Incidents of anti-Semitism continued to trend upward in Canada last year, with a record 1,042 occurrences reported by the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada – nearly one-third of them on the Internet.

The new high marked an 11.4 per cent increase over 2006 and nearly doubled the 584 incidents reported in 2003, the League stated in its 2007 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents.

Occurrences ranged from assaults on visible Jews to the airing of a Holocaust-denial film by a campus student group.

The surge in Canadian incidents is consistent with findings by other organizations surveying anti-Semitism around the world.

“The findings of this year’s Audit…support the conclusion of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that anti-Semitism ‘appears in a variety of forms and is becoming relatively commonplace.’ This statement holds true across the globe,” the Audit concluded.

The largest number of incidents was reported in the Greater Toronto Area, home to the country’s largest population of Jews, where 427 events were recorded, down four per cent from the year before. Montreal, with 249 incidents (up 16 per cent from 2006) and regional Quebec, with 42 incidents (up 282 per cent from the year before) showed increases.

The Audit correlated the spike in incidents in Quebec to the Bouchard-Taylor Commission hearings, which solicited the opinions of Quebecers on the reasonable accommodation of minorities.

“While there were submissions on relevant issues that used respectful and sensitive language, the hearings proved to be a magnet for intolerance and bigotry,” the Audit stated. “Instead of calming the waters, the process stoked the flames of discord, feeding into and amplifying every misconception and bias and giving a largely unrestricted public platform to ignorance and racism.”

The Audit found that, across Canada, “It was the smallest centres of Jewish presence that saw the most significant patterns of escalation, including regional Quebec and regional Ontario.”

Breaking down the incidents by type, the Audit reported that of the 1,042 events, 699 were categorized as harassment, up from 588 in 2006. Altogether, that category represented 67 per cent of incidents in 2007.

The Audit also reported 315 cases of vandalism, down marginally from the 317 recorded the year before and 28 cases of violence, down from 30 in 2006.

There were 22 incidents involving synagogues, with targeted houses of worship in Montreal, Toronto,Winnipeg, Edmonton, Richmond, B.C., Hamilton and Barrie, Ont.

In one of the most egregious acts reported in the Audit, the Montreal Jewish Community Centre was firebombed during the Passover holiday.

Nearly 30 per cent of all incidents – 310 in all – were attributable to Web-based activity. Of these, nearly one-third involved threatening or harassing communications.

Harassment was reported in 31 instances in the workplace and 82 incidents were reported in school settings, mostly at public schools.

“With concerted efforts underway to import anti-Israel propaganda into the high school classroom, such an increase cannot be entirely unexpected, since anti-Semitism is often a by-product of virulent anti-Israel activity,” the Audit stated.

The Audit also found university students “reported feeling intimidated as a result of the poisoned environment created by the annual ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ hate fest.”

The Audit did report some silver linings. It welcomed the government of Ontario’s “recent provision of funding to bolster services to victims of hate crimes,” which included a grant to the League to hold a forum on the topic. It also applauded the federal government’s announcement of financial grants to vulnerable communities to underwrite part of the costs of security measures.

“The 2007 findings indicate that anti-Semitism is not just at the fringes of Canadian society, nor the work of a few lone bigots.” said Frank Dimant, executive vice president of B’nai Brith Canada. “Anti-Semitism’s reach is far more systemic, occurring in benign places where one normally would not expect to encounter racism. This form of hatred appears to be increasing in rural areas, whereas before incidents were primarily confined to urban centres.”