Keep your expectations low, and you’ll  never be disappointed. 

So it was for me on Monday evening, watching Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivering remarks on antisemitism in Canada. He was joined by Leslie Church, the MP for St. Paul’s, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon, and Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree. 

Leslie Church deserves real credit. By all accounts, she is the one who pushed this up the Federal Liberal Party chain and made it happen. St. Paul’s is one of the most Jewish ridings in Canada. The threat its constituents are facing right now are among the most serious of any area in the country. 

Church told an anecdote about her young daughter walking into a synagogue for the first time and being struck by the intense level of security. For diaspora Jews, that security is a benign fact of life – so familiar for so long that they have stopped noticing it at all. 

That apathy; the acceptance of a new normal, is exactly why Monday’s announcement matters. It is a signal that the needle might just be moving in a positive direction. 

So — did Carney deliver?

That depends entirely on what you were expecting.

If you tuned into the speech hoping for a rousing condemnation of Islamic extremism, a direct naming of anti-Zionism as antisemitism, or a pivot in this government’s posture toward Israel – then you would be sorely disappointed. Mark Carney’s Middle East politics, and that of the “New” Liberal government have been clear since he slipped up during the election campaign last year when asked about a Genocide in Gaza. If that hadn’t tipped you off, then his unilateral recognition of the........

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