Prime Minister Mark Carney launched a new faith advisory council to combat hate in a major speech on Monday.
Carney spoke at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, where he announced the Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion would be headed by former senator Marc Gold.
“Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians,” Carney said, citing several recent examples of violent antisemitism in the country.
“If that covenant fails for one of our communities, it fails us all.”
Antisemitism in Canada has surged to new highs in post-war period, Carney says
His announcement comes as the government faces calls to take stronger action to protect Jewish communities.
Last week Carney discussed antisemitism in Canada during a phone call with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog that was primarily about the mistreatment of Canadian citizens detained by Israel for participating in a Gaza-bound flotilla, according to a readout from the Prime Minister’s Office.
Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada recorded over 6,800 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the highest number it has recorded since 1982. It points to those statistics as proof that anti-Jewish hatred is being normalized in Canada.
These incidents represented over two-thirds of all religiously motivated hate crimes committed in Canada last year, Carney said, noting they were directed at a group that makes up just one per cent of the population.
Carney launches new council on rights, equality and inclusion
“Across our country, antisemitism has surged to levels not seen in the post-war period,” Carney said, citing bullets fired at Jewish schools, firebombs thrown at synagogues and attacks on community centres and Jewish-owned businesses among other incidents.
These attacks threaten Canada’s pluralistic identity, Carney warned, saying the government was fully committed to a targeted response to what he said is a “crisis of antisemitism.”
In addition to introducing legislation to combat antisemitism and announcing additional funding to counter violent extremism, Carney said the council chaired by Identity Minister Marc Miller and led by Gold would combat racism and hate “in all their forms.”
Gold was appointed as a senator under former prime minister Justin Trudeau in 2016 and appointed government leader in the Senate in 2020. He retired from the upper chamber last year.
Carney made no mention of Israel and only referenced Islamophobia in passing, alongside transphobia and burning churches.
“I want to be clear, particularly to the Jewish community: naming these assaults is not equivalence,” he said.
Carney hailed Gold as “one of Canada’s most collaborative, effective and principled voices on the scourge of antisemitism.”
The council will conduct an assessment of antisemitism in Canada and co-ordinate a “whole-of-federal-government” approach to combatting it, Carney said.
The council will also improve research and the collection of data on hate incidents and measure the impact of government efforts to address hate, he said.
Those efforts will not involve “curtailments of freedom of expression,” Carney said. “They are not constraints on legitimate criticism of any government on any subject anywhere.”
The council will replace two key offices combatting religious discrimination that the government abolished in February — the offices of the Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia and the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism — merging them into a single advisory council.
The former at the time was held by Amira Elghawaby. The latter had been vacant since Deborah Lyons resigned in 2025.
Poilievre wants a ‘big apology’ from Carney on antisemitism in Canada
Ahead of Carney’s announcement, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called on the prime minister to offer “a big apology” to Canada’s Jewish community “for the violence, the terror and the fear that his party and his government have allowed to happen over the last decade.”
Concluding his speech, Carney said Canada must learn from previous historic injustices against minority groups and take action now.
“Canada promises a country in which Jewish Canadians can be visibly, fully, joyfully Jewish in public life,” Carney said.
“Canada promises a country where our differences are nurtured, not managed.”
