Montreal, December 22, 2025 — The Anti-Racism Program of the CJPME Foundation (ARPCF) has released a new report, Policing Palestine Solidarity: A Crisis of Civil Liberties in Canada (2021-2025). This groundbreaking research documents the alarming state response to mass mobilizations for Palestinian rights following October 7, 2023. Amid one of the largest protest waves in Canadian history, the report finds that instead of respecting democratic dissent, authorities responded with surveillance, criminalization, and repression. Through the use of intelligence agencies, riot squads, legal overreach, and unprecedented inter-agency coordination, the Canadian state treated a peaceful human rights movement as a threat to national security.
The report's data analysis reveals that pro-Palestinian protests made up only 10.1% of all demonstrations between 2021 and 2025, yet they accounted for 37% of all recorded police interventions. This disproportionate enforcement targeted a movement in which over 96% of events were entirely peaceful. In 2024 alone, nearly two-thirds of all protest policing was directed at pro-Palestine activity—a stark indicator of political bias. The report documents how federal and municipal actors used tools such as “Project Resolute” and bail conditions not for public safety, but to suppress speech, intimidate organizers, and incapacitate movement infrastructure.
“This troubling report reveals how Canada systemically over-policed and repressed a peaceful movement for human rights. There needs to be accountability.” Said Yara Shoufani, President of the CJPME Foundation. “It is a wake-up call. The machinery of repression built in response to Palestine activism today will threaten all movements for justice tomorrow—unless we dismantle it now.” Added Jamila Ewais, Lead researcher of the ARPCF.
Behind this intensified crackdown was a high-level architecture of repression. The report exposes the role of ADM NS Ops—a federal intelligence coordination committee—in integrating CSIS, RCMP, and Public Safety Canada with local police to monitor and disrupt peaceful activism. The analysis further raises the alarm about Bill C-9, currently before Parliament, for threatening to legalize these forms of suppression by creating vague “hate” designations and protest “bubble zones.” Equally troubling is the absence of protections for political belief in Canada’s human rights legislation, which allows public and private institutions to discriminate with impunity against those who support Palestinian human rights.
The ARPCF calls for urgent reforms to protect civil liberties in Canada. The report recommends a Federal Commission of Inquiry to investigate the political motives behind protest repression; the immediate withdrawal of Bill C-9; and an amendment of the Canadian Human Rights Act to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on political belief.
About the ARPCF – The mandate of the Anti-Racism Program of the CJPME Foundation (ARPCF) is to create public awareness about racism in Canada. This mandate falls in line with the Foundation’s broader purpose of monitoring and combating manifestations of racism, xenophobia, and discrimination by increasing public awareness of such biases.
For more information, please contact Jamila Ewais, 514-389-8668
ARPCF, [email protected] www.cjpmefoundation.org
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