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Chris Selley: Suddenly, Toronto police decide now that Jews shouldn't be harassed in their homes?

Is it really illegal to walk along a sidewalk waving a Palestinian flag? Should that be police business?

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An interesting development last week on the front lines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — which to some truly awful people means a Jewish neighbourhood in North Toronto. Toronto police announced that henceforth, “due to the changing security landscape in Toronto in recent weeks, including increased volatility and heightened fear in our communities, demonstrations moving into residential neighbourhoods in the Bathurst (Street) and Sheppard (Avenue) area presents an unacceptable risk to public safety.”

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“As a result, demonstrators will not be permitted to enter residential streets in this area,” a police spokesperson told National Post.

Chris Selley: Suddenly, Toronto police decide now that Jews shouldn't be harassed in their homes? Back to video

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No one should believe that unless and until they see it. But it certainly makes a big rhetorical change, at least. Over the last two years, not only did police not prohibit such marches, they famously escorted said marches around the residential neighbourhoods. The escorts were probably for the best, if these cretinous parades were going to happen at all, but it caused entirely understandable consternation among local residents.

And those residents now have every right to ask, “Why now? Why not ages ago?”

It’s a perplexing question on multiple levels.

With all due respect to the “changing security landscape in Toronto,” it seems very likely someone up the political chain of command finally put their foot down and said, “Enough. This has to stop.”

And that would be fine, if we knew whose foot it was. “Independent policing” has always been a bit of a myth, and Canadian policing is, if anything, far too independent from political oversight and accountability. This is a country where many police forces greet court injunctions to enforce the law with a sort of bemused yawn.

Something had to give, obviously. One thing people across the political spectrum in Canada tend to agree on is that politicians should not be confronted or protested in or around their homes. Those objecting to protesters making camp outside Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly’s home in Montreal, ostensibly in support of Gaza, included the enthusiastically anti-Israel NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson, the enthusiastically pro-Israel Toronto Sun’s editorial board, and the enthusiastically anti-Liberal Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman.

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If our foreign affairs minister should be shielded from such things, then surely so should the average Jewish family whose views on Israel in general, on the Netanyahu government’s response to the October 7 pogrom specifically, on settlements in the West Bank, on the two-state solution, onanything, cannot be assumed except by raving antisemites.

But is it really illegal to walk along a sidewalk in a Jewish neighbourhood waving a Palestinian flag? Should that be police business? As ever, the question of whether Crown prosecutors would be interested in pursuing charges, perhaps along the lines of harassment or intimidation, is wide open — and the safest answer, based on much experience since Oct. 7, 2003, is “no.” And that raises its own problems: If prosecutors aren’t willing to prosecute something, then should people really be getting arrested for it? I think not.

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Montreal MP Anthony Housefather made an intriguing comment this week after the House of Commons passed Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act. “It needs to be adopted by the Senate ASAP. We then need to work with provinces to train police and prosecutors and make clear it must be enforced,” he wrote on X.

This is a rare and very welcome perspective.

Arguably, C-9 really doesn’t change much at all. Its much-discussed ban on displaying the Nazi swastika or the “SS bolts,” for example, is not actually a ban on displaying the Nazi swastika or the SS bolts. Rather, it’s a ban on “wilfully promoting hatred against any identifiable group by displaying, in a public place, certain terrorism or hate symbols,” and willfully promoting hatred by any means is already illegal.

More than anything else, the bill was a stunt. As I always said about the Justin Trudeau Liberals, “the announcement was the policy.” Follow-up was optional and usually declined.

If the Criminal Code is going to ameliorate this horrible situation for Canadian Jews, then Ottawa absolutely needs to get the provincial attorneys general on the horn and somehow convince them to get Crown prosecutors from dropping nearly every charge that’s ever laid along these lines. And then they would maybe have to convince judges that it’s worth convicting those people.

What we really need, though, is for anyone who feels it appropriate to march through a Jewish neighbourhood in North Toronto in protest over what’s happening in Gaza to bugger off and find another, worse country to live in. And we need to hear that from our political leaders.

It’s not our fault if the Criminal Code isn’t up to solving this problem. It’s theirs for abusing the freedom Canada quite rightly and must always offer.

National Post cselley@postmedia.com

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