On Aug. 5, a new national study of antisemitism on Canadian university campuses revealed a startling reality: 95.7 per cent of Jewish students surveyed said they had experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the past year.
The report received wide coverage, including in The CJN, but there’s more to this story than that disturbing number. The 1,200 anecdotes submitted by students paint a vivid picture of being targeted by peers and professors for their faith and identities.
The research was originally commissioned by the office of Canada’s Special Envoy on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism, Deborah Lyons, before Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government scrapped both her office and the Islamophobia czar’s in February 2026. When Carney announced the makeup of a new federal Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion in June, he told the members to tackle antisemitism first, especially on campus. That’s when the study’s authors reminded the government it already had the research sitting there, which it had paid for.
But what else does this report tell us? What do Jewish university, college and CEGEP students actually say happened to them? And now that we have the research, what happens next?
On today’s episode of The CJN’s North Star podcast with Ellin Bessner, you’ll hear several of the students who spoke out, along with Cary Kogan, a University of Ottawa professor who was an advisor on the report and helped make it public last week, who spoke with The CJN’s Zenith Wolfe.
Related links
A new report finds nearly 95%, nearly all Jewish students surveyed, personally experienced or witnessed campus antisemitism last year, in The CJN
Read about the class action lawsuit against McGill University, and other legal actions underway against three other campuses including TMU, Western, and Windsor, in The CJN.
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