Jews Are Leaving Canada in Droves
A shooting at a Jewish bakery is only the latest in a wave of antisemitic attacks causing a growing number of Canada’s Jews to flee.
Keeping tabs on the world’s oldest prejudice—and the people fighting back—as it once again rears its ugly head.
Gad Saad has lived in Canada since his family fled Lebanon in 1975 after someone showed up at their home to kill them. But last month, the professor of marketing and evolutionary behavioral sciences announced on social media that he had given up on Canada and decided to leave.
“The taxation system is astounding, rendering it nearly impossible to accumulate enough money to truly retire,” Saad wrote about the first reason for his decision. It’s true. The typical Canadian pays 70 percent more in income taxes than the typical American. The second reason is far more alarming. “The government’s open immigration policies have made it unsafe for my family to remain here (due to the exponential increase in Jew-hatred),” he wrote.
Saad said basically the same thing on Joe Rogan’s podcast in May. “I’m now leaving in large part because it became difficult for me, if not impossible, to be a high-profile Jewish professor who supports the right of Israel to exist.” Saad had already taken a leave of absence from Concordia University in Montreal and will continue working as a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.
Saad’s decision made it even more painfully obvious that Canada has an antisemitism problem. As of mid-July, B’nai Brith had documented 27 violent antisemitic incidents so far this year, compared with 10 during all of 2025. As The Free Press’s Rupa Subramanya reported in June, Jews account for about one percent of Canada’s population of 41.6 million, but were the targets of more hate crimes reported by police in 2024 than all other religious groups combined.
Over the weekend, two locations of Jewish-owned Kiva’s Bagel Bakery in Toronto were attacked, including one with gunfire. Last week, police charged a pro-Palestinian demonstrator who encouraged terrorism and “harm against members of the Israeli and Jewish communities” at protests in Toronto in 2024, alleging that he was associated with Hamas.
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has said that “Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians” and that his government “is fully committed” to ending “the crisis of antisemitism in Canada today.” But it is too little, too late for some Jewish Canadians.
From renowned physicians and educators to entrepreneurs and community leaders, Canada is losing some of its most extraordinary citizens because they no longer feel welcome or safe in the place they called home. Jews from Canada and several other countries recently asked the U.S. State Department to allow them to immigrate as refugees or under another form of protected status, though no decision has been announced. Aaliyah from Canada rose 51 percent between 2023 and 2025, reaching a record high, according to the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem.
An average of more than 10,000 Canadians are leaving the country every month, the highest level of emigration in Canada’s recorded history, according to the federal government. Those numbers are not broken down by religion or other groups, but many of those who are leaving are well-paid and highly educated.
Michael Sachs never imagined that he would leave Canada. He grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he raised a family, built a career, and became a leader in the city’s Jewish community. Last year, though, Michael and his wife Shira, a teacher, decided to move to the U.S. with their two young children. Speaking to me from his new home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Sachs, 45, said that antisemitism became so pervasive and normalized across Canada after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, that leaving went from implausible to inevitable.
But it wasn’t just the antisemitism. It was the sense that no one in power appeared genuinely interested in it or committed to actually addressing it. “Between the inaction of the province and the new federal government, we knew nothing would change,” Sachs said. “In fact, we’ve seen from afar that their inaction has actually made things worse.”
Tulsa Tomorrow, an organization that has been working since 2017 to attract Jewish families to Oklahoma’s most populous city, said that it has been contacted by roughly 600 Jewish Canadian households since December. Those households include about 2,000 people in all.
Chloe Brandt left Canada for Israel almost exactly two years ago. She was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, but felt “an absence of real, genuine dialogue” about antisemitism or anything related to Israel while she was an undergraduate student at the University of Alberta. “Universities in Canada no longer foster respectful disagreement or serious discussion. Instead, I felt increasingly isolated from my friends and from the people around me, just because of who I was, and what I believe in,” she told me.
