Canada's long, sad history of non-policing police
National Post, 29 March 2026
Law enforcement loathe to tangle with determined protesters
The Toronto police have announced that henceforth, and forthwith, to better serve and protect, they will commence … policing!
Pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protesters will no longer be permitted to parade through Jewish neighbourhoods hurling antisemitic invective at the residents. As this deliberately aggressive harassment has been going on for more than two years, the minimal comfort offered by the Toronto police comes rather late in the day, but it is something. Protesters will retain the right to air their grievances — against Israel, against Jews — on the main streets and intersections. No longer can they disturb the peace on residential streets.
For 30 months now my Jewish friends have professed shock at the eruption of antisemitism in Canadian cities — Toronto and Montreal principally — which has included not only incitement to violence but actual violence. It may be that the shots fired at two Toronto synagogues recently led to the new police-doing-policing strategy.
The Jewish community has expressed surprise and acute distress at the previous no-policing approach of the police. They were right to be distressed but wrong to be surprised. It is older than Canada.
Consider an early example. Exactly 200 years ago, the Types Riot devastated the offices of William Lyon Mackenzie’s newspaper.
In the 1820s, Mackenzie (grandfather of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King), used his newspaper, the Colonial Advocate, to argue for reform against the existing authorities in Upper Canada, which he later called the “Family Compact.” Fiercely loyal to the British crown and suspicious of democracy as an invitation to mob rule, the Family Compact leaders of church, state and business controlled most aspects of common life. They did not look kindly upon Mackenzie and his ilk, who were agitating for democratic reforms 40 years before Confederation. Violence to preserve the existing order was not out of the question.
In 1826, several young law (!) students and associates of the Family Compact broke into and ransacked the Colonial Advocate offices. They smashed what they could inside, destroying the printing press. They then carried out the pieces of lead type and threw them into Lake Ontario — hence the Types Riot.
Workers at the Colonial Advocate appealed to passersby for help, but none was forthcoming. Senior members of the Family Compact were on the scene and, far from summoning the police, let the rioters have their way. The attorney general declined to bring any criminal charges, leaving Mackenzie to pursue claims in civil courts, where he did prevail.
That was 1826. Canada subsequently developed a storied history of law, of peace, order and good government, the symbol of which was the North West Mounted Police tending to the tranquillity of order on the frontier.
In recent years, high-profile events — the APEC protests in Vancouver in 1997, the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010 — brought the police hammer down on protesters. But that was the government protecting itself, or its guests, or its reputation. The recent norm in Canada is that government does not protect property.
In the 1990 Oka Crisis, Indigenous blockades did lead to police action, and a violent response killed a Quebec police officer. A standoff ensued for months, with the Canadian Armed Forces involved. Eventually the federal government purchased the municipal land in question, defusing the crisis by halting the proposed developments.
The lesson learned though was clear. Police ought not to tangle with determined protesters.
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