Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow speaks to reporters in Toronto, March 8, 2025. Photo: Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via ZUMA Press via Reuters Connect

A ceasefire is holding in Gaza. In places like Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the mayor’s tenure was interrupted by a seven-year prison stint, local governments will have to drop their calls to end the war and get back to the boring business of running their cities.

Beleaguered Jewish residents across North America, who have gritted their teeth through an unprecedented spike in antisemitic attacks, are surely breathing a sigh of relief.

Earlier this month, however, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow decided to dust off the Israel punching bag for one last go.

Speaking at a fundraiser for The National Council of Canadian Muslims in Brampton — Canada 7th largest city — Chow claimed, “the genocide in Gaza impact [sic] us all.”

Encouraged by the audience’s applause, she then got personal: Chow told the audience that when her mother was 13, Chow’s grandmother died of dysentery as a result of Imperial Japan’s invasion of China during World War II, leaving Chow’s mother alone to care for her siblings.

Reasonable people can disagree about the proportionality of Israel’s response to the barbarity of Hamas and fellow terror groups’ attack on October 7, 2023. But to compare it to a war whose explicit goal was conquest — and which resulted in an estimated 20 million Chinese deaths — is more of an apples to elephants comparison than apples to oranges.

More troubling was Mayor Chow’s glib use of the phrase “genocide.”

A sculptor by training — who spent her professional career in mostly local politics, with a stint as a member of parliament for Canada’s perennial also-ran socialist party — Chow is not well qualified to be making legal conclusions.

The timing was particularly ham-fisted, given the fact that only days earlier, reports had surfaced of a massacre in Sudan, one in which the blood of more than 2,000 unarmed civilians ran so deep that it could be seen in satellite images.

In Israel, the country’s roughly 6,600 Sudanese refugees see little daylight between the murderers of Darfur and Hamas.

But for devout leftists, when an Arab-supremacist Muslim paramilitary murders African Muslims, the Intersectional Bingo scorecard gets to be a confusing place.

Nevertheless, if one is looking to lob the “genocide” grenade or to find modern comparisons to the Rape of Nanjing, Sudan would be the most intellectually honest place to start. One suspects the applause from the Brampton crowd would have been somewhat thin if Chow had gone there.

Ultimately, Chow was hoping to score political points to salvage a re-election campaign that seemed assured months ago and is suddenly sagging.

Her predecessor, John Tory, beat her soundly in 2014, but after winning 62% of the vote and a third term in 2022, he abruptly resigned less than four months later after it emerged that he had a consensual extramarital affair with a staffer.

Chow won a snap election in which she was the sole candidate on the left, and was buoyed by the support of an outfit called Progress Toronto. With an election scheduled for next October, she suddenly finds herself governing a city that has woken up to its many problems, including public safety, a crumbling public transit system, and a lack of affordable housing.

More alarming for the mayor, Torontonians seem to have reached the audacious conclusion that the problems might have something to do with her leadership.

With talk of a Tory comeback, and centrist Councillor Brad Bradford openly campaigning, the road suddenly looks a lot bumpier for Chow.

It would appear that Toronto’s Jewish community has also had enough. After two years of harassment, intimidation, vandalism, and arson, Toronto’s Jewish community might have naively believed the Gaza ceasefire would bring it peace.

At my own synagogue, which is one of the city’s oldest and has been in operation since 1914, High Holiday services are usually held in the main synagogue building, with overflow at the nearby Jewish Community Centre. This year, there was no service in the main building, presumably to focus the large security presence at a single location.

In addition to being warned of “heightened security,” congregants were told that there would be no Yom Kippur food drive to support a local charity this year, and that they should instead donate cash. Think about that for a moment: when Toronto Jews want to commemorate their holiest day of the year by donating non-perishable goods to a non-Jewish charity, they now have to consider the possibility of being blown up in a terror attack.

The week after Chow made her comments was a busy one for the city’s antisemites and Israel haters. On Tuesday, a Toronto synagogue was vandalized for the 10th time in 18 months.

The following day, a group at Toronto Metropolitan University called Students Supporting Israel held an event at which speakers from the IDF came to share their stories. The organizers had been refused a permit on campus, so they held the event off-campus and took steps to keep the location secret.

Nevertheless, they were hunted down by protestors organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, some of whom stormed the building, broke a glass door, and caused minor injuries to one of the IDF vets.

Five arrests were made, and the university offered a milquetoast statement. Given the light touch approach Canadian authorities tend to apply in such cases, it seems unlikely the perpetrators will face any consequences.

Welcome to Canada in 2025.

Advocacy group B’nai Brith has circulated a petition to the city’s integrity commissioner alleging that the mayor’s comments violated the city’s code of conduct for members of council. It remains to be seen whether that allegation will hold up. But hopefully the message will be received regardless: while Toronto has no foreign policy, it does have many serious problems, including rampant intimidation of the Jewish community. If the current mayor isn’t up to fixing these problems, voters should find someone else who will.

Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.