THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

Canada’s Jewish population numbers 365,000, representing 1.3 percent of the total population of 27 million. The largest communities are Toronto (170,000) and Montreal (100,000). Other important Jewish centers are Vancouver (30,000), Winnipeg (15,000) and Ottawa (12,000).

The impact of postwar immigration on the Canadian Jewish community is perhaps the most significant difference between patterns in American and Canadian Jewish immigration. During World War II the Canadian government refused to allow Jews fleeing the Holocaust to enter the country. However, thousands of Jewish war survivors were permitted entry in the late 1940s and 1950s; thus, they came to constitute a more significant percentage of the total Jewish community in Canada than in the United States.

Canadian Jewry tends to be more traditional than the American Jewish population, with approximately 40 percent identifying themselves as Orthodox. In recent years the level of intermarriage has risen, but it still remains significantly lower than the figure for American Jews.

The Canadian Jewish Congress, with six regional sub-divisions, is the leading national Jewish organization. Canadian Jews publish some 20 newspapers and journals, including the Toronto-based Canadian Jewish News.

During his visit to Israel in April 2000, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien apologized for Canada’s failure to provide sanctuary to Jews during the Holocaust.

THE EXTREME RIGHT SCENE

The organized extreme right movement in Canada did not appear to be very active in 1999; nonetheless, its ideology is being spread increasingly through the Internet.

Skinheads with neo-Nazi beliefs and connections were prominent in the news, with the sentencing of five skinheads found guilty of beating a Sikh to death in British Columbia in January 1998. The five were linked to a Nazi skinhead group called White Power. Evidence in the case suggested a network of Canadian skinheads who were hoping to incite what they called a “racial holy war,” ostensibly to bring on the end of the world to coincide with the turn of the millennium.

The more well-known leaders of the far right in Toronto, such as Holocaust denial publisher Ernst Zündel, Wolfgang Droege of the Heritage Front, and Don Andrews of the Nationalist Party of Canada, were largely quiet during the year. The only active neo-Nazi skinhead group in Toronto was the Polska Skins. Several Polish youths were spotted wearing neo-fascist regalia such as Screwdriver (a white supremacist rock band) T-shirts, and RaHoWa (Racial Holy War) and COTC (Church of the Creator) patches.

The violent Aryan Nations, one of the main far right organizations operating in Canada, suffered a blow in May when its head Marty Olsen resigned, leaving them largely without representation.

An alarming trend noted during the year was the expression of racist views by right-of-center politicians and members of the public, which seems to have been triggered by racists, who exploited a few well-publicized cases involving minorities to warn that Canada would be swamped by immigrants and Canadians deprived of their rights. One such case concerned Chinese nationals who had arrived in Canada by boat and sought refugee status, and another was the Supreme Court of Canada decision respecting a native Mi'kmaq (the “First Nations People” of Nova Scotia) fishing and hunting treaty. Particularly vocal in the Chinese affair was Paul Fromm, through his Canadian Association for Free Expression (CAFE) and Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform (C-FAR). Fromm, who is known to associate with white supremacists, continued his speaking tours across Canada, while his appeal against his dismissal as a teacher in Ontario (see previous reports) was pending.

The Mi’kmaq case fueled the growth of the white supremacist movement in the Atlantic provinces, and there were reports of a rise in recruitment activity by various groups such as Celtic Sons and Daughters and the Heritage Front.

ANTI-SEMITIC ACTIVITIES

There were 267 anti-Semitic incidents reported to the League for Human Rights of B’nai B’rith Canada (hereafter, the League) in 1999. This represents an 11 percent increase from the previous year (240 incidents), continuing the upward trend which began then. There was no major event, either in Canada or elsewhere, that would explain this rise and it may actually reflect a change in reporting patterns, whereby certain segments of the Jewish population were more willing than they had been in the past to come forward and complain. Harassment (including the distribution of hate propaganda such as targeted threats and personally addressed e-mail, but not anti-Semitism on the Internet) constituted the largest proportion of incidents for 1999 -- a total of 205, compared with 198 cases in 1998. Recent years witnessed a steady decrease in acts of vandalism, but in 1999 there was an upswing. The number of reported incidents of vandalism was 62, a 47.6 percent increase from the 42 incidents reported in 1998.

