Paul Hirschson has made his home wherever he has hung his diplomatic hat.
The 60–year-old Israel Consul-General for Quebec and the Atlantic provinces feels like he is leaving home as he wraps up his term next week and heads back to his “other” home, in Tel Aviv.
“Of all the places I’ve served, Montreal has really felt like home to me,” he told The CJN, as he begins to wrap up business and ponder some of the achievements and challenges for Israel and his mission.
Hirschson’s replacement is former Deputy Ambassador to Canada Eliaz Luf, who served in Ottawa with former Ambassadors Miriam Ziv and Rafael Barak from 2010 to 2014. Luf was a departmental director at Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs, and director of international relations at the ministry of science and technology.
After diplomatic stints in the United Arab Emirates, Senegal, and the United States, the South African native arrived in August 2021 at his Quebec post — and his office in iconic Westmount Square on the cusp of downtown Montreal — with a clear agenda, notably, to get the stillborn Quebec Government Office in Tel Aviv off the ground and running, while boosting business, academic and cultural ties between eastern Canada and Israel.
History, meanwhile, had other ideas.
Hirschson was back in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, making final preparations for the opening of the office, Quebec’s 35th, which was championed by Premier François Legault’s government and its top ministers, in the face of strident opposition and criticism. He was awaiting the arrival of Quebec International Relations Minister Martine Biron, who was set to step on an Israel-bound plane on Oct. 8, and then the world went dark, as terrorists from Gaza rampaged through Israel, kidnapping 251 people and murdering 1,200, the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
Instead of cutting ribbons with business, political, and diplomatic leaders, the father of three pivoted into family mode, seeing off his son, a sergeant-major called up the morning after the invasion. (The moment resonated for Hirschson, who 21 years earlier — when his son was a toddler — was called up with his unit following the bombing of the Park Hotel in Netanya, aka the ‘Passover Massacre’, which killed 30 people during the second intifada.)
On Oct. 8, Hirschson packed his bags, found a flight, and came “home” to Montreal, where his love affair with Quebec had already taken root.
While he leaves with great pride and satisfaction, notably for the Quebec Office deal, he leaves with some regrets, particularly lackluster progress in the Atlantic provinces. “We’re weaker there than I would like us to be.” His predecessor David Levy served half his term during the COVID pandemic, making travel and meaningful connections unlikely. “I went out there five times, and should have gone more, but eventually I was really focused on the government of Quebec. Then October 7 hit and everything changed. So, after two years of COVID, and two years of October 7, we’re not as engaged as we would like to be.
“Nonetheless, if you buy lobster at an Israeli restaurant in Israel, there’s a 95 percent chance that it arrived live from Prince Edward Island. We have about 150, I’m not sure of the number, Israeli truck drivers in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and we are taking products from Halifax all the way across Canada and across New England into the United States, and on rare occasion right down to Florida.”
He says the Quebec Office proposal was his flagship project. Originating from a successful economic mission by former Quebec premier Philippe Couillard in 2017, the plan was left to linger. “In 2021 the idea was not only dead,” he says, “it was buried and nobody thought it worth resuscitating. So we pushed it, hard.” Under the current administration, it came to life and has already expanded in scope and operations, “and two years to the day after I arrived, they formally informed me that it was happening.”
The language of business, the language of prosperity
Located within Canada’s embassy, the office will expand, Hirschson confidently predicts. “Over a year and a half ago, it started with one person sent from Quebec’s Ministry of International Relations to establish infrastructure in the relationship.” It has since added new staff, including an economic attaché, administrative personnel, and a public diplomacy position. “They’re a real team and they’ve been doing some wonderful stuff.”
Quebec and Israel currently enjoy more than US$500 million in bilateral trade, which means, says Hirschson, “10,000 jobs depend on this trade, and only trade,” not tourism or banking, only investments, like the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem train cars manufactured by Bombardier.
He says the “triangle” of academia, private sector, and government, that fuel Israel’s famous technology ecosystems, whether fiber-tech, bio-tech, agri-tech or water-tech, convinced Quebec to redefine its priority for overseas offices as economic relations. Thanks to Quebec City’s stand for 21 months, work already done and future activity planned, “we’re going to double that number. That means 10,000 jobs apiece in Israel and Quebec, dependent on this trade. An additional 5,000 people in each paying taxes and not taking benefits. That’s what business does.” As reported in The CJN, the office also focuses on education, instances of mutual recognition and more, while leveraging the estimated half-million French speakers living in Israel.
