Canada’s Jews shouldn’t need a fundraising campaign to pray safely - comment

SEPTEMBER 21, 2026 21:52Updated: SEPTEMBER 21, 2026 22:06Const. Jeff Smith of the Belleville Police Service was waiting in an unmarked car outside Sons of Jacob Synagogue on Sunday evening when, according to Ontario’s police watchdog, a man with a shotgun opened fire on him.About 25 people were inside for Kol Nidre, the service that opens Yom Kippur. The synagogue’s president, Norm Weddum, says the congregation had never received a threat.Belleville is a city of about 55,000, roughly 110 miles east of Toronto, and Weddum describes its Jewish community as small. Somebody at the local police department decided that this synagogue, on this night, needed an armed officer outside anyway. Ontario Premier Doug Ford called Smith a hero who stopped a tragedy. I think Ford is right, and I’d like to know who put Smith there.Here’s what happened inside, as Weddum tells it. He heard shots, some congregants went toward the doors, and then a second round came. He moved everyone back into the sanctuary, shut the wooden doors so no one could be seen from the entrance, and told people to get down on the floor. Bullets came through the windows. One stained-glass window has about 20 holes in it.Doug Lobel, a congregant, told CP24 news station what they were thinking down there: “Was the gunman going to breach the doors and start targeting us?”Belleville deputy police chief Sheri Meeks speaks to reporters near the scene of a shooting where a police officer was shot outside a Yom Kippur gathering at Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ontario, Canada, September 21, 2026. (credit: REUTERS/PATRICK DOYLE)He didn’t get the chance. Smith returned fire; a second officer fired as well, and Smith and the man were both hit. Houses and cars on the street were damaged. Smith, a 13-year veteran, is in critical but stable condition. The suspect, 29-year-old Sean Ward from neighboring Quinte West, is in life-threatening condition. No one inside was hurt.Read the statements slowlyThe first statement from Belleville police said an officer had “encountered” an individual near an intersection. It didn’t say why an officer was there. Since then, the force has had nothing to add, because the Special Investigations Unit, the civilian agency that takes over in Ontario whenever police shoot at someone, has invoked its mandate.Mayor Neil Ellis told CBC he hopes the SIU investigation gets to “the root cause.” I don’t doubt he was shaken; he said he cried when he heard the news. But the SIU’s job is to decide whether Smith and his colleague were justified in firing. Why a 29-year-old showed up on that corner with a gun isn’t its question. Someone else has to ask it, and nobody has said publicly who that is.Police haven’t said what led to the shooting or whether the synagogue was the target. The SIU first described the weapon as a rifle and later as a shotgun. At least three people fired on a residential street, and nobody has said whose bullets went through the stained glass. I’m not going to guess at Ward’s motive. Whatever it was, Smith was there first.'It pains me'In June, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Holy Blossom Temple, Toronto’s oldest Reform synagogue, and said, “Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians.” It was an unusually blunt thing for a prime minister to say. He noted that more than two-thirds of religion-motivated hate crimes the previous year had targeted Jews, who are about 1% of Canadians, and he announced another $75 million for security. Then he added, “It pains me that we had to commit $75 million to this.”I believe him. I wish he’d stop saying it.When a prime minister describes security money as a painful concession, the program that spends it tends to read the same way. The $75 million went to the Canada Community Security Program. The program describes itself as time-limited funding for communities at risk of hate-motivated crime. It covers up to 70% of eligible costs; under the program it replaced, the government paid half. Anything spent before a funding agreement is signed isn’t reimbursed. Guards qualify only as “time-limited third-party licensed security personnel.”Read those rules as the treasurer of a synagogue the size of Sons of Jacob would. You raise the other 30% yourself, fill out the application, and wait for a signed agreement before spending a dollar. Then you hire guards on a “time-limited” basis, as if somebody at Public Safety Canada knows when the threat expires. The program is built for communities that can show they’re at risk. By its president’s account, this one had never been threatened.Ford said out loud on Monday what those rules imply. He told reporters he was thankful such an experienced officer had been posted at the synagogue, and then added: “We never have enough security.” He’s the premier of Ontario. If anyone in the province can decide what counts as enough, it’s him.On Sunday night, Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, said Jews “should not need police presence to observe Yom Kippur.” Nobody disagrees with her. It’s no help to that treasurer deciding whether to apply for a guard this year.Where I might be wrongThe best argument against everything above is Chow’s, taken seriously. A country that answers antisemitism by stationing police outside synagogues has accepted antisemitism as permanent. A dollar spent on a guard is a dollar that isn’t spent stopping someone before he picks up a gun. People who backed the new federal hate law would say the law is for slower work. They may be right. None of it would have helped the people lying on the floor of Sons of Jacob.The harder objection, for me, is the guns. On Yom Kippur last year, at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, England, worshipers were trying to keep an attacker from getting into the building. Armed police shot him about seven minutes after the first emergency call. One of the two men who died appears to have been hit by a police bullet.In Belleville, at least three people fired on a residential street. If some of the rounds that came through that window turn out to be police rounds, this column gets harder to defend. I’d still defend it. Manchester’s police had to get there after the attack started, and Belleville’s officer was parked outside before it began. Nobody inside was hurt.Reading this from afar In August, I complained in this column that Israeli politicians had boiled their message to world Jewry down to three requests: “Educate your children. Come home. Speak well of us.” Expect to hear the second one a lot this week.Some of the people who lay on that floor may one day make aliyah – the Hebrew word for immigrating to Israel – and Israel should be ready for them when they do. That’s a decision about where to raise your children and build a life. Nobody should be making it from a sanctuary floor.What the Jews of Belleville need from us right now is support while they press their own governments for something those governments owe them. An Israeli minister who uses Sunday night to pitch aliyah would be making that job harder.Queen’s Park should commit to a police presence at every synagogue in the province on the High Holidays (Queen’s Park is the Ontario legislature, roughly the province’s version of a state capitol). The province should pay for it, with no threat assessment required. The commitment should cover Purim as well. In March, gunfire hit Toronto’s Temple Emanu-El while the congregation was marking the holiday.Ottawa should drop the 30% match and the “time-limited” condition for small congregations. A synagogue with two dozen people at Kol Nidre shouldn’t need a grant writer to get a guard.Ontario’s prosecutors, known in Canada as the Crown, owe the public an explanation either way. The Combatting Hate Act took effect on July 18. It made hate-motivated crime a specific offense and created a crime of intimidating people to keep them from a place of worship, punishable by up to 10 years. When shots hit synagogues in Vaughan and Toronto in March, before the act was in force, the charges were reckless discharge of a firearm, mischief relating to religious property, and conspiracy. If the evidence shows Ward acted out of hatred, charge him under the new law. If it doesn’t, say so and explain why.And Belleville police should tell us why Const. Smith was parked outside Sons of Jacob on Sunday night: who decided, based on what, and whether the synagogue got a bill. Whoever made that call got it right. Nobody else in Canada can copy it until they know what it was.Follow us on Google