Daniel Robson is a Canadian independent journalist specializing in digital extremism, national security, and counterterrorism.The antisemitic terror attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach — where a Hanukkah celebration turned into a killing ground — should land in Canada not as distant tragedy, but as a policy warning.Australian police say a father and son targeted the event, killing 15 people, while Australia’s prime minister described it as an “antisemitic terrorist attack.” The horror is immediate. The lesson is structural: when states treat early indicators as “just rhetoric,” they gamble with lives.The most politically explosive detail is not the body count, but the timeline. Australia’s domestic intelligence service, ASIO, had examined the older suspect in 2019, reportedly tracking him for months before assessing he posed no ongoing threat. That assessment did not prevent mass murder..BORG: Calgary Jewish community comes together in candlelight after Bondi Beach terror attack.Whether the file was closed too soon, whether the threat evolved, or whether legal thresholds chilled earlier intervention, the bottom line is the same: “known to authorities” is not the comfort people think it is. It can be the epitaph of institutional complacency, as ABC reporting on the 2019 ASIO scrutiny underscored.Canada is not short on warnings of its own. In the days following Bondi, Canada’s security apparatus defaulted — again — to the familiar script: no specific, imminent threat, but a violent extremist attack “remains a realistic possibility,” including one targeting the Jewish community, according to the ITAC assessment.That language matters, because it quietly admits a brutal operational reality: a lone actor or small cell can move from grievance to violence with little or no detectable lead time, using readily available means. The question is what we do with that reality — beyond press releases and extra patrol cars..For Jewish Canadians, the “realistic possibility” is not theoretical. It is lived experience — over and over, with a sense that the country is reacting rather than preventing. In Statistics Canada’s latest police-reported hate crime breakdown (2020–2024), total hate crimes in 2024 remained near a record high (4,882), with religion-motivated incidents at 1,342 and hate crimes targeting Jewish people at 920 — only a modest dip from 2023 (959) and still far above 2022 (527).Federal summaries also underline how steep the surge has been, noting a 71% increase from 2022 to 2023 (900 incidents) in the Government of Canada’s antisemitism overview. Numbers like that are not just data points; they are indicators of an ecosystem in which threats, harassment, vandalism, and incitement become normalized.What makes the Canadian moment especially dangerous is the recurrence. We have a pattern of serious incidents, repeated often enough to destroy the credibility of the “isolated case” reflex. Ottawa police charged a man in what they described as a hate-motivated stabbing of an elderly Jewish woman in a grocery store’s kosher area..CARPAY: From equality before the law to race-based rights — how UNDRIP is reshaping Canada.In Montreal, a Jewish father was assaulted in a park in front of his children — one of several high-profile episodes that shook local communities and drove calls for stronger protection, later covered as part of a court outcome.In Toronto, a Jewish girls’ school was targeted by gunfire multiple times in 2024, prompting a major police investigation and arrests documented by the Toronto Police Service. These are not minor “tensions.” They are real-world expressions of a climate where dehumanization is being rehearsed in public and amplified online.And yet, what many Canadians do not see — at least not consistently — is a hard-edged prevention posture commensurate with the threat. The deterrence signal is muddled: incidents happen, outrage follows, police presence rises briefly, then the country moves on until the next headline..When a society absorbs escalating hate as background noise, it trains extremists to believe they can keep pushing until someone crosses the line into violence. Bondi’s “2019 lesson” is precisely about that crossing: the pivot from weak signals to catastrophic action can be fast, nonlinear, and brutally unforgiving.This is where Canada’s legislative debate must catch up to its security reality. If we agree that radicalization is often incubated through propaganda, glorification, and social reinforcement, then prevention cannot begin only when a suspect is assembling weapons or scouting targets.It must begin earlier — at the stage where terrorism is being sold as heroic, necessary, or inevitable. That is exactly the logic behind Bill C-257 on Parliament’s LEGISinfo, a private member’s bill proposing a new Criminal Code offence for wilfully promoting a terrorist activity or terrorist group through public statements, as set out in the text of the bill at first reading. Its supporters argue it targets the “spark” — the normalization and marketing of political violence — before it becomes operational planning..DOBRER: An open letter from an angry Canadian Jew.Critics will raise a predictable concern: Canada already has terrorism speech offences, and Charter protections for expression are real. True — and that’s why the debate must be serious, not performative.Canada’s Criminal Code already criminalizes “advocating or promoting the commission of terrorism offences” in section 83.221, and it contains hate propaganda provisions that can apply when speech crosses defined thresholds. But the repeated operational failure in Western democracies is not a lack of moral condemnation. It is the tendency to treat propaganda as “mere speech” until the moment it becomes violence.Our legal framework often struggles with the grey zone where extremist messaging functions as recruitment and incitement without neatly fitting older categories. A bill like C-257 forces Parliament to confront that grey zone openly: do we want an offence calibrated to the modern propaganda pipeline, with clear safeguards and a high mens rea threshold, or do we keep improvising after the fact?.The answer cannot be naïveté disguised as liberal virtue. Free expression does not include a right to socially launder terror, mainstream antisemitic conspiracies, or frame violence against Jews as “resistance” while pretending it is just politics.The state’s duty is not to protect every radical’s comfort; it is to protect the public. That means intelligence services must treat weak indicators as risk — especially in periods of heightened social polarization. It means police and prosecutors must pursue hate-motivated offences consistently, seek meaningful conditions when there is credible risk, and communicate deterrence clearly.It means platforms and online ecosystems that feed incitement should face sustained disruption efforts, not sporadic outrage. And yes, it means legislators must stop pretending that a propaganda-to-violence pipeline is an abstract academic concept. It is now a repeating pattern..RUBENSTEIN: Missing government art, a window into indigenous artifact repatriation.Bondi should settle one argument in Canada: the cost of “waiting for certainty” is sometimes paid in funerals. A suspect can be noticed in 2019, assessed as non-threatening, and still kill in 2025. That is not a reason for panic; it is a reason for seriousness.We do not need a police state. We need a state that is not willfully blind — one that understands that in an era of viral hate, what looks “small” today can become a targeted massacre tomorrow.Canada can either keep practicing after-the-fact sympathy, or it can practice prevention. Jewish Canadians — and every Canadian who cares about public safety — deserve the latter.Daniel Robson is a Canadian independent journalist specializing in digital extremism, national security, and counterterrorism.about.me/danielrobsonX account: @Daniel_Robson_