Meanwhile, Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), with more than CDN$470 billion in pension fund assets, announced this month that it will not authorize any new investments in Israel or the territories, according to CEO Charles Emond. That comes in the wake of a widely circulated report by the UN’s controversial special rapporteur Francesca Albanese—who has been sanctioned by the United States for what they call unabashed antisemitism, support for terrorism and activism against Israel and the U.S.—claiming Quebec’s pension funds are invested in companies like Lockheed Martin, Hyundai and others building military equipment used by Israel. Nevertheless, Emond rejected the “false equivalence” linking Quebec pension fund dollars to suffering in Gaza, adding it is directly invested in firms like Google and travel booking companies, while its Lockheed Martin and other holdings are shares already circulating on the market, with less than 0.05% of its entire portfolio invested in the region.
Supportive administration
Hirschson fondly remembers his posting as the first Israeli diplomat in the United Arab Emirates in 2005, where he helped lay early groundwork for what was once deemed unthinkable. “Fifteen years before we signed the Abraham Accords, we opened the conversation and built the initial infrastructure,” he recalls, those first days in the UAE made up of meetings in coffee shops, business arrangements, telecom contracts and more. “The language of business, the language of prosperity: We built the building blocks of peace on business,” he laughs, adding, “one day everything that we did there will be told.”
Back to 2025, there is so much commonality between Israelis and Quebecers, it’s a story that bears repeating, says Hirschson. “Quebec’s story is fascinating, the creativity here, the self-awareness. Quebec is a place having a conversation with itself about its own identity, and that’s a remarkably fascinating, interesting, inspiring angle that I will take with me.”
He will also take words “that particularly touched,” him, delivered by Premier Legault who awarded the Order of Quebec to Montreal philanthropist and former chair of the MUHC Foundation Norman Steinberg on June 18. Legault expressed pride and praise for the Jewish community for its resilience and foundational contributions to Quebec. “The last few months have not been easy for your community, and I want to say that you are at home here, you are one of us,” said the premier. “You have the right to the respect, security and fraternity of all Quebecers.”
Switching gears into a less diplomatic parting missive, Hirschson says “if the Prime Minister of Canada and the mayor of Montreal had a fraction of that, shall I say, the decency, the courage, to do the right thing and say the right thing, everything would be different.” Demonstrations would happen, as would tough conversations, he says, “and yes, people would say terrible things about Israel. But they wouldn’t be saying all these horrible things about Jews. The conversation about Israel would be authentic.”
Israel’s Ambassador to Canada Iddo Moed says under Hirschson’s leadership, the Montreal Consulate played a major part in maintaining and significantly strengthening the relations between eastern Canada and Israel. “He has managed to establish very effective relations with government officials, the Jewish community, as well as numerous business groups and leaders.”
Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs Quebec vice-president Eta Yudin says Hirschson arrived in the midst of a global pandemic, and quickly got to know the community and the political landscape, “and remarkably develop a fondness for Montreal winters… He worked hard to serve as an engaging and stalwart ambassador of Israel in Montreal and through Quebec and the Atlantic provinces, strengthening a relationship built on common values of democracy, culture and mutual respect.”
Hirschson has at every opportunity expressed what many Montreal Jews already know, that the current Quebec administration has been supportive of Israel and the Jewish community, as the community feels increasingly marginalized, under assault, with few allies in sight during this historic era —never mind in the highest corridors of power. On more than one occasion he has called the Legault administration, “the most pro-Israel government” in North America.
Indeed, Legault made it clear his government would fend off attempts by some groups and political players, like the opposition Quebec Solidaire, to shutter the Quebec office and demonize Israel. Hirschson says after meeting with the most senior administration officials, “I can tell you, they haven’t had an easy time, but they committed. There are people who don’t like Israel, obviously, but I think we’ve got real friends in Quebec. Tomorrow, next year, the year after, there’ll be an election, and one day there’ll be a different government, or a different political constellation. And we’ll see how it plays out.”
