Mezuzah by Daniel Mitsuo https://flic.kr/p/8kCWBi CC BY-NC 2.0

Earlier this month, Jewish students at Wilfrid Laurier University returned to their residence after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, to find that the mezuzahs affixed to their doors had been torn off and smashed. In the immediate aftermath, the campus Chabad rabbi joined the university’s dean of students to replace them, with Jewish and non-Jewish students gathering in support to send a unified response to the blatant antisemitism. My The Hub op-ed notes that the incident was yet another reminder of the escalation of harassment, discrimination, and vandalism targeting Jewish students and faculty on Canadian campuses. While repeated surveys and studies have left little doubt about the scale of the problem, not all universities have responded as decisively as Laurier. Indeed, too many have either ignored the issue or been reluctant to address it head-on.

The Ontario government tried to address the issue with Bill 166, legislation it passed in 2024 that required colleges and universities establish policies and rules to address and combat racism and hate, including anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Black racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. The law also requires the schools to issue annual reports on the implementation and effectiveness of the policies.

Yet to date, the law has failed abysmally. Not only has antisemitism increased on many campuses, but the annual reports are frequently difficult to find, buried on websites or in board minutes that make it virtually impossible to fully assess the situation on campus.

Nolan Quinn, Ontario’s Minister of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence, and Security, recently sent an unequivocal message that this isn’t good enough. He issued a revised directive that shifts the emphasis from policies to enforcement. This includes requiring universities to assert authority over student associations and groups, including investigating complaints against them. It also mandates proportionate security measures for campus events and time-and-place restrictions on protests, effectively establishing bubble zones with enforced perimeters around religious and cultural gathering places.

To address concerns about insufficient awareness among students and staff, the directive also requires universities to provide and actively promote training on prevalent forms of hate, developed and delivered with experts trusted by the affected communities. Furthermore, annual reports must now disclose complaint data by category and stage of completion, so universities can no longer hide antisemitism complaints behind a single total.

The directive also addresses the lack of confidence in campus complaints mechanisms. Recent studies, including the CASE report that surveyed 900 Jewish students on campuses across the country and the Benotto report on antisemitism at Toronto Metropolitan University, found that many students did not believe that reporting incidents would result in any action. The province will now require universities to check in with complainants at least every 30 days, until the case is resolved.

Most importantly, the new directive is backed by the threat of real penalties. It expressly puts operating and other provincial funding at risk for non-compliance. Since the prior directive failed to get some Ontario universities’ attention, the possibility of lost revenue might.

These steps will help address the current situation, but more could still be done.

First, universities could be required to establish an antisemitism envoy or adviser, with a direct line to university leadership. The University of Toronto created such a role for their medical school in 2021. Meanwhile, the University of Ottawa has proven invaluable in deploying their advisor to rapidly respond to incidents of hate, including to a similar case of vandalism in student residences last year.

Second, the directive stops short of defining antisemitism, even though the province adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition in 2020. By contrast, Australia established national standards in July requiring every university to adopt a definition of antisemitism. In the U.S., leading universities such as Harvard and Columbia have incorporated the IHRA definition into their anti-discrimination policies. Without a clear definition, the government’s effort to standardize reporting is unlikely to succeed, since each university will count antisemitism complaints according to its own view of what qualifies.

Finally, policies and requirements need deadlines. The new directive does not include a deadline for implementation, running the risk that recalcitrant universities will continue to drag their feet on antisemitism.

In the days after the Laurier vandalism, dozens of students who had not previously displayed mezuzahs outside their residence rooms requested them. The success of the government’s latest efforts to combat campus antisemitism will ultimately be judged by whether those students can live and study openly as Jews, down to placing a mezuzah on their door, confident their university will protect their right to keep it there.