Why do abortion clinics receive more protection than synagogues?
National Post, 7 January 2026
Police shirk from their responsibility to protect live Jews
Would Jews be safer from intimidation and harassment if they told the police that their synagogues, community centres and schools were abortion clinics? Canada is vigilant about the serene operation of the latter, and somnolent about safety at the former.
In recent years, I have joined fellow Christian leaders expressing solidarity with our Jewish brethren facing rising antisemitism in Canada. One of the most pressing areas of concern has been the intimidation and harassment of Jews just going about their ordinary lives.
Shopify’s president, Harley Finkelstein, detailed his own experiences in these pages last week. Yet this has been well known for years, and police have been allergic to any enforcement of existing laws that might give some relief to Canadians who are simply living while Jewish.
Consider the deportment of the Toronto police, which has included chaperoning small groups — often masked, shouting anti-Jewish slogans — through Jewish neighbourhoods. Or watching as streets or bridges are blocked. Or restricting the freedom of assembly or movement of pro-Jewish demonstrators.
I am sure many Toronto police officers are embarrassed at their own inadequate conduct. Perhaps their leadership, too, as the day after the Hanukkah massacre in Sydney, the coppers galvanized themselves.
Evidently aware of their own lack of useful action, they rummaged around in their files and found a 62-year-old apiarist who had been handing out antisemitic flyers. The alleged offence was committed on Jan. 2, 2025; after 11 punishing months of onerous investigation, a charge was laid.
Toronto’s Jewish community would likely give a solitary beekeeping crank a booth to hand out discredited literature if the police would instead bestir themselves against the masked mayhem that Jews face on their streets.
With the beekeeper’s case in the courts now, Toronto police are investigating the vandalism and theft of mezuzahs in a city-run seniors’ residence. No word yet if those responsible might be entrenched in Toronto’s network of antisemitic apiaries.
About the abortion clinics. In Ontario, if you stand within the designated buffer zone around an abortion clinic, saying nothing, alone, but simply wearing a t-shirt saying, “I support Norway’s abortion laws,” you could be arrested and charged. It might be construed as an “act of disapproval” of someone seeking an abortion under Canada’s unlimited abortion license.
In 2018, an octogenarian pro-life demonstrator was arrested in Ottawa for standing near a clinic, alone, silent, carrying two signs about freedom of speech: “The Primacy of Free Speech Cornerstone of Western Civilization” and “Without Free Speech, The State is a Corpse.”
The state was not corpse-like in its response. It did not take 11 months, it took three days. Charges were laid even though neither sign was about abortion and the elderly man did not speak to or approach anyone. He was just standing there. After four years of rumination on the criminality of a sign advocating free speech, the Crown dropped the charges. Yet the obviously unconstitutional law remains on the books.
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