“Between the inaction of the province and the new federal government, we knew nothing would change.”
—Michael Sachs, 45
Brandt, 23, is now in graduate school at Tel Aviv University and has no plans to return to Canada. “Canada isn’t my home anymore. It hasn’t felt like my home for a very long time, and I don’t see a future for myself there any longer,” she said. Her thinking is also motivated by what she sees as a major “shift in Canadian culture” in which “the way you’re treated in Canada is increasingly structured around what category you fit into and whether you match a particular framework of identity or politics or not.”
Aedan O’Connor has lived in Miami for almost a decade. What she sees happening in Canada seems even more widespread than what led to her decision to pack her bags and leave the country that her family has called home for five generations. She blamed rapidly changing demographics, largely due to immigration, a focus on being not American rather than uniquely Canadian, social and political “capitulation” to Islamism, and surging antisemitism. Antisemitism is the downstream outcome of other major social and political issues that have crept in and taken hold over time—“a symptom of something darker,” she said.
In Miami, O’Connor, 29, has built an event management and ticketing platform. “There is a wonderful culture of innovation and success in Miami, which allowed me to build my company from scratch. I’m excited to raise a family here,” she told me.
Last week’s terrorism charges against Ahmad Hassan Hajahmada, 33, the pro-Palestinian protester known for his vile antisemitic rhetoric, served as another stark reminder of the ongoing sense of danger that is driving some Canadian Jews to emigrate, while leaving many others uncertain about their future in the country.
Last year, police arrested three men for allegedly attempting to kidnap Jewish women in Toronto. That led to terrorism charges against one of the men, who was accused of providing support to ISIS and conspiracy to commit murder for the terrorist group. In April, a Pakistani national in Canada on a study permit pleaded guilty to plotting a mass shooting at a Jewish center in Brooklyn on the one-year anniversary of October 7. Prosecutors said that he told an undercover officer, “We could rack up easily a lot of Jews.”
And while most of the antisemitic incidents in Canada and elsewhere fall below the threshold of terrorism, there remains a deep sense of unease within the country’s Jewish community due to the quieter forms of hatred and bigotry that pervade daily life: shootings of Jewish institutions; vandalism of Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and synagogues; and assaults, acts of intimidation, and various other hate crimes.
Alex Fish, a marketing executive who owns his own company and founded Bonim B’yachad, a program that trains high-school students to recognize antisemitism before they arrive at college, left Canada for South Bend, Indiana, in 2018. He anticipated then what many Jewish Canadians are dealing with now.
“I didn’t leave Canada because of a single incident that happened to me,” Fish, 37, told me. “I left because I read the trajectory early and acted on it, and everything I’ve watched happen. . . has confirmed rather than challenged that decision. Canada is past the point of no return.”
After seeing Canadian immigration figures rise sharply, particularly from countries that had purged or persecuted their Jewish populations, like Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, Fish got the sense that Canada’s security dynamic was going to change quickly. “I told my wife that we needed a plan to leave, whether to Israel or to the United States.”
Going forward, Canadian leaders—officials and lawmakers to provincial politicians, mayors, police chiefs, university presidents, corporate executives, and community organizers—should treat this crisis not as merely a Jewish problem that needs to be managed but as a national tragedy that demands an urgent and effective response.
The Jews who are leaving Canada or wondering if they should aren’t simply one community among many making a lifestyle choice. They are a warning sign. What those who are giving up on Canada, with their packed bags and passports, is something that no serious country can afford to ignore.
Author: Casey Babb
Image: Shawn Goldberg/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
AND THIS IS HOW THEY ARE THANKED
Jewish Canadian service in the Second World War
Jews took part in all of Canada’s major battles—from Hong Kong to Dieppe, Ortona to D-Day, and beyond. They served with distinction and nearly 200 of their ranks received decorations for gallantry and other official citations for their exemplary service. These contributions came at a high cost, however, with nearly 450 Jewish Canadians losing their lives during the Second World War.