Putting the money in software
Meanwhile, Hirschson says he’s excited to get back to Tel Aviv. “I’ve had a marvelous time with the things we’ve done in these four years, but these have also been big years in Israel.” He’s not sure if he’ll pick up another mission, or where it could be, and has some ideas where he’d like to go, but cautions, “I’m very bad at predicting my own future.” Meanwhile, he has some literal housekeeping to do; his apartment was damaged and the windows blown in, when one of Iran’s missile barrages targeting civilian centers hit the street three blocks from his home in July.
While he contends that Montreal’s diaspora community is more engaged than any other, he laments that world Jewry is slow on the uptake when it comes to investing in academia. “Follow the money: governments have been investing in academia forever and I think Jewry made the mistake of putting money into what I call hardware, buildings, while others financed the software, the chairs of this and the chairs of that. That needs to be corrected.”
He also says authorities, such as the federal and city governments, are not firm enough on the issue of hate speech. “The failure to do that is dangerous because it means you are facilitating it. There hasn’t actually been a significant amount of violence, it’s more against property and I don’t want to brush that aside, but when there were shooting incidents, Molotov cocktails, and at two o’clock in the morning, it means they were trying to terrorize us.”
The next step is shifting to violence against people, he predicts. “Authorities here are cowards for not saying, ‘There’s a line in the ground: You want to demonstrate? Demonstrate.’ Instead, they incessantly, permanently, exclusively hide behind claims of free speech to explain why they are allowing hate speech. I’ve watched the anti-Israel crowd, which is a polite way of saying pro-Hamas crowd and it’s bewildering. I would love them to demonstrate as much as they want within defined lines, which I don’t want to define. I just don’t know whether it’s reasonable to be shouting into megaphones at 11:30 at night in a residential neighbourhood.”
Montreal is still one of the world’s safest cities, says Hirschson, “but for that specific, small, little niche around Jews, which is problematic. The rest of the city is almost two million people, culture and art, music and dance, theater and whiskey.” But there’s a second Montreal, he says, “where hatred lives. It’s a hijacking of Montreal by a very loud minority, and cowardice of leadership that doesn’t tell them that there are certain things you don’t do and there’s certain things you can do, within certain limits.”
Asked if he takes personally the raucous demonstrations outside his window every few days, featuring dozens of masked people chanting aggressive slogans, obstructing traffic, disturbing residents, impeding the flow of people, commerce and public transit, he is unimpressed. “Their drummer is pretty good,” he says in all seriousness. “There was a short while where he was maybe on holiday or sick, because they brought another drummer. It was off-putting. I take that personally because I played drums when I was a kid and can appreciate a drummer who knows how to keep a beat.”
Childhood is over
It’s been a rough 20 months, says Hirschson. “We’re in the process of dismantling threats, one by one. We’ve got hostages that we think about non-stop, and we will bring them all home, and we’ve got recovery to go through.” But there’s real excitement to come he says. “This year we topped the 10-million-person mark, and in a second year of war our economy is growing by 3.5 percent, 5.5 percent next year, and 25 years from now, we’re going to top 15 million people.”
That’s where his parting pitch comes in: “Jews everywhere, not only in Canada, should give some serious thought about their relationship with Israel. If you’re not going to live in Israel, you really should be invested in Israel, not only in a home but in business, because there’s nothing, like actually being on the field. That field is Israel.
“We have a remarkable young adult generation. Childhood is over and they have more experience, more maturity and are more ready for the future than anybody else. What they’ve done in the last 20 months, for all the complaints we had about the TikTok generation, Israeli young adults have been put to the test and came through with flying colours. They are going to drive Israel.
“We’re already in the world’s top 15 per capita GDP but it’s not only about money; it’s also about the currency of ideas. The ideas coming out of some North American universities are going to lose to the ideas which my children’s generation in Israel are going to bring to the world. They’re going to lose intellectually, and they will wake up one day and look on as we sign agreements with Saudi Arabia and with the entire Arab world. It’ll happen, including the Palestinians. They’re going to wake up one day and will never forgive the Palestinians for reconciling with Israel, and will shake their heads in bewilderment, wondering how they devoted so many decades to a failed intellectual currency.
“We are the opposite of refugees; we are no longer victims,” says Hirschson. “We are owners of our destiny.”