There were 119 reported incidents of anti-Semitism in the city of Toronto, including a cemetery desecration and a number of assaults. This represents a 3 percent decrease over 1998 (123 incidents). As Toronto is the largest city in Canada and has the largest Jewish population, it is not surprising that it had the largest number of anti-Semitic incidents -- 44.7 percent of all reported incidents in Canada in 1999.

Regional Ontario recorded a significant increase in anti-Semitic incidents – 47 compared with 34 in 1998, a rise of 42 percent. The National Capital Region (the Ottawa area) experienced an 8.5 percent decrease in anti-Semitic incidents, with 32 compared with 35 in 1998.

The marked increase -- 85 percent -- in reported incidents in Montreal in 1999 may reflect the results of the publicity surrounding a case in which the League was involved and which, in turn, served to raise awareness among the Hassidic community of avenues of assistance in the event of hate crimes; 37 incidents were recorded, up from 20 in 1998. Four incidents were reported in regional Quebec in 1999, compared with none in 1998 and only one in 1997.

The three incidents in Manitoba included a serious cemetery desecration in Winnipeg. Saskatchewan and Alberta had five reported incidents in 1999, the same as in 1998. British Columbia (BC) recorded a decrease of 29.4 percent in reported incidents – 12 in 1999, down from 17 in 1998. An anti-immigration backlash by white supremacists in this area might partly have accounted for the reduced focus on Jews as a target for attack. In the Maritimes, too, an anti-immigration backlash strengthened white supremacist groups who were handing out hate propaganda aimed at recent immigrants as well as Jews. Three incidents were reported compared to only one in 1998.

Besides known white supremacist organizations, such as the Heritage Front and Aryan Nations, one of the most troubling sources of anti-Semitic propaganda is the school/college campus, where students have been increasingly expressing anti-Semitic and racist beliefs in public. In classrooms, comments have covered the spectrum from Holocaust denial to statements such as “Hitler didn't go far enough, he didn’t purify the race enough,” to students advocating genocide in front of the class. A group of students in a Toronto suburban school wrote anti-Semitic and racist expressions in various languages for inclusion in their yearbook. It was only after distribution of the book that the slurs were detected. All the copies were recalled and the offending passages blacked out. Tea, too, were guilty of spreading prejudice: one school teacher was reported as saying, “We don’t need Jews around here.”

British author David Icke, a former BBC sports announcer and one-time member of the British Green Party, who asserts the Torah was written by “a bunch of human-sacrificing, blood drinking fanatics and black magicians,” spoke in October at Toronto University. The Canadian Jewish Congress has asked the government to review its policy on admitting known hatemongers into Canada to speak.

Several cases of anti-Semitic prejudice were recorded in the printed and electronic media, including the claim that Jews are cheap (“We won’t Jew you,” and “We are not cheap Jews,” on a Quebec radio station advertisement), and that they killed Jesus (in a national radio broadcast at Easter time).

Issues relating to the Middle East continued to serve as a trigger for anti-Semitic invective or slurs. The promotion of propaganda during "Israel Week" and pro-Palestinian student events were again a problem in 1999, with incidents reported at University of Western Ontario in London, Concordia University in Montreal and both Carleton University and University of Ottawa in the National Capital Region

In 1999 Holocaust denial was fueled by the publicity given the role of various European countries in World War II, and the acceptance of responsibility by some of them for the crimes perpetrated against the Jews. Several letters to the editor appeared in the national and regional press, along with many hate letters directed to individuals and Jewish organizations, telling Jews to stop complaining about the Holocaust, and calling them demanding and money-grubbing for attempting to redress some of the wrongs of World War II.

The much publicized case of Ernst Zündel before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (see previous reports) has been postponed, pending the results of several Federal Court judicial reviews requested by Zündel's lawyer Doug Christie. The case has now dragged on for more than two years.

