Two organizations count antisemitism in Canada, and they count it differently. In 2025 their numbers moved in opposite directions – which turns out to be the most useful thing about them.
B’nai Brith Canada’s Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents documented roughly 6,800 incidents across Canada in 2025, the highest total in the audit’s history. Statistics Canada, counting something narrower, recorded 788 police-reported hate crimes targeting Jewish people in the same year – a 16 per cent decrease from the 943 recorded in 2024.
A record high and a double-digit decline, describing the same twelve months. Both are accurate.
Why do the two counts disagree?
They measure different things. The police figure counts incidents that met the threshold of a criminal offence, were reported to police, and were classified as hate-motivated. The audit counts the wider category of antisemitic incidents in Canadian society: harassment, vandalism, threats, online abuse. Most of that is never reported to anyone, and a good deal of it would not meet a criminal standard if it were.
The police series also has to be read against its own recent history. Anti-Jewish hate crimes went from 527 in 2022 to 959 in 2023, a jump of 82 per cent, then 943 in 2024, before falling to 788 in 2025. The decline is real. It is also a decline from an extraordinary peak, not a return to where things were.
Share of Canada’s 1,115 religion-motivated hate crimes in 2025 that targeted Jewish people – who are less than one per cent of the population. Anti-Jewish incidents were 16.7 per cent of all 4,708 hate crimes recorded nationally.
Jewish Canadians are roughly one per cent of the population. They were the target of about seven in ten religiously motivated hate crimes recorded by police.
Is it getting worse in 2026?
Partial-year data suggests the violent end of the spectrum is moving the wrong way. B’nai Brith reported violent antisemitic incidents accelerating through the middle of 2026, rising from 11 in May to 27 by early July. By mid-July the running total for the year had already passed the full-year totals for 2022, 2024 and 2025, second only to 2023.
Violent incidents remain a small fraction of the overall count. They are also the category that most directly changes how an organization operates.
What does antisemitism cost community organizations?
Most reporting on antisemitism, correctly, centres the people harmed. There is a second-order effect that gets less attention, and it is the one that shapes our work.
When threat levels rise, community organizations absorb costs that never appear in an incident count:
- Security becomes a line item. Doors, cameras, guards for events, insurance premiums: money that was previously programming money.
- Volunteers and lay leaders take on risk assessment they were never trained for and did not sign up for.
- Attendance patterns shift. Some families quietly stop coming to public events, which changes what programming is viable.
- Staff and directors carry a sustained low-level vigilance that is a genuine contributor to burnout.
None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary arithmetic of running a small charity in a harder environment. An organization with three staff and a volunteer board does not have a security department to absorb it; the same people simply do more, with the same budget.
Why we work the way we do
Lech Lecha does not run security programmes, and we would not claim expertise we do not have. What we do is narrower: we help Jewish organizations stay operationally stable so that they can keep functioning when conditions are difficult.
In practice that means the unglamorous things: covering an operating shortfall, funding a role that would otherwise go unfilled, helping a small organization get its governance and compliance in order. Work that never makes a newsletter.
The reason we think that is worth doing is visible in the numbers above. Community institutions are where Jewish life actually happens: the classes, the study groups, the places people bring their children. Sustained pressure does not usually close such institutions dramatically. It closes them slowly, through attrition, exhaustion and a budget that will not stretch to one more year.
Keeping those doors open is the least visible form of community security there is. It is also, in our view, one of the most durable.
Sources
- Statistics Canada, police-reported hate crime in Canada
- The Canadian Jewish News, on the 2025 Statistics Canada hate-crime figures
- B’nai Brith Canada, Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents (2025)
- B’nai Brith Canada, Special Report: Violent Antisemitic Attacks Are Accelerating in Canada
- B’nai Brith Canada, Recent Government Reports Underscore Threats Facing the Jewish Community