We Were Right to Leave Canada

It happened in the middle of an unremarkable Ontario Walmart, in the back-to-school section, under the fluorescent lights.

My four-year-old son was trying on a bright red backpack for his first day of kindergarten. It was much too large for him, as backpacks often are on small children, hanging low on his body and pulling slightly at his shoulders. He turned around so I could see it. He was proud of himself. He was excited. He had the look of a child standing at the edge of something enormous and believing, because he is loved, that the world waiting for him must be good.

It is one of the cruelties of parenthood that you can be standing beside your child in a perfectly ordinary place, buying a perfectly ordinary thing, when fear suddenly enters the room and rearranges your life.

In that moment, the thought came without warning:

Will he be safe in Canada as a Jew?

Not in the abstract way Jews are accustomed to asking this question. Not historically. Not philosophically. Not as one more entry in the long ledger of Jewish anxiety. I meant, would he be safe in that backpack, in that classroom, on that playground, in that country?

I looked at him and knew that I was not alone in questioning this as a father.

And as a father, I knew the answer.

No.

Or near enough to no that pretending otherwise would have been its own kind of betrayal.

That was the moment I began leaving Canada. Not with a plan. Not with boxes or paperwork or a destination. But inwardly. Quietly. Irrevocably. Something in me had crossed a border before the rest of us did.

For months before that, my wife and I had been having the conversations that many Jewish families began having after October 7th. They took place late at night, after the children were asleep, when the house had gone quiet and the day’s obligations could no longer keep gnawing concerns at bay.

What if this gets worse?

What if this is not temporary?

What if the country we thought we lived in is no longer the country we are living in?

We resisted the conclusion for as long as we could. Canada was home. We had fallen in love there. We had become parents there. We had built a life out of routines and friendships and obligations. We had given ourselves to community. We had a map of belonging: schools, synagogues, parks, familiar roads, the places where a family deposits its memories without realizing that one day it may have to retrieve them in a hurry.

We told ourselves what Jews in comfortable countries have always told themselves when the air around them changes.

We will stay.

We will fight.

We will not be frightened out.

There is dignity in that instinct. There is courage in it, too. But there is also a danger in mistaking it for wisdom. Adults can make arguments out of suffering. Adults can transfigure fear into principle. Adults can convince themselves that to remain is noble because the alternative is too painful to contemplate.

Children clarify things.

I could choose risk for myself and call it courage. I could not choose it for my son and call it the same thing.

This is what public language so often fails to capture. Antisemitism is discussed as an issue, a phenomenon, a challenge to pluralism, a failure of social cohesion. It is analyzed, condemned, contextualized, panelled, and put into reports. But for Jewish parents it is not an abstraction. It is a physical sensation. It is the pause before sending your child to school. It is the calculation you make when he says something Jewish in public. It is the tightening in your chest when you hear that another Jewish school has been shot at and then watch your government respond as if the problem were simply something to be managed.

It is the knowledge that childhood can be made smaller by the cowardice of adults.

October 7th did not create antisemitism in Canada. It revealed how much had been waiting for permission.

We watched the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust unfold in real time. Families were butchered. Children were kidnapped. Young people were hunted at a music festival. Whole communities were burned and destroyed. And then, before the dead were buried, before the hostages were even fully known by name, before Jewish grief had been given even the courtesy of a silence, people poured into Canadian streets to celebrate, rationalize, excuse, and explain.

Something very old had returned.

It called itself justice. It called itself liberation. It called itself anti-Zionism. But Jews recognized it. We do not need a seminar to identify the hatred that has followed the Jewish people across centuries and continents. We know it even when it shows up wrapped in the language of idealism.

Then came the rest.

Synagogues were vandalized. Jewish schools were shot at. Jewish neighborhoods were menaced. Jewish students were harassed. Jewish businesses were targeted. Jewish charities were maligned. Jewish fear was interrogated as though it were a suspicious political claim. Jewish pain was treated as something to be balanced against the sensitivities of the people causing it.

And Canada reached for its most familiar national comfort.

‘This is not who we are.’

It is a lovely sentence until it becomes a substitute for action. Then it becomes something closer to self-flattery. A country is not its preferred story about itself. It is not its branding, its official multiculturalism, its carefully staged concern. A country is what it does when a minority is afraid and protecting that minority becomes politically inconvenient.

By that measure, Canada has failed its Jews.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech Monday on antisemitism was, in many ways, a relief. It said many things that needed to be said. It acknowledged that Jewish Canadians are afraid. It recognized that antisemitism has become a national crisis. It admitted that the country has failed. It had gravity. It had polish. It had the sound of moral seriousness.

But Jews have learned to listen not only to what governments say but to what they do next.

And what came next was a council.

Not a national emergency plan led by people whose lives have been devoted to studying antisemitism, fighting antisemitism, preventing antisemitism, prosecuting hate crimes, protecting Jewish communities, securing Jewish schools, or confronting the anti-Zionist extremism now animating so much of the hatred Jews are facing.

A council.

And not even a council with an obvious expert in antisemitism.

No scholar of antisemitism. No specialist in Jewish communal security. No expert in campus antisemitism. No hate-crimes prosecutor. No law-enforcement professional known for confronting antisemitic violence. No one whose professional work suggests deep expertise in the thing the government says it now intends to address.

But there was room for an Olympic speed skater.

This is the kind of detail that would be funny if it were not so revealing. It is not a personal criticism of any one appointee. I am sure they are accomplished people. That is not the point. The point is that the composition of the council tells Jewish Canadians exactly how seriously their government understands the crisis.

