When tolerance becomes performance, it ceases to be principle. Sweden learned that lesson; Laurentian Canada, still enthralled by its own virtue, has not.
Today (October 7 , 2025), two years after the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians, mobs gathered across Canadian cities to honour their “martyrs.” At Concordia University in Montreal, administrators closed the downtown campus after two agitators, neither students nor staff, were arrested carrying incendiary devices. The university president wrote to the community expressing “sadness” for the disruption, affirming that Concordia “values inclusion, compassion, and the right to peaceful expression.” She explained that the closure was taken to “ensure the safety of all members of our community” amid the “heightened tension” surrounding the day. The tone was heavy with empathy and the vocabulary of inclusion, yet the act itself was exclusion by necessity. An institution that proudly celebrates tolerance and has repeatedly looked the other way when violence visited it, could no longer tolerate its own openness.
This was no isolated disturbance. It exposed a country that has lost the ability to distinguish between rights and indulgences. Every person in Canada, citizen or not, enjoys freedom of expression under the Charter. But the right to speak is not the same as the right to intimidate free citizens or to steer the ship of state. Political influence, whether through organized protest or lobbying, is the privilege of citizenship. That distinction once defined the sovereignty of the Canadian electorate. Canadians blur it and obscure human decency at their peril.
Read the rest of the column in our Substack here.