Deborah Lyons had three months left to go in her two-year term as Canada’s federally appointed Special Envoy to combat antisemitism and promote Holocaust remembrance. On July 15, her office released a disturbing study of widespread antisemitism targeting Jewish students in Ontario’s public school system.
So when the announcement came two days later, on July 17, that she was stepping down, it took the country by surprise.
Lyons had accepted the post just prior to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. The career diplomat and former Canadian Ambassador to Israel had served in some tough conflict zones, including Afghanistan. But coming home to Canada and waking up “every day to a fight” while she held this post, was, in her words, the toughest job she ever did.
“I never could have imagined that two years into this job, we would still have this degree of divisiveness,” Lyons told The CJN’s North Star host Ellin Bessner, in her first media interview after her resignation.
Although Lyons felt called “in her own heart and soul” to take on the role to fight antisemitism and hatred against the Jewish community, initially her appointment raised eyebrows within the very community she had agreed to champion–because she is not Jewish.
But Lyons still believes that having a non-Jew stand up for the country’s 400,000-member Jewish community should have sent a strong message to business leaders, politicians, religious leaders and even ordinary folks, who she calls “bystanders”, that Canadians should fight for one another.
In this Q&A with The CJN’s Ellin Bessner, Lyons reflects on her successes, and her regrets at not being able to help Canadians come together.
Joining us from New Brunswick, welcome back to North Star. It’s really good to see you again.
Great to be with you again, Ellin. Always good.
Now, our listeners might not know, but the cottage you are visiting is in New Brunswick, your home, for the summer.
That’s right. It’s where I was born, where I grew up, where I learned all of those wonderful values of community, where it taught me what I needed to know to become a diplomat. So it’s always wonderful to come back home and get restored as I watched the Miramichi River float by.
Our listeners have been concerned about why you decided to leave three months early. Can you tell us why you stepped down before the end of the mandate?
I think it was simply time. This is a job that, certainly, from the beginning of October 2023, after the horrific attack in Israel, really this job turned upside down, as I think the lives of many of us did. And it was 24-7, without question, for the first year, and pretty much 24/6 for the second year, if not 24/7. You just work literally night and day. It’s always on your mind. And as someone who had been a diplomat, and abroad for about 13 years consecutively, coming home to Canada, trying to retire, not doing a good job of it, then going into a job like this, I think my family just said, ‘Okay, enough is enough, Mom! Grandma, you gotta just hang out with us and enjoy some of life.’
Now, having said that, let me make it really clear, I’ve left the position, and I’ve left it with a strong base for my successor, But I am not leaving the issue. I am not leaving the compassionate, united Canada that I insist we are going to continue to work hard for. I’m not leaving the issue of antisemitism or Holocaust remembrance. I will just find other ways of contributing and probably do it more on a part-time basis than 24/7.
So was it a health or mental health reason, too? Was your family worried?
Well, I think I’ve always been pretty sturdy when it comes to mental health. There’s no question that this job was one that tore at you physically and emotionally. I faced a lot of hate out there myself, directed at me, a lot of nasty words, and in some cases, actions. But I’ve dealt with that before in some of the conflict countries, conflict postings that I’ve had. I’m a Maritimer. I didn’t want to miss another Maritime summer. As my sister jokingly said, ‘Deborah, you got confused with Freedom ‘55; you thought it was Freedom 75. It’s time. It’s time.’
How old are you now? Is that a mandatory retirement? Are you 75 now?
Yeah, I’m 75. I turned 75 in May. I’m a very young 75, people tell me. But no, it wasn’t mandatory in any way. It was just simply the fact that, you know, at some point you have to stop, you know, restore your batteries, get a little bit of the joy back into life.
This was every day waking up to a fight. And I mean, every day, waking up to a fight and having a lot of people angry at you all the time. And by that, I mean people on all sides of this discussion and debate. There are multiple layers to what we have gone through in the last two years. I learned a lot, and that learning is not something I want to just put in a box and store in the basement. I want to continue to contribute.
I think I learned a lot about courage. I think I learned a lot about bystanders and how, as the saying goes, ‘The mark of a country is not the courage of its military, it is the courage of its bystanders.’
And how is Canada doing in that regard?
During this period, these last two years, I’ve been really quite amazed and often become quite despondent and despairing about the fact that it was hard to get people to speak up and to speak clearly. To speak with clarity, to speak with conviction about what we’re seeing happening here on Canadian soil. Yes, there are all kinds of issues with what’s happening in the Middle East, and we should be directing ourselves to those issues as well. But if we can’t deal with what’s happening in a growing hatred on our own soil, what does that say about us?
