Howard Levitt: Olivia Chow owes Toronto’s Jewish community some answer

There is a serious and growing fault line between Toronto’s Jewish community and Mayor Olivia Chow. In its time of crisis unmatched since the 30s, the fear is that, when we most need her, she is on the other team.

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We judge politicians by their words, their actions, the causes they champion, the people whose approval they seek, those they are willing to offend and, most importantly, what they do when “doing the right thing” carries political costs.

That is the basis of my judgement of her.

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And if I am wrong, she has made my conclusion difficult to rebut. Look at what happened this week.

Toronto’s mayor was invited to a mayoral debate about antisemitism and the safety of her city’s Jewish community.

She refused to attend. Her explanation was that she does not participate in candidate events before her campaign officially launched on Sept. 9.

The debate was Sept. 8. That would be an amusing technicality if the subject were not so serious.

It also belies common sense. The organizers had been communicating with Chow’s campaign for weeks without her providing that excuse. They offered to change the date, but she still refused to attend. Her opponents were attending. Jewish community representatives were to be there. But Chow did not. Imagine if there was an outbreak, accompanied by significant violence, of anti-black racism in the city. Or pick any minority group other than Jews. Can you imagine her not attending?

This is not a scheduling problem but a revealing political choice.

Toronto’s Jewish community is facing extraordinary violence and hostility. Jewish schools, synagogues and community institutions are being shot at, bombed and require security. Jewish businesses attacked. Many Jews are concealing any visible identity to avoid becoming a target. They are fearful in many cases of walking our streets.

Toronto Police reported that Jews were the targets of 82 per cent of religious motivated hate crimes in 2025, despite Jews representing about three of the population.

This is a public safety crisis involving one of the communities the mayor is sworn to represent. A debate devoted to that crisis offered Chow the opportunity to stand before Jewish Torontonians and answer difficult questions.

Her defenders will point out that Chow has condemned antisemitism and expressed support for Toronto’s Jewish community and its necessary security measures

Put those statements in the record. But put everything else on it too. The relevant question is not whether Olivia Chow has ever said something supportive of Jews. The question is what her record as a whole reveals.

Last November, speaking at a fundraising gala for the National Council of Canadian Muslims, to applause, Chow said: “The genocide in Gaza impacts us all.”

Genocide is the deliberate attempt to annihilate a people and where large percentages of them are exterminated. That is not a synonym for war or civilian suffering. It is one of the most consequential accusations that can be made against a state.

Chow is obviously entitled to criticize Israel, condemn its government, oppose its military campaign and express upset over Palestinian civilian deaths. None of those positions, by themselves, are inherently hostile to the Jewish community

But there is a profound difference between criticizing a government and adopting rhetoric that demonizes the world’s only Jewish state, one reborn as a direct result of an actual genocide the large majority were slaughtered in the most heinous ways

That distinction becomes particularly important when the politician using that rhetoric is the mayor of a city with a Jewish community in crisis.

Chow, with decades in public life, knows the power of political language. She knows that a mayor’s words do not disappear when the speech ends.

Her words signal whose suffering she recognizes. Whose claims she considers legitimate. Whose political concerns she is prepared to take seriously. And whose she is obviously prepared to ignore

It is not one sentence or missed debate but her cumulative record. The audiences she chooses to address, political causes she embraces and the people she is not willing to confront

Chow appears perfectly comfortable using the most inflammatory language before audiences deeply engaged by the Palestinian cause. Yet when Toronto’s Jewish community asks her to discuss the hatred directed at Jews in the city she leads, she finds a procedural reason not to appear.

Perhaps it is political calculation.

A politician does not have to personally be politically opposed to the Jewish communities interest to make herself useful to people who are. She only has to decide that confronting them is politically inconvenient. That is how prejudice becomes normalized.

The politician does not have to utter a slur. They can simply become comfortable with the people who do, the rhetoric they use and be unwilling to challenge them when doing so carries political costs

That is why I believe my concerns about Chow are justified. Not because she supports Palestinian rights, criticizes Israel or disagrees with Jewish organizations.

It is the combination. She uses language about Israel that Jewish organizations have condemned as profoundly offensive, operates comfortably in political spaces where hostility toward Israel is prominent and embraces one of the most extreme accusations that can be made towards any state.

And when Toronto’s Jewish community asks her to account for her record at a debate devoted to its safety, she is absent.

None of this proves what she privately believes. But it reveals something about her public judgment, priorities and the risks she is unwilling to take on behalf of one of the communities she represents.

And that is precisely what voters are entitled to judge.

Perhaps Olivia Chow will yet prove me wrong. But if she does, it will not be by another statement about tolerance or by announcing another security initiative.

She has to explain why the language she uses is so extreme. She has to explain why Jewish concerns seem less urgent when addressing them carries a political cost. She has to explain why, when Toronto’s Jewish community asked its mayor to stand before it and answer difficult questions about its safety, she chose not to attend.

Ultimately, politicians are judged not by the intentions they purport, but by the choices they make.

I am not alone in my view of this mayor. If I am wrong, the burden of disproving that conclusion is not on Toronto’s Jewish community. It is on Olivia Chow.

And right now, her record makes my case for me.

Howard Levitt is senior partner of Levitt LLP, leading his teams of labour lawyers in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.

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