Canadian Institute for Historical Education

On June 1, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Toronto's Holy Blossom Temple and spoke about a reality many Jewish Canadians say they are living every day: a growing fear that they are no longer safe in the country they call home. Recent years have seen attacks on synagogues, schools, businesses, and community institutions, prompting the Prime Minister to warn that antisemitism in Canada has reached levels not seen in the postwar era.

To understand why that statement carries such weight, it helps to remember the longer history of Jews in Canada.

Jewish Canadians have been part of the Canadian story since the days of New France and British North America. They helped build businesses, universities, labour organizations, cultural institutions, and governments. Yet for much of that history, they also faced barriers that many Canadians today have forgotten.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, universities imposed quotas. Neighbourhoods and resorts excluded Jewish families. Employers refused to hire them. During the 1930s, as Jews fled N**i persecution in Europe, Canada became known for one of the harshest refugee policies in the Western world. The infamous phrase "None is Too Many" came to symbolize a government unwilling to open its doors to those seeking refuge from Hi**er.

The Holocaust changed Canada. The postwar era saw the country gradually embrace a different vision of itself—one built on pluralism, religious freedom, and multiculturalism. Jewish Canadians became central participants in that project. For generations, Canada was regarded as one of the safest places in the world to be Jewish.

That is why today's concerns resonate so deeply.

The question is not simply whether hate crimes are rising. It is whether Canadians can preserve the civic compact that emerged after the Second World War: the understanding that citizenship, not religion or ethnicity, determines who belongs.

History teaches that antisemitism rarely begins with violence. It begins when people grow accustomed to exclusion, intimidation, or the idea that one group's security matters less than another's.

Canada has confronted these moments before. The challenge today is whether we remember the lessons we claimed to learn from them.

History does not repeat itself exactly. But it does ask each generation the same question:

What kind of country do we intend to be?

For a deeper look at the history of Jews in Canada, listen to Professor Gil Troy speak on the "Ask Haviv Anything" podcast.

Photos: Library of Canada

Before there was a bridge connecting Windsor and Detroit, there was Gordie Howe.

The Gordie Howe International Bridge was intended to open a new chapter in the relationship between Canada and the United States. Yet questions and delays surrounding its opening have left that moment uncertain.

Even so, the bridge remains a fitting tribute to a man whose life spanned the border long before the structure bore his name.

Born in Saskatchewan in 1928, Gordie Howe became a hockey legend in Detroit, where generations of Americans came to know one of Canada's greatest athletes simply as "Mr. Hockey."

When it eventually opens, the bridge named in his honour is expected to carry millions of travellers and billions of dollars in trade between two sovereign nations. Yet its name already reminds us that the relationship between Canada and the United States has always been about more than economics or politics. It has also been built by people.

Howe never held public office. He negotiated no treaties. But through talent, character, and sportsmanship, he became one of the most recognizable Canadians in America.

There is something uniquely Canadian about that.

Many countries name major infrastructure after presidents, generals, or political leaders. Canada chose a hockey player.

Not because hockey is our national pastime, but because Gordie Howe represented something larger: a Canadian whose excellence earned admiration on both sides of the border without ever requiring him to stop being Canadian.

Long before steel and concrete connected these two countries, Gordie Howe did.

Did Canada exist because America failed to conquer it?

On June 18, 1812, the United States declared war on Great Britain. What followed would become one of the most consequential—and often misunderstood—conflicts in North American history.

At the time, there was no Canada.

There were British colonies stretching from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes, populated by English-speaking settlers, French Canadians, Indigenous nations, recent immigrants, and Loyalists who had fled the American Revolution.

Many American leaders believed these colonies could be easily absorbed into the United States. Former President Thomas Jefferson famously predicted that the conquest of Canada would be "a mere matter of marching."

It was not.

Over the next two years, American invasions were repeatedly repelled by a coalition of British regulars, Canadian militia, French Canadian volunteers, and Indigenous allies led by figures such as Tecumseh.

The war ended in 1814 without territorial changes. Yet its political consequences were profound.

For Americans, the conflict became a story of national survival and independence from Britain.

For the people living north of the border, it became something different: a shared memory of resisting annexation and remaining outside the American republic.

Historians continue to debate whether the War of 1812 "created" Canada. Confederation was still more than fifty years away. But the war helped foster a sense that the colonies of British North America had a distinct future—one that would develop separately from the United States.

In that sense, modern Canada may owe part of its existence not simply to British victory, but to an American failure.

“Canada became self-governing before Canada even existed.”

Nearly two decades before Confederation, a quiet political transformation was already reshaping British North America.

In 1848, Nova Scotia became the first colony in British North America to achieve responsible government—the principle that political leaders should answer to elected representatives rather than distant authorities in London.

Why does this matter?

Because before there was a Canadian nation, there was already an emerging political culture grounded in the idea of self-government.

Democratic institutions preceded nationhood. Responsible government came before sovereignty. Confederation did not invent these principles—it consolidated and expanded them.

Canada’s path toward independence was not defined by revolution or rupture. It developed gradually through constitutional reform, political negotiation, and institutional evolution.

This raises an important question:

Is Canada’s gradual path to sovereignty one of its greatest strengths—or has its incremental nature made us forget how difficult these institutions were to achieve?

The first sitting of the Province of Canada marked one of the most consequential—and uneasy—experiments in Canadian political history.

The union of Upper and Lower Canada was imposed in the aftermath of the 1837–38 rebellions, driven by a belief in London that political instability stemmed from weak institutions and divided governance. By merging the two colonies into a single legislature, British authorities hoped to restore order, reduce conflict, and accelerate assimilation—particularly in French-speaking Lower Canada.

In practice, the union did the opposite.
Equal representation between Canada East and Canada West, despite unequal populations, produced chronic deadlock. Linguistic, religious, and regional tensions dominated debate. Governments rose and fell quickly. Nothing worked smoothly.

But that dysfunction proved instructive.

The Province of Canada became a political laboratory where Canadian leaders learned, often the hard way, that durable governance in a diverse society required responsible government, compromise, and eventually federalism. The failures of the 1841 system directly shaped the constitutional thinking that led to Confederation in 1867.

This first sitting reminds us that Canada was not built from a single grand design.
It was built by confronting what didn’t work—and adapting accordingly.