See more Toronto Sun on Google — save as a Preferred Source

A dozen Jewish teachers have filed human rights complaints against four Ontario school boards and two teachers’ unions, alleging they were discriminated against amid persistent incidents of antisemitism.

The group named in their complaint the Toronto District School Board, York Region District School Board, Simcoe County District School Board, Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation.

Toronto lawyer Kathryn Marshall, who is representing the educators, said Jewish teachers who have made complaints over their treatment have endured consequences for speaking out or faced discrimination themselves.

“Many of the teachers over the past years and months, when they’ve reported the antisemitism, when they’ve reported things that have happened to them, they’ve been disciplined, they’ve been not believed, they’ve had the tables turned on them,” Marshall said Thursday morning at a press conference outside Queen’s Park.

“They’ve been accused of being racially insensitive, they’ve been accused of discrimination themselves.”

The teachers, who filed the complaints individually but will ask the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal to hear the applications together, are each seeking $150,000 in general damages along with compensation for psychological counselling.

Seek to combat discrimination

In addition, they are asking the tribunal to order the school boards and unions named in the complaint to develop transparent, enforceable policies and processes to uphold their duty of fairness, to combat discrimination both individual and systemic antisemitism with input from the Jewish community, to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism endorsed by the provincial government, and to cease spreading antisemitic misinformation.

Marshall listed examples of hate and discrimination Jewish teachers have had to deal with, including one instance of an educator being publicly reprimanded during a union meeting for attempting to speak out on the rise of antisemitism at work and retaliation from school boards and unions for filing complaints.

“Someone going to work and seeing a swastika on their desk is an act of discrimination (and) hate,” Marshall said.

The filing comes at a time when incidents of hate continues to persist in Canada against the Jewish community.

Majority of hate crimes

According to Statistics Canada , 70% of police-reported hate crimes targeting a religion in 2024 were aimed at Jewish people.

Toronto Police report anti-Jewish hate crimes accounted for 40% of all reported hate crimes in 2024 despite the community being less than 4% of the city’s population.

More recently, a police officer was critically injured Sept. 20 in a shooting outside the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville on Yom Kippur. That same day, a CBC Toronto journalist was met by protesters who taunted him as he entered a Yom Kippur service at the Meridian Arts Centre.

  • GOLDSTEIN: New report on federal response to antisemitism comes three years too late
  • WARMINGTON: Waterloo Region latest community probing alleged threats against Jews
  • KINSELLA: Jew hate festers across Canada – even in small towns like Belleville