Imagine a national aviation-safety council without a pilot, an engineer, an air-traffic controller, or anyone whose work involved keeping planes in the sky. Imagine a pandemic task force with no epidemiologist, no infectious-disease specialist, no hospital administrator, no one who had spent a career trying to stop disease from spreading. Everyone would know what that meant.

It would mean the government wanted to appear concerned without surrendering control to competence.

That is what this felt like.

A place for Jewish fear to be acknowledged, softened, studied, and filed. A place where urgency can be translated into process. A place where the sharp edges of reality can be sanded down until no one is too uncomfortable and nothing too disruptive is required.

It was at once familiar and clarifying.

We were right to leave.

I do not write that sentence with satisfaction. I write it with grief. We did not leave Canada because we stopped loving it. We left because we stopped trusting it with our children.

That is the whole thing.

We packed up our home. We pulled our son from the school where he was meant to begin kindergarten. We walked away from the country where we had imagined our boys would grow up. We left friends we loved, a community we had served, and a life we had spent years building. We did not leave because Canada became an enemy state. We did not leave because every Canadian is an antisemite. We did not leave because we wanted drama or reinvention.

We left because when the question became our children safely growing up in their identity, Canada’s answer was not good enough.

For a while, we did not know where we would go. We thought about Israel, as Jews do when history begins to close in. Israel is not an abstraction to us. It is the homeland of the Jewish people, the center of Jewish memory and destiny, the place toward which Jews prayed for two thousand years and to which they returned not as guests but as a free people.

But our boys were little. Too little, we felt, for sirens and shelters. Too little for the grammar of war to become part of their childhood.

So we came to America.

Not to New York, not to Los Angeles, not to one of the great coastal capitals of Jewish life. We came to the American heartland. To Tulsa, Oklahoma. And there, in a place many Canadian elites would not understand and quietly patronize, we found something we had not realized we had lost.

Air.

We found neighbors who did not require an extended lesson in geopolitical nuance before they could state plainly that antisemitism is evil. We found a Jewish community that took us in and embraced us. We found a school where our son could be openly and ordinarily Jewish. We found people who understood that Jewish safety is not a favor granted by the tolerant. It is a basic condition of a decent society.

America has antisemitism. Of course it does. Jews do not need fairy tales. We do not ask any country to be perfect.

We ask it to be serious.

Seriousness is not the absence of hatred. No society can promise that. Seriousness is the determination to confront hatred when it appears. It is the difference between danger and abandonment. It is the difference between a government that sees Jewish fear as a crisis and one that sees it as a communications problem. It is the difference between a country that will act to protect its Jews and one that will convene a meeting about their vulnerability.

Canada has not been serious enough.

That is why the United States should create an expedited asylum pathway for Canadian Jews.

I know how that sounds. Canada is not Iran. It is not Syria. It is not 1930s Europe. It is a liberal democracy that has invested deeply in its image as decent, tolerant, humane, and safe.

But countries do not get to be judged only by the stories they tell about themselves. They are judged by what happens when those stories are tested.

The test has come.

Canadian Jews are not imagining this. They are not being hysterical. They are not exploiting antisemitism for political effect. They are watching the slow collapse of a basic promise: that their children can be safe, equal, and unafraid in the country they call home.

Many will stay. Many will fight. Many will continue to build Jewish life with courage, stubbornness, and grace. They deserve admiration and support.

But some need to leave.

And they should have a lawful, expedited way to seek refuge in the United States.

We did. And that is what nags at me.

We had documents. We had mobility. We had professional flexibility. We had enough resources and enough luck to turn fear into action. Many Canadian Jews do not. They are caught between danger and paperwork, between instinct and affordability, between the need to protect their children and the brutal practicalities of immigration, housing, employment, and money.

They are being asked to wait while another council studies what they already know in their bones.

They should not have to wait for the next Jewish school to be shot at. They should not have to wait for the next synagogue to be attacked. They should not have to wait until their children learn, in the country of their birth, that being Jewish makes them a target.

An expedited asylum pathway would not be an insult to Canada. It would be a lifeline to Jews Canada has failed to protect. It would say that when Jews in a friendly democracy are made to feel unsafe, the United States will not limit itself to statements of concern.

It will recognize reality.

It will take seriously the fear that Canadian Jewish families are living with every day.

It will give those who need to leave a legal and humane path to safety.

I still think about Canada every day. I think about the life we left behind, the people we miss, the places that shaped us. I think about the country I wanted my children to inherit and the one that forced us to choose between nostalgia and safety. I think about what could have been different if more people had been braver earlier.

But I no longer wonder whether we made the right choice.

We did.

The prime minister’s speech confirmed it.

Canada sees the fire. It smells the smoke. It hears Jewish families saying they cannot breathe.

Canada did not push us out with one dramatic act. It happened more slowly than that, and perhaps that is why it hurts so much. It happened through indifference, euphemism, delay, cowardice disguised as complexity. It happened through leaders who condemned antisemitism while refusing to confront the movements and ideologies spreading it. It happened through institutions that could see Jewish fear and still move too slowly.

Canada let go of us before we let go of it.

That is the wound.

And last night, after the prime minister’s speech, I found myself back in that Walmart aisle.

I saw the red backpack. I saw my son’s smile. I saw a little boy ready for kindergarten, unaware that his father, standing beside him, was realizing that the country around him could no longer be trusted with his future.

Now I think of the Jewish parents still standing in aisles like that across Canada. Smiling for their children. Swallowing dread. Telling themselves they are overreacting. Waiting for the country to prove them wrong. Waiting for action. Waiting for seriousness. Waiting, perhaps, until waiting becomes its own kind of danger.

They should not have to wait or beg or pretend that council is protection.

And they should not have to be wealthy, lucky, mobile, or already connected to America to choose safety for their children.