Not just as leaders, by the way, but as everyday citizens. So, you know, it was a constant discussion with people about ‘Why are you not standing up? Why are you not saying something? What do you need?’ And I guess I would say that what I did find is that there were things that people needed in order to feel comfortable enough to stand up.
What do they need?
And I’m going to speak to that. But I guess what I’m saying is they needed help in finding the right words, partly because of social media, but not just social media; people became concerned about, ‘But if I say this, am I going to insult somebody else? Am I going to hurt somebody else? What is the right tone that I should take?’ And then when it came to actions, ‘What would be the right actions? Because if I do this for this community, do I have to do it for another community, or does it look like I’m favouring one over the other?’
You know, our former minister of defence, Minister [Bill] Blair, said, ‘You know, in different times in my political career, when a community is hurting, I stand up for that community. And then when another community is hurting, I stand with that community. I say to each of these communities, I haven’t left you. It is just that this is the community that needs me the most right now, and I need to take a stand and be courageous.’
And I was very impressed with him for saying that.
I didn’t get that clarity from business leaders, whom I asked many times to stand up. I was incredibly disappointed with business leaders. And I have to say, you know, we have a tendency to want to blame politicians all the time, but where have the faith leaders been? Where have the priests, and ministers, and rabbis, and imams, and so forth, where have they been bringing us all back together as children of God?
I think also, you know, educators standing up, teachers standing up, university presidents…but also just the everyday citizen, you know, reaching out to the Jewish community and saying, ‘How can I be helpful? I want to hear what you’re going through and so forth.’
So I think as a result of watching and being a part of all this happening, and having, in many cases, not just a front row seat, but being in the ring as the battle was raging, I actually connected with a number of other people who’ve been studying the whole aspect of bystanders. And what does this mean throughout history? And I think it’s something right now that Canada has to be thinking about. And again, what is it that makes it so difficult?
Hate is not car theft. It’s not even tariffs, which are tangible, concrete. And you can somehow get your head around addressing that issue. Hate is a little more amorphous and obtuse. And I think frankly, we’re struggling with how to face it head-on and address it. And I think that that’s something we’ve got to do a lot more thinking about, and we need to improve our performance.
So are you giving Canadians a failing grade on standing up to hate?
I’m not sure, no, I don’t think I would give Canadians a failing grade on that. I think we are still one of the most spectacular countries when it comes to a decent society, when it comes to social programs, when it comes to caring for one another. I think this recent test in these last two years has brought us a little bit to our knees. I think that I wouldn’t give it a failing [grade], but I certainly wouldn’t give it top marks.
Is it fixable? You struggled in the ring for two years, and you’re ‘leaving with a heavy heart,’ you said those words. Tell me why you use those words.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I use those words because I would love to continue in the job and because it’s wonderful, you know. It was without question the toughest job I ever did, including my time in conflict countries.
Our listeners should know it was Afghanistan and Israel.
Yeah, but I would say that it was the most meaningful and the most powerful in the sense that you get to see the underbelly of society. You get to see where we’re strong, but you particularly get to see where we’re weak, and you get to work on those issues. So even though pretty much every day ends with a level of dissatisfaction because you never got enough done and because more issues arose than you could deal with…you could feel that you were at least making a contribution that was critical, however sparse it may be at the moment.
But you’re also getting an exceptional understanding of where we are weakening as a society, not just us, the Western world. Frankly, I think the whole world is tilted these days, and we’re continuing to tilt. And we’re going to have to figure out a way of getting us back to our centre, back on course, because it’s pretty scary out there, not just for our Jewish community, but I think whatever is happening to our Jewish community is happening to all of us.
You said you got a lot of hate. Your predecessor, colleague, and mentor, Irwin Cotler, had death threats against him. Is that what you’re alluding to? That you personally also had death threats?
So let’s be clear. What Irwin has had to deal with is something quite separate and distinct and involves a particular country and the incredible work Irwin has done as a human rights advocate in the world, taking care of people from all over the continents. In my particular case, it was nasty stuff on social media, of course, some threatening emails, in some cases, losing colleagues, and in some cases, losing friends who were not happy with me doing the job. So, I mean, just the kind of thing that you have to deal with when you are in the middle of a critical issue that is fraught with multiple emotions from so many different perspectives.
And so we’re going to continue, I think, to have a pretty tough battle on our hands for the next year or two.
But what I’m hoping Canada will do, we’ll do right by our Jewish community, we’ll do right by all our communities. I think we’ve had incredible progress in the last 50 years, and we can’t lose that. But I think these past two years have taught us not to be complacent, that there are many areas now that need additional attention and additional fixing. Whether we’re talking about people not understanding antisemitism, so more training is needed, examination of policies and programs to make sure that they do not have inbuilt antisemitism. Or even finding that surveys have their own sort of kind of structured isolation built into them. That’s almost a whole new science that’s opening up that we’re going to be exploring. Not to mention law enforcement, not to mention our legislation, not to mention how our ministers and members of parliament communicate.
