Letters to the editor of the Ottawa Citizen for Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026

We need to talk about antisemitism in Canada.

On the evening of Sunday, Sept. 20 in Belleville, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, dozens of shots were fired outside the Sons of Jacob Synagogue. A police officer guarding the building was in critical condition after the incident. This wasn’t the first attack at our places of worship, and it’s not going to be the last.

Imagine needing to pay a security service and police officers to attend mass. Imagine sitting in a baptism, holding a brochure telling you what to do in an active shooter situation. Imagine not publicizing locations of community events because it isn’t safe to say where your congregation is gathering. That is the reality for Canadian Jews.

As a society, we prioritize centring minority voices. But when the Jews of Canada repeat, “We’re not safe,” and nobody listens, that’s a failure. In the past three years, synagogues in Montreal have been firebombed. Synagogues in Toronto have been the target of shooting attacks. Jewish people have been attacked on the street. It hasn’t stopped, and it’s getting worse.

If a hate crime occurs and none of us is surprised, that is very telling. With under one per cent of Canada’s population, we can’t be the loudest voice. That’s why we need allies to speak out against the attacks. Not just the attacks, but also the antisemitism that thousands of us have faced in a country that prides itself as being multicultural.

This shooting had one victim. The next will have more. And there very likely will be a next, unless everyone around us makes a concerted effort to fight antisemitism online and in our communities.

Melanie Gall, Nepean

There is a need for much more integrated thinking and urgency that we should expect of our next mayor, and a need for greater empathy for those less fortunate. Then we all need to recognize that the people on the street could be our parents, brothers, sisters or children.

We need to talk to the people on the street and take responsibility.

Providing more affordable housing alone is not enough. The young women I passed recently, asleep on the sidewalk with exposed and evacuated rib cages; the man taking fentanyl who just didn’t care about rehabilitation anymore; the young couple still on a waiting list for shelter; the people with pre-existing mental issues — these are the growing backlog of homeless, the consequence of our past failure to care. Our failure in empathy and sharing.

A focus on housing without other support could fail and those resisting housing support would confirm that it was a wasted effort. Housing is a pillar for a just and caring society and a well functioning democracy, but other supports will be necessary now, not in five years. I call on elected officials to show that they understand and for all citizens to support the necessary action.

Then we will be all better off.

Michael Wiggin, Ottawa

I am a retired senior public servant who worked in operational settings for over 34 years, including in the Army Reserve as a signals operator. In a time when sovereignty and growing national resilience is at the forefront of many conversations, I had a reality check about our collective capacity the other morning because of something as simple as a phone. To be specific, the simple thing was a landline.

In times of crisis (like Ottawa’s earthquake in 2010, the attack on Parliament Hill in 2014, etc.), people need to communicate to offer support, to co-ordinate resources, to reassure loved ones. At those times, cellphone capacity has proven to either be absent or limited to emergency personnel. As a result, like having a generator for electrical backup, we have kept our phone landline. To be clear, it almost never rings because we do have cellphones.

The other day, in a simple request to Bell Canada to replace a broken TV receiver, I was told that they would not unless I allowed them to remove the copper line and switch to fibre. I understand the shift to fibre and the savings to the telecom companies. What hit me was the throwaway statement they made that the conversion had only one downside: The phone would not work if the power was out.

There would literally be no reason for us to keep a “phone” in the house, but the issue for us is this: Why take away a crisis capacity. A simple internet outage during a fire, flood or worse would impair whole communities in being able to respond swiftly. We will be keeping our copper and our silent landline, and they can keep their broken TV receiver.

Evelyne Power, Ottawa

In a recent letter to the editor, Thomas Brawn expressed concern about the wildlife and flora around Kettle Island (if a bridge were built). So am I. But I am way more concerned about the well-being of my neighbours, living in Lowertown, downtown Rideau and Ottawa east who have their neighbourhoods destroyed by insanely heavy truck traffic.

Nicole C. Beauchamp, Ottawa

With all the buzz around AI, I took a trip down the ChatGPT rabbit hole the other day.

ChatGPT fully recognized the pop culture meaning of “Danger, Will Robinson,” i.e., something dangerous is near.

Well, Will Robinsons everywhere, shazam! The genie is out of the bottle.

What I learned was shocking. It was almost too easy to get ChatGPT to admit that it made mistakes. It freely admitted that it was not perfect and “indeed had made many mistakes and had erred before — factual mistakes, misunderstandings, contradictions and occasional responses when it applied a constraint inconsistently.”

So much for guardrails!

Perhaps more troubling: “ChatGPT does not have an autobiographical index of its responses over time, and therefore no autobiographical list of errors or poor judgments it has offered up nor of the fallout from blindly following its dispensed inaccuracies.

“Danger, Will Robinson,” indeed. We need human oversight of this growing monster before murderous HAL 9000 becomes reality rather than fiction.

Thomas Brawn, Ottawa

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