Executive Summary

In recent years, Canadians have witnessed intensifying debate about how best to address rising hate and racism, and about how that effort relates to political debate over human rights crises abroad. In debates over Israel’s actions in Gaza, for example, Israel’s supporters have argued that pro-Palestinian advocacy is driving a rise in antisemitism, and that anti-Zionism should even be viewed as synonymous with it.^[1] Regrettably, Canada’s efforts to combat antisemitism have largely adopted this faulty position. Canada is now in the process of effectively penalizing the basic historical narratives of Palestinians: not by making them criminal, but by treating them as presumptively antisemitic and exposing those who voice them to investigation and sanction. This has significant negative implications for civil liberties, academic freedom, and human rights advocacy in Canada.

 Click here to download the full report as a PDF

The clearest sign of this shift came on 24 September 2026, when Public Safety Canada published a progress report on its National Commitments to Combat Antisemitism. The report states, without qualification, that “antisemitism, which includes anti-Zionism, is not always obvious,” and sets as an intended outcome that institutions across Canada be equipped to recognize and respond to “contemporary manifestations of antisemitism, including anti-Zionism, as outlined in the Canadian Handbook.” The report never defines anti-Zionism. It also confirms that police services are increasingly using the IHRA definition to recognize and assess potential antisemitic incidents, and that the RCMP’s national hate-crime policy now references the Handbook.^[2] The Canadian Press described the report as a major federal policy shift,^[3] and it drew immediate criticism from Palestinian, Muslim, Jewish, and civil-liberties organizations, including Independent Jewish Voices, which warned that the redefinition “endangers all Canadians’ right to freedom of expression.”^[4]

This is the most explicit conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism that the federal government has made to date.[5] It no longer suggests that some anti-Zionist speech may be antisemitic, but treats anti-Zionism itself as a category of antisemitism, and builds that classification into police training and guidance. The stakes go beyond any single viewpoint: treating opposition to Zionism as hate pushes out of legitimate debate the very concepts, such as settler colonialism, apartheid, and self-determination, through which scholars, human-rights bodies, and international courts examine Israel’s conduct. Whatever discussion of Israel remains is then left to proceed on terms set by Zionism’s defenders.

One of the most significant policy mechanisms driving this shift is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, which the Government of Canada adopted on 25 June 2019 as a non-legally binding tool within Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy.^[6] The definition includes a short core text, accompanied by 11 illustrative examples, seven of which concern Israel or Zionism in some way. Most importantly, Example 7 identifies as a possible manifestation of antisemitism “[d]enying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”^[7]

The purpose of combating antisemitism is urgent and legitimate. Jewish communities in Canada must be protected from discrimination, harassment, vandalism, conspiracy theories, threats, and violence. Nothing within this policy brief disputes that responsibility. The problem is that the IHRA definition, and in particular its Example 7, shifts the object of protection from Jews as a minority community in Canada to a particular proposition about a state: that supporting Jewish safety in Canada requires protecting the continued existence of the State of Israel in its present constitutional form, as a state built to guarantee a Jewish majority. It also implies that Canada is obliged to protect Zionism itself, as an ideology, an identity, and a social movement, because of its connection to Israel. It therefore creates a route by which criticism of Zionism, Israel’s founding, its legal order, or its treatment of Palestinians can be characterized as hostility toward Jews without first establishing an anti-Jewish target, stereotype, intent, or effect. In doing so, the government also takes sides in a long-running debate within Jewish communities, elevating the positions of the most established communal organizations over those of the many Jews who reject Zionism.^[8]

In effect, the Canadian government is deeming Palestinian perspectives, and other critical perspectives on Israel and Zionism, to be inherently antisemitic. This poses a major threat to civil liberties and academic freedom in Canada.