I spent many frustrating days getting the three levels of government, the federal, provincial, and municipal, to work together on the issue of growing hate. Why was it so much easier for them to come together around car theft and have a massive, important summit on it and put in place dedicated prosecutors right across the country? Again, it’s tangible. It’s concrete. They could address that. But we have not been able, I think, to get the three levels of government, as yet, coming together in a common front to address hate.
Well, you had the antisemitism forum in March 2025 right before the election, and then there was one in 2021 under Trudeau as well. So they did get together, three levels of government.
Okay, but let me clarify. First of all, the summit in 2021 was the summit on antisemitism. Full stop. The summit in March of this year was the summit on antisemitism and law enforcement. And Minister Rachel Bendayan did a brilliant job, as did Minister David McGuinty, as did Minister Arif Virani, the Minister of Justice. The three of them attended the full meeting, put enormous amounts of effort into having it happen. But they were trying to get it done as a leadership campaign was underway and as an election was about to be called. So it happened in short order. It did not become a full federal, provincial, municipal gathering conference to address hate. It did, though, bring elements, certainly the federal elements and elements of the provincial and municipal people together, but not all of them. You couldn’t possibly do the preparation you needed in that short order.
The commitments made by the federal government in the press release coming out of that conference are truly exceptional. They’re talking there about reviewing legislation to determine what might need to change, if any. They’re talking about…
Bubble legislation as well.
Bubble legislation. I mean, it was a huge success. Now, those commitments have been made; they even talk about having an action plan that identifies what else needs to be done, and more importantly, where they will be reporting publicly on those commitments.
Everyone is aware that those commitments that were made by the previous government are solid, solid commitments and need to, and will be, followed up.
And frankly, Prime Minister [Mark] Carney has already committed to bubble legislation publicly as well as more money going into security infrastructure. So, you know, we got a huge step forward with that forum.
What we need, though, is much, much more attention from the provinces and the municipalities working with the feds on this, not just in terms of law enforcement, but in terms of the larger environment. You know, what are we doing in our schools? What are we doing in our universities? What are we doing in our workplace? We are now involved, with tremendous support frankly from the deputy ministers federally, in looking at very solid antisemitism training for senior managers in the federal government, not just in terms of ensuring a more inclusive workplace, but actually helping people look at programs and policies to ensure that they have the balance that’s needed.
You mentioned this government. Let me ask you about Prime Minister Carney. I know you had regular meetings with former prime minister Justin Trudeau when you were in the job at the beginning. Have you met Carney? Tell me about what his deal is as far as antisemitism and Canadian Jews.
Prime Minister Carney asked me for a meeting. His staff got in touch with me to say that he wanted to meet with me. But unfortunately it was after my departure date. So his calendar was, of course, pretty crazy, and we couldn’t make the meeting happen before I left. But the request came from him, not from me. So I was very pleased with that.
Further to that, I have been talking to senior officials in his PMO almost from the week they got elected. I mean, his senior person on the foreign policy file, Scott Gilmore, and a number of staff working with Scott. His new chief of staff, Marc-André Blanchard, is a personal friend.
I’m very impressed with the outreach that I received from the PMO. And I’m sure this is true of others, including my counterpart on Islamophobia. I probably spoke to them, I don’t know 15-20 times, and these are long conversations. We worked on a number of different issues together.
So I guess the point I’m making is that I am getting an enormous amount of attention from this new government. I am struck by how, as a new government coming in, they’re going, ‘Okay, what do we need to do? What do we need to do to get this right?’
Right. But there haven’t been photo ops. And this is a criticism that you’ve read, from [former Canadian ambassador to Israel and current commentator] Vivian Bercovici. You didn’t go to the Nova Exhibition festival in Toronto with Carney and didn’t go to the various events. You know, there were a lot more photo ops with the other [prime minister].
No. And you know what? I was pretty busy getting out a report on K-12, doing the follow-up from the forum, making sure that we were doing the work inside the government that we have to do on the handbook, dealing with the conference in Israel on antisemitism, preparing for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance conference. You know, I don’t measure my progress on photo ops. Maybe people do, and if they do, I wish them luck in their progress. But for us, we were busy getting a lot of solid work done, and never did I ever feel neglected by the prime minister’s office, not for a second. If anything, I had a much more engaged conversation and action plan in place with them than I’d had in the previous six months.
Understood. You mentioned that you’re working towards finding a successor. So that means that they’re going to replace you? During the April 2025 election, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said they would cancel both yours and the special representative for Islamophobia’s position. What should we know?
