Israel Ellis: It's minutes to midnight for Canada's Jews

In 1947, a group of scientists created a clock — to measure a world teetering on the edge of its own destruction. Born from the fear of a nuclear arms race between Moscow and Washington, they called it the Doomsday Clock. Its face was simple: an analogue dial, a single minute hand leading to midnight — the point of no return.

Today that clock is how I would describe a humanity in moral peril. Because it is at minutes to midnight that I find Canada's Jews — staring down the barrel of uncertainty, the question echoing around every dining room table: should we stay, or should we go? Every decent Canadian who understands the moral values that are the bedrock this country was built on has good reason to ask this question.

My grandparents arrived in Canada in the 1890s. They came with nothing and built a life, a family, a community. I am the third generation. My children are the fourth. This is not an uncommon story in Canada's Jewish community. Our families worked hard. We built businesses, professions, organizations, and endowed public facilities — a legacy that says: we were here, we did this, and our values are to provide for others. And yet I am having conversations with people I could never have imagined possible. This is not Warsaw in 1933. This is Toronto. 2026.

This conversation is not mine alone. It is happening in synagogues and living rooms across this country, in voices kept low so the children do not hear, by people who reasonably assumed that the home their grandparents chose would hold. I believe these words echo the thoughts of many.

Our focus was always on the far right, and yet the left — armed with DEI — became the wolves in sheep's clothing that we did not see coming for us — progressives wrapped in the language of human rights, equity and anti-racism, who have built beneath that language something I can only describe as a perversion of the moral order. They have fused Marxist anti-colonial ideology with Jihadist grievance politics and arrived, by some bizarre calculation, at the Jew as the source of the world's suffering. Their humanism is loud. It has one exemption. It does not include the Jew.

This narrative has corrupted something foundational to Canadian values — the Judeo-Christian civic foundation on which this country's laws and social architecture were built. Not as religion, but as civilization. The dignity of the individual. The rule of secular law. The genuine protection of minorities. These are being systematically dismantled, with progressive applause, by a value system that is their direct opposite. After October 7 it became a landslide of hate. I have watched a prime minister — and now his successor, a person of questionable intelligence — look Canadian Jews in the eye and refuse to name the sources of their abandonment. Mark Carney's words are not confusion. They are a choice.

There is the explicit antisemitism — the masked and keffiyeh-clad protesters propping up terrorism, the street tags, the social posts, the violence. It can be photographed, prosecuted, condemned in a press release. And then there is what I call the greatest threat: subversive antisemitism. It wears institutional clothing — and it is far more dangerous precisely because it is deniable. It sits inside the Canada Revenue Agency, stripping century-old Jewish charities of their status without due process, while organizations with documented ties to terror-designated groups collect Canadian taxpayer money undisturbed. It sits on school boards that bus students to anti-Israel rallies as though they were field trips. It sits in our public broadcaster, framing Israeli self-defence in language so distorted audiences can no longer distinguish between a military response and a massacre. It sat on the government committee struck to study antisemitism — appointed there by the prime minister himself — individuals with documented terrorist sympathizers. It wore a lapel pin reading "From the River to the Sea" while serving passengers on an Air Canada flight at 35,000 feet. It pencilled hate slogans into the sidewalks of Collingwood, Ont. There are too many incidents of betrayal, making Jews feel unwelcome and unsafe — too much of a licence granted to the haters to act without consequence. And yet each hostile event gets explained away. An aberration. An isolated case. But these are not isolated. They are a pattern sustained across institutions, over years, with impunity. It is a policy of permission — one that normalizes antisemitism with a distinct message: Jews not welcome in Canada.

It's a Saturday morning on Avenue Road in Toronto. I am leaving Sabbath services. The decorative bag containing my prayer-shawl is in one hand. My granddaughter's hand is in the other. A woman passes on the sidewalk with her friend. She glances over her shoulder at me — at the child — and in the direction of the synagogue says one word. "Disgusting." Its casualness, the ease of it, gave me a chill. It is not just hatred. It is the licence.

It is in moments like that one — small, unremarkable to anyone watching — that the accumulated weight exhausts me. Each incident pushes the red line a little further forward, until you stop noticing how far it has moved. And the question that was theoretical becomes real: do I stay, or do I go? It is not an easy question. To sell a property in a market that has lost its footing. To leave behind employees whose families your business has supported. To say goodbye to friends, to community, to a synagogue your family has attended for decades. To explain to your grandchildren why the country their great-grandparents chose and built and loved has become a place you no longer feel safe. That is not a decision. That is a grief.

So let me offer Canada a reality check. Our youth is leaving. The economic impact of each young professional who makes the choice not to stay is an enormous negative to our economy. The Brain Drain, as it is referred to, is quietly happening. "I do not see a future here," I will hear from a Jewish 26-year-old recent graduate. When a country turns on its Jews — it is usually the beginning of the end to a slow demise. Canada is not turning on its Jews but on itself.

With all of the above — I am not ready to leave Canada. And why should I? I love my Canada. I am proudly Canadian. And I will not be forced to abandon this ship despite its betrayal.

Where is my red line? I have asked myself this more times than I can count. Is it the woman on Avenue Road? The graffiti? The committee? The prime minister's silence? Each time I think I have found it, something worse happens and the line moves again. That is the insidious nature of a red line — it is elastic. It stretches to accommodate the unacceptable until the unacceptable becomes normal. And that is precisely what those who want us gone are counting on. Our exhaustion. Our accommodation. Our quiet departure.

My red line is the moment I stop speaking. The moment I walk past the graffiti without photographing it. The moment I leave a dinner party without correcting the lie. The moment I decide it is easier to say nothing. That is my red line.

We must answer to four reality checks. This is where we are — at minutes to midnight. This is how we got here — through accommodation, through silence, through the slow permission of the intolerable. This is our reality — no country that has turned on its Jews has emerged the better for it. And this is what we can do — write letters to your MP, demand accountability, make your voice heard in every room you enter. Lobby, educate, consolidate, speak, and refuse, every single time, to let a moment pass unremarked.

The clock is ticking. The hand is close. But it has not struck midnight yet — and that means there is still time. The only question is whether we have the will to use it.

Israel Ellis is the author of The Wake Up Call and the host of The Unfiltered View podcast.

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