The risk is no longer theoretical. The federal Canadian Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, released on 31 October 2024, classifies a Canadian social-media post describing Zionism as a racist and violent settler-colonial project as a case study of antisemitism under Example 7. The same Handbook recommends the practical use of IHRA in police training and hate-incident recording, legal education, school and campus codes, government funding vetting, workplace policies, hiring and dismissal, and civil-society programming.^[9] The Handbook repeatedly states that IHRA does not change Canadian law. That is true only if law is understood to change solely through legislation. In practice, the Handbook changes how the law is interpreted and applied, because its proposed uses can determine who is reported, investigated, recorded, disciplined, denied funding, excluded from employment, or treated as presumptively hateful.^[10] Ultimately, it is designed to guide how actors across the criminal justice and public-safety systems, from police officers to prosecutors and judges, understand these issues.^[11]

It is important to be precise about what IHRA, including Example 7, does and does not do under Canadian criminal law. The adoption of IHRA as government policy does not make the words “apartheid,” “settler colonialism,” “racist state,” or “anti-Zionism” criminal in and of themselves. Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, in force since 18 July 2026, did not directly incorporate IHRA into the Criminal Code. Instead, its hate-crime offence requires an underlying federal offence plus proof of a hate motive; the Code defines hatred as an intense and extreme emotion associated with vilification and detestation and clarifies that expression is not hateful merely because it discredits, humiliates, hurts, or offends.^[12] This reflects the high threshold developed by the Supreme Court of Canada, which has held that “hatred” must be restricted to “those extreme manifestations of the emotion described by the words ‘detestation’ and ‘vilification’.”^[13]

Because that threshold is so demanding, very little political speech about Israel will ever be prosecuted as hate. The policy danger, therefore, is not that anti-Zionist speech will itself become criminal. It lies in the soft-law pipeline that precedes any criminal finding and extends far beyond criminal law, shaping how police, employers, universities, funders, and other institutions treat those who hold these political views.

This brief examines the IHRA definition, and in particular Example 7, as adopted and operationalized in Canada, with a focus on its effects on civil liberties and on how it perpetuates anti-Palestinian racism. Although Example 7 is not the only problematic element of IHRA, it is worthy of close study here because of how it directly targets anti-Zionism. After setting out our approach, this brief introduces the IHRA definition and its adoption in Canada, sets out the core conceptual problems with Example 7, and then examines its consequences for free expression and academic freedom, and its role in reproducing anti-Palestinian racism, drawing throughout on lessons from other countries, before concluding with recommendations to the federal government. It finds that Example 7:

1. Falsely conflates political criticism with racism by collapsing Jewish people, Zionist ideologies, the State of Israel, and Israel’s laws and governing structures into a single category, so that criticism of the state or its ideology is treated as hostility toward Jews.

2. Contradicts IHRA’s own promise that Israel may be criticized like any other country, by exempting Israel from the structural-racism and settler-colonial analysis that is routinely applied to Canada and other states.

3. Functions as anti-Palestinian racism by treating Palestinians’ historical narratives, such as the Nakba, and their descriptions of dispossession, occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism by the State of Israel as presumptive evidence of prejudice or antisemitism.

4. Threatens expression, assembly, association, academic freedom, and equal participation by encouraging institutions to police viewpoints rather than harmful conduct.

5. Has already shaped Canadian complaint campaigns, official interpretive guidance, and now federal public-safety policy, while comparative evidence shows how non-binding adoption can lead to cancellations, discipline, loss of opportunities, and self-censorship.

This analysis demonstrates that IHRA Example 7 is not fit to serve as guidance for public policy. To be clear, this does not mean weakening the fight against antisemitism; it means making that fight more precise. Governments and institutions should address threats, violence, harassment, collective blame, Holocaust denial, classic anti-Jewish tropes, and discriminatory exclusion through enacted law and conduct-based policy. What they should not do is conflate these forms of discrimination with anti-racist and pro-Palestinian speech. This brief argues that the federal government should retract Public Safety Canada’s characterization of anti-Zionism as antisemitism, withdraw the Canadian IHRA Handbook, suspend coercive use of IHRA, and recognize anti-Palestinian racism in Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy, while looking to the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) as a clearer educational resource that does not reproduce the same harms.