The Blogs: Open Letter #3 to Leslie Church, MP Toronto-St. Paul’s | Benjamin Rubin

Dear Leslie,

As you know, I first wrote to you on June 2, 2025, in the days following your election as Liberal Member of Parliament for Toronto–St. Paul’s. In that letter, I did what newly elected representatives often invite their constituents to do: I introduced myself, congratulated you on your victory, and then told you plainly that I had not voted for you, but that I nevertheless hoped — and expected — that you would represent me and thousands of other St. Paul’s residents among whose paramount political concerns today are the rising forces aligned against the democratic Jewish state of Israel and what had been, until very recently, a flourishing Jewish community in Canada.

I recalled for you my long years of support for your parliamentary predecessor, Dr. Carolyn Bennett, who, though not Jewish herself, became one of the Jewish community’s staunchest political allies in Ottawa: chairing the Canada–Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group, leading delegations to Israel during the Second Intifada and the 2014 Gaza war, and serving as part of the Liberal Parliamentarians for Israel. My question to you then was simple but not easy: would you walk in Carolyn’s footsteps and be, from your seat in the Liberal caucus, a clear, principled voice for Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, and for the right of Canadian Jews to live openly as Jews and as Zionists without fear? Or would you be swept along by the growing influence of MPs from ridings where strident anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiment had become a powerful force in Liberal politics?

I pointed out the inconvenient and almost unspeakable political truth: that Toronto-St. Paul’s is one of only five electoral districts, among Canada’s 343 ridings, in which Jewish voters constitute at least 10% of the electorate, as opposed to the 24 ridings in which newly arrived Muslim Canadians constitute at least 10% of the electorate.  A number of these ridings have elected Liberal MPs openly hostile to Israel, and to the Jewish Canadians who in their overwhelming majority support Israel. Therefore I suggested that as MP for Toronto-St. Paul’s you bore a certain responsibility to stand up for the Jewish community in a way that MPs from other ridings are not required.  That first letter was not just about policy; it was about whether Jews in Canada, who once felt themselves a respected minority, could still trust the Liberal Party as a political home, or even as a reliable defender of their basic civil rights.

We met in your constituency office on July 10, 2025, and I deeply valued the opportunity to speak with you face to face. It was, genuinely, a good meeting. I felt that you listened carefully, and that you understood the depth of my concerns, which are the concerns of friends and family and many in the Jewish community.  I sensed that you were personally committed to oppose rising antisemitism in Canada, even if you were not prepared to break with the Liberal party line on foreign policy.

Out of that meeting grew my second open letter to you, of September 4, 2025, which I also copied to newly elected Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney. In that letter, I thanked you explicitly for signing the “Statement on the Deplorable Rise of Antisemitism in Canada” drafted by your Liberal colleague from Montreal, MP Anthony Housefather. But I also laid out a stark truth: of the 169 Liberal MPs then in the governing caucus, only 37 — fewer than a quarter — were willing to sign even this modest, carefully worded statement, which studiously avoided any mention of foreign policy, Palestine recognition, or UN votes, and confined itself to condemning the wave of antisemitic attacks and threats directed at Jewish Canadians. The Prime Minister himself did not even sign. I described how challenging it was, as a constituent, to even confirm that you had in fact signed: CTV, CBC and the National Post listed some Liberal signatories, but not you; your social media did not highlight it; and in the end a friend had to send me a screenshot to prove your name was indeed on the list.

My plea to you then was that you make your signature count by publicizing it proudly, by urging more members of your caucus to sign, and by calling on the Prime Minister to add his name. Because if even such an anodyne, motherhood‑and‑apple‑pie affirmation of Jewish Canadians’ civil rights could draw the public support of less than one‑quarter of Liberal MPs, then the uncomfortable conclusion is hard to avoid: that under Mark Carney, as under Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party has become at best lukewarm toward Canada’s Jews, and at worst hostile to Israel and to the Jewish community in Canada, the overwhelming majority of who stand with Israel and support the world’s only Jewish state.

I am writing this third open letter because your May 2026 “constituency newsletter” just arrived in my mailbox. I read it carefully.  In it, you publicize what you see as the progress of the Carney Liberal government: announcements of major infrastructure and housing projects; efforts to make life more affordable through measures like the Groceries & Essentials Benefit; and a Spring Economic Update that, you note with satisfaction, projects a federal deficit $11 billion lower than expected.

But you also acknowledge, candidly, that “patterns of antisemitic violence have robbed Jewish Canadians of the feeling of safety in their own communities,” and you highlight steps the government has taken in response: the March 2026 announcement of $10 million “to strengthen security for Jewish community spaces,” and a further commitment of $75 million in the Spring Economic Update for the “Canada Community Security Program to further fund security for communities vulnerable to hate. There’s still more work to do, but this is a crucial step forward to support the immediate security needs of synagogues, schools and community centres in Toronto–St. Paul’s and across Canada”. I appreciate that you have recognized this reality in your communication with constituents, and I am genuinely grateful for measures that help protect Jewish institutions and the people who enter them.

