, palliative care doctor and order of Canada recipient, Dr. Sandy Buchman led the symposium off with an extremely powerful anecdote. He told the story of one of his first exposures to MAID, when he walked into a patient's home for a consultation.

Dr. Buchman was received by an elderly gentleman with a European accent, who, upon his arrival, rolled up his sleeve and revealed the numbered tattoo on his arm. He said — and I'm paraphrasing — "Hitler and the Nazi's wanted to take away my right to choose whether I lived or died. Today I am exercising that right. Will you support me in making my choice?"

That moment helped settle the debate in the mind of Dr. Buchman.

In my personal life, I have a friend whose father was suffering but not terminally ill. He had a clear quality of life issue that caused him physical and emotional pain. What's more, he felt his pain was the responsibility of a doctor who had performed surgery on him earlier that year. In my friend's estimation, that physical pain and the emotional sense of betrayal drove the decision for this individual to pursue MAID. He was suffering badly. He got the procedure done less than a month later.

In the days after their father's death, that patient's family received a voicemail from the health ministry: a social worker had been assigned to their father's case and would be getting in touch to set up an appointment to figure out next steps for treatment.

At the end of his life, this person was let down by the health system. Universal healthcare failed him, and supports did not arrive quickly enough to help. He felt he had lived his life, was miserable, and only had one way out.

It is impossible to know what would have happened if the social worker had been put in place two months earlier, it might have made all the difference in the world. Or maybe, the same conclusion would have been reached. Was this fate or destiny? This man was exercising the exact same right that the holocaust survivor did, after all.

We can't know for sure but we can certainly acknowledge that there are real gaps in Canadian healthcare. Therefore, we must conclude that there is a risk that MAID is providing people a way out of, and giving cover to, a broken and degraded system.

The unfortunate reality is that Canadians are at the mercy of institutions that have gaps. Autonomy is one thing, but if even one person falls through the cracks, compelled to ending their life prematurely, that ought to be considered unacceptable. A single life that could have been saved is a tragedy that should give us serious pause before forging ahead.

It is likely impossible to completely eliminate mistakes, but we need to be absolutely committed to the best outcomes. Add it to the list of reasons to improve the healthcare system. Ultimately, we must be hyper cautious not to allow MAID to cover for the government's shortcomings.

This is a particularly poignant criticism given the trend we see in the number of Canadians receiving MAID. The latest statistics (from 2024) are that since legalized, approximately 2% of deaths in Canada happen via MAID. Saliently, that number is on the rise.

In 2024, that number was all the way up to 5% on the year. 16,000 people. Those numbers feel jarring. But before we draw conclusions, we need to ask, what should that number be? Really, what % of Canadian deaths should be happening via MAID?

What can we find when we dig into the numbers? For Starters, 95% of people who get MAID are on what is called "Track 1", which means a person whose death is "reasonably foreseeable".

What's more, 20% of MAID requests in 2024 were never completed because those people died from other causes before getting the procedure done. That suggests that physicians might actually be too conservative about approving patients.

A couple more key numbers that really stand out: 63% of MAID recipients had terminal Cancer, and their median age was 78. These statistics seem reasonable and signal that MAID is doing what it was designed to do, alleviate suffering for people with no other option.

On the other hand, outliers and anecdotes don't care about these numbers. The famous Stalin line comes to mind: a million deaths are a statistic, one death is a tragedy. My friend from earlier will always have to wonder if the system was responsible for losing his father.

The consequences of making a mistake here are therefore all the more serious. Realizing that even one person received MAID when they shouldn't have, has the ability to call the entire system into question. The data is fascinating and illuminating, but it doesn't tell the whole story. If you’re curious, It's all public, and you can see the 2024 numbers here.

The data implies that for the most part, we are getting MAID right. But what about when we're not talking about senior citizens? There is a big difference between a 90 year old with terminal Cancer, and a 30 year old living with extreme depression.

As of today, that 30 year old with depression could not seek MAID. But in a year's time, (March of 2027) they will be eligible to pursue it. This development changes the landscape significantly, because mental illness is much trickier to reckon with than a physical disease like cancer.

No matter how many years of "Bell Let's Talk" days go by, there is still and will always be a massive stigma around mental health issues.

But, if we accept that mental health is health, which we try to do, then what really is the difference between mental suffering and pain versus that caused by a condition like cancer? Perhaps there isn't one. That is the line of thought that suggests we should allow MAID when the only underlying condition is a psychiatric one.

The big caveat here though is that many mental health issues are by their very nature subjective. Depression for example, is almost never a clear-cut diagnosis. It is often times determined by a combination of self reported behaviours and feelings.

Depression can be heavily influenced by external factors, seasonal changes, lifestyle, and so on. So if literal sunlight might be a valid medication, then the burden of proof needs to be sky high. If death is not reasonably foreseeable, there could be a realistic chance that a positive development is in store and that the patient's outlook might change.