Internet

Chatrooms on the Internet were sometimes infiltrated for the purpose of anti-Semitic and racist incitement. However, the chatroom “hosts” are often reluctant to censor the right of free speech. In one case, a Vancouver, BC woman was banned from the chatroom when she complained that MSNBC (a NBC based news and current affairs site) was being exploited for the dissemination of virulently anti-Semitic material and that some users were trying to recruit people to white supremacy groups such as Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan. Yahoo!, a major search engine on the web, hosts a number of Jewish chatrooms which regularly draw anti-Semitic abuse and harassment.

Websites of white supremacists, hatemongers and extreme right-wingers continued to proliferate. There has been a notable increase in sites designed to recruit women and children. Women for Aryan Unity, for example, preaches a strict division of roles for men and women which will aid in the “fight against ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government] and other evils that impose their destructive ways upon us.” Sigfridia Publications runs another Canadian website published by “white women in the racialist struggle.”

Marc Lemire continued to host the Freedom Site which houses a number of webpages for extreme right groups, while the Heritage Front and the Canada First Immigration Reform Committee (CFIRC) continued to spread racism and intolerance through their sites.

RESPONSES TO RACISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

In 1999, the Canadian Human Rights Commission initiated a process to reform and strengthen the Canadian Human Rights Act and the commission itself. It is expected that the reforms will include amendments to the act dealing specifically with hate on the Internet

Several public education campaigns continued throughout 1999 to promote awareness of anti-Semitism, racism and hate and to stress the importance of reporting incidents. The League was actively involved in this and other projects, including “Taking Action Against Hate,” designed to provide practical strategies and training for communities to counter hate group activities, as well as the promotion of Holocaust education and awareness. In 1999 it completed a study for the Canadian Race Relations Foundation on the impact and effectiveness of public education campaigns in raising awareness and promoting positive race relations in Canada, which formed the basis of a major public education campaign launched in December by the foundation, entitled “See People for Who They Really Are - Unite Against Racism.”

As a follow-up to its 1997 symposium, the League hosted the Second International Symposium on Hate on the Internet, in March 1999. Approximately 150 delegates came from France, Sweden, Germany, Israel, England, Australia, Canada and the United States to coordinate methods of dealing with this global problem.

A trend, not confined to Canada alone, became apparent in 1999: the prosecution of libel suits by extreme right-wingers (see also Irving case, United Kingdom). Notably, Eileen Pressler, head of the white supremacist Council on Public Affairs, and her husband, successfully sued anti-racist activist David Lethbridge and the CHBC radio station in British Columbia for libel, while the notorious New Brunswick Holocaust denier Malcolm Ross obtained a judgment against editorial cartoonist Josh Beutel and the New Brunswick Teachers Federation which Beutel had addressed. (Ross was barred from teaching in 1991 because of his anti-Jewish position; his brother, William, also a Holocaust denier, was removed in 1999 from his position on a committee that decides on curriculum in New Brunswick provisional schools, but remains a member of the school board, to which he was elected.)

A number of similar law suits are in process. Paul Fromm is suing the Canadian Jewish Congress and in another case, the League and its director Karen Mock, for damaging his reputation. Roger Rocan, a former Reform Party member who has aligned himself with some far right groups, is suing Warren Kinsella, a well-known author and former journalist who has documented the activities of the far right in Canada. A number of decisions are under appeal including both the Pressler and the Ross cases.

On the other hand, Vancouver journalist Doug Collins (see previous reports) was found guilty of promoting hatred against Jews and fined $2,000 by the BC Human Rights Commission. Paul Fromm called the verdict an outrage and promised that CAFE would support Collins all the way to the Supreme Court.

In June a Canadian judge ruled that 76-year-old Serge Kisluk, a Ukrainian native residing in Ontario, was a Nazi collaborator, who obtained entry into Canada in 1948. The decision paves the way for Canada’s cabinet to revoke his citizenship and order a deportation hearing. In another case, in December, the Federal Court of Appeal in Ottawa ruled that Vladimir Katriuk of Quebec may not appeal the decision of January 1998, in which the Federal Court found that Katriuk had obtained his citizenship under false pretenses, and thus had no right to challenge his pending deportation. On the other hand, a Canadian judge ruled that Eduards Podins, an 81-year-old BC resident, could stay in Canada despite allegations that he was a guard at a Nazi-run camp in Latvia.