But security guards and cameras outside Jewish institutions, important as they are, address only one layer of the threat. The Jewish community in Canada today is confronting not only bullets into Jewish school doors, rocks through synagogue windows and menacing crowds outside Jewish Community Centres, but also organized campaigns aimed at undermining and delegitimizing the core institutions that make a living Jewish community possible.

In February 2026, a coalition of anti-Israel activist groups, including Canada BDS, launched a coordinated campaign targeting 17 Jewish summer camps across Canada. The groups pressured provincial camping associations to strip these Jewish camps of their accreditation. Activists also submitted complaints to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) demanding the camps’ charitable statuses be revoked. (This followed successful regulatory challenges by anti-Israel activists over the previous two years, in which the CRA revoked the charitable status of high-profile entities – including the Jewish National Fund (JNF) of Canada and the Canadian Zionist Cultural Association – following long-standing audits and complaints regarding technical compliance.) The BDS coalition targeted the Jewish camps over their ties to Israel, including celebrating Israeli Independence Day and hiring Israeli staff (who, since Israel has mandatory military service, served in the IDF).  Thankfully, the Ontario Camps Association issued a blistering statement condemning the campaign, stating that accreditation is based on safety and health standards, not political views, and denounced the effort as discriminatory.

And now, on April 22, 2026, a coalition of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel advocacy groups filed a formal complaint with the Canada Revenue Agency seeking to revoke the registered charitable status of 11 Jewish day schools and school-linked charities located in Toronto and Montreal. These anti-Israel groups launched a letter-writing campaign and public petitions to flood the CRA with complaints to force an audit.

I grew up in Toronto’s Jewish community in the 1960s; I attended Associated Hebrew Day School, one of the schools currently under attack, and I spent my summers at Jewish summer camps that are now being portrayed as suspect. A generation later, my own children went to Jewish day schools and Jewish summer camps. These are not luxuries. They are the central pillars of Jewish upbringing and Jewish continuity in this country. A vital, confident thriving Jewish community in Canada rests in no small part on the stability and inviolability of these institutions. To say that you support the Jewish community cannot mean only that you support posting police outside our buildings when we are physically threatened; it must also mean that you will stand against efforts to weaponize government agencies, including the Canada Revenue Agency, to weaken or dismantle the schools and camps that form the beating heart of Jewish life.

These rising threats to the Diaspora Jewish community in Canada now closely resemble the trends visible in the United Kingdom, France, Australia and even parts of the United States, where Jewish citizens’ formal equality coexists with rising social and political hostility and campaigns that make Jewish communal life more precarious year by year. Before October 7, 2023, most Canadian Jews felt that the thriving of Jewish life — day schools, camps, synagogues, community centres, cultural institutions — was second nature to Canadian society, something taken for granted as an important part of the country’s pluralist fabric. That assumption has been shattered. The question now is whether elected officials, especially those like yourself, representing ridings with significant Jewish populations, will content themselves with funding guards and cameras, or whether they will speak and act publicly against campaigns that seek to turn the machinery of the state against the very institutions that sustain Jewish continuity.

I therefore would respectfully ask you, within the Liberal Party caucus and beyond, to take a public stand regarding these campaigns seeking to revoke the registered charitable status of Jewish summer camps and Jewish day schools and denouncing the antisemitic campaign to flood the CRA with complaints to force an audit.

I eagerly await hearing from you what you now plan to do in support of Canada’s embattled Jewish community.

Benjamin Rubin was Chair of Limmud Toronto 2018, elected to Zionist Congress, and VP of Canada-Israel Chamber of Commerce. Under his pen name eBenBrandeis, he composes YouTube poems, translated from Hebrew a pre-war Pinsk biography, edited and published a book of contemporary Jewish humour, and created NewHouseOfIsrael.net, a Zionist conceptual art project. Since retiring from the practice of law, he and his wife split their time between Toronto and Tel Mond. He has an abiding interest in Israeli contemporary music, the Golden Age of Hebrew poets from Andalusia, and the Muslim-Christian-Jewish convivencia of Spain. Writer, producer and director of the Zoom teleplay series, “Golden Age Travel”, about 12th century Hebrew poet and Arabic Jewish philosopher, Yehuda HaLevi, travelling through time. Episodes of the series have been performed online at Limmud Festivals in Toronto, Boston, Seattle and Winnipeg. GAT episode VI, “Berlin 28, Paris 38, Jerusalem 61” was premiered at Limmud Toronto November 2021. www.ebenbrandeis.com