We trust our physicians, but doctors are human beings. They make mistakes too they and can be influenced. You need two to sign off, but are two professional medical opinions enough when the stakes are this high?

If you find the right doctor, they could bias towards an "any reason is good enough for me" mentality. We balk, but that could be argued as a valid medical opinion. Many doctors won’t give the recommendation for MAID. They’ll say, they got into medicine to preserve the sanctity of life, and to prolong it. Cognitive dissonance once again. But it only takes two signatures to be approved. Those physicians who lean all the way towards autonomy are out there, and they might be right.

With mental health issues, there is still so much of the science undiscovered. To give a practical example, postpartum depression wasn't fully recognized or understood as a genuine condition until the 1990s and 2000s. There are many psychiatric disorders where we do not have the full picture yet.

In that same vein, completely new treatments and drugs could come on the market that change the landscape of mental and physical health dramatically. Is it moral for us to end someone's life when help could be just a few difficult years away?

On the other hand - should we, or the state, be able to dictate to anyone that they don't have personal autonomy? Can we tell a person that they cannot end their life if that's the choice they want to make?

The personal autonomy side is winning the battle in both public opinion and the law. MAID is legal after all. It continues to evolve though as lawmakers and healthcare professionals wrestle with more emerging challenges. That next frontier of MAID are the notions of advanced directives, and access to assisted dying for minors.

Advanced directives are the ability to say something along the lines of "If I am so unhealthy that I can't communicate, or if I get Alzheimers and can't recognize my family, I want to get MAID".

At first pass, this seems reasonable. But how do we know if while unable to communicate, that person didn't change their mind? Isn't that murder? What if the post-dementia version of the person is happy and otherwise healthy? Do we, or could we ever respect the advanced directive?

Minors can't consent to many things, they can't drink and they can’t vote. So how can they have the mental maturity to decide if they live or die?

In the case of kids and teenagers, we all mature at different rates. Should there be different rules for a 17 year old in immense pain than for an 18 year old? Probably not. But what about 16? 14? 12?

Where do we draw the line? The questions only get harder.

Then we can add another layer of complexity; elements of faith and feeling. Suicide is of course prohibited in many religions. This isn’t legally suicide, a life insurance company it turns out, will treat it as a natural death.

Within different sects of the most popular religions there are disagreements. Some will permit MAID, while others will treat it as heretical. Different faith groups have different pressures and parameters both for and against based solely on moral grounds within their world views. Can we say with authority that either is right or wrong?

We can go further still, and examine concerns that family members might actually be leveraging MAID to pressure their elders into making the decision to die sooner. Those family members might think that a quicker outcome will alleviate personal obligation, hardship, or in the worst cases, expedite or preserve an inheritance.

On the flip side of that line of thinking, there are potential MAID recipients who simply don't want to feel like a burden on loved ones, caregivers, or the already taxed healthcare system. Can we deny those people their autonomy? Should we be obligated to convince them they aren't a burden?

The debate rages on.

I think about this issue a lot, and the more I consider, the more I am conflicted. Ultimately, the conclusion I have come to isn't for or against - it's more of an approach:

The key is keeping an open mind, being brave about the realities of being human, and to have the maturity to actually have the conversation.

On the micro scale, when speaking to friends, family, and loved ones, you need to position yourself so that you can have an honest discussion without judgement. It's probably best to go in with no opinion yourself, and to start by listening. If you're young, you may be surprised by how much your parents or grandparents have thought about this topic. They may be surprised you're curious to know what they think.

The greatest lesson from my career is that candour and openness in personal and family relationships almost always leads to better outcomes. Making private decisions without clear communication often leads to surprises. In matters of family, surprises are often tremendously difficult.

On the macro scale (the societal conversation), the key is to have respect for other people's perspectives. We never know exactly what someone is going through, or has gone through. We can't assume to know another person's capacity to withstand hardship, the value they put on their own human life, or that of others.

When engaging in such minefield laden discussions, I try to always start from a position that everyone has everyone else's best interests in mind. We just might disagree on what those best interests are.

This conversation will continue for decades. There will always be people who claim in the name of the sanctity of life that MAID is simply state-sponsored suicide. On the other hand, there will be those who believe strictly in personal autonomy - "my life, my choice" after all.

Sanctity of Life. Personal Autonomy. The cognitive dissonance abounds.

We will never have a perfect understanding of what is right and wrong on this one, so my final advice, is that when approaching matters of literal life and death, we must come to them with open minds, humility, and above all, empathy.

** This piece is dedicated to the grandmother of Max and Taylor, may she rest in peace. In a quirk of the cosmos, I learned she had died via MAID while doing the final edit on this article. **