Yeah, it was regrettable, you know. I tried to meet with Mr. Poilievre when I was in the job. In the end, I got a response that he was too busy to meet with me and wished me good luck in my work, which was kind of unfortunate, but also kind of reflects the way in which sometimes this conversation gets a little too political.
Wait, so he never met with you at all, in two years that you were there?
No, we didn’t. We met at the parliament buildings when my colleague, Michal Cotler-Wunsh [Israel’s antisemitism envoy] was in town, and we had a very good conversation. He was very engaging. We had a great time. And as you know, he’s got some fantastic members in his party who’ve been very active with me, Melissa Lantsman in particular and Shuv [Majumdar] and some others. I mean, they’ve been really, really active and really helpful, you know. But at that time, when I first met him in the parliament, he said, ‘You know, Deborah, let’s get together, please call my office and so forth.’
So we did, and we put in the request and then got word that it wasn’t going to happen. So that’s it.
Right, so what about the replacement? You got a commitment that they’re going to replace you?
I’m very confident that they’re going to replace me. Absolutely. No question. And we’ve talked about several different candidates. Yeah. And I’m hoping it’ll come fairly soon. You know, it’s hard to make these things happen because it’s a governor-in-council appointment. So it takes some time to get all the paperwork done. But yeah, we’ve looked at some really, really excellent candidates.
What was left unfinished that’s kind of a regret? Because you did the K to 12 report, which was very well covered. And you did the IHRA Handbook, which was a big, big thing for your mandate. But when you met me for the very first time, I remember in November 2023, a few weeks after you got into office, you said your priority was students on campus and gathering data. So what’s up with that?
Okay, so I think in gathering data, we did quite well. I think both the hate crimes units across Canada have done a really excellent job, and Stats Canada, with more money from the government, is doing a really good job. We’re getting better data and we’re getting it faster.
More importantly, we’re doing research. That’s what the K-12 was about and other work that we’ve had underway with Jack Jedwab and others. We need more research on the subject, and of course, ADL has done some great stuff. So I would love to stay and do more research on the subject because I think we need to explore it more in terms of where it’s coming from. Where’s antisemitism coming from? What are the best ways to fight it? Etcetera. But on data, we had some progress.
On university students, I guess one of the things that became really clear to me is that this is really the domain of university administrators and of provincial governments. I’ve certainly done some work with the granting councils federally, and we’ve got some excellent work underway there with them on antisemitism. We’ve been looking at how they set up their selection processes and so forth. Great cooperation from them, from SSHRC and a number of the others.
I’m confident that on the federal side, we’ve tackled the area where we have some influence and we’re going to continue to work with them. I think that we’ve seen some improvements on the university campuses. I think there’s still more work to be done.
Where I would like to spend more time is on the whole area of K-12 right across the country. I think we’ve got good ministers of education who are putting in place solid Holocaust remembrance curricula, but we need to address antisemitism specifically, and therefore, we need the training in place and I’ve been really impressed with Ontario’s education minister Paul Calandra; his response to that report was excellent. His team was terrific when we briefed-
They put it on hold for a year when they took over Toronto and Ottawa school boards. All that new stuff that was supposed to be mandatory is now on hold.
There’s things to deal with there. But let me mention one other area. I would like to do more on a respective dialogue because one of my great regrets is that we did not come together as a nation the way we could have and should have. And I feel that I’m a part of that gulf, and it hurts me to think that people didn’t want to meet with me because of the job I was in; they didn’t want to have the discussions with me. I held back from having some discussions because I knew there was going to be animosity or I wasn’t going to be welcome in the room. And it disappoints me.
Right. And two years ago, I said, let’s try to get an interview with your counterpart, the three of us online and talk about Islamophobia and antisemitism and how we can… together. You even appeared with her early on in your career. You made a point to try to go together with her to events to show solidarity. And I’m wondering how that dialogue has continued, if at all. Or is it so far apart right now that it’s too fraught, nobody’s talking?
Okay, to be clear, she also tried. I mean, this wasn’t just me alone. Amira [Elghawaby] also tried, of course. Let’s be clear, neither my community nor her community were happy all the time to see us in pictures together. So we were responding to the reactions of our communities as well. At the beginning, before October, she and I were going to travel together to meet with provincial ministers of education. We had great plans. We’ll get back to that one day in another format, I’m hoping. And again, this comes back to respectful dialogue.
All those good people who did reach out to me and say, ‘Let’s engage more on this’. I was over there fighting fires and trying to keep people from burning and had other work I had to be doing. And also, there were often people who just simply didn’t want me participating in respectful dialogues or wouldn’t come into the room. So that’s history now. Let’s move on.
I always like to try to find a silver lining, if anything. At the end of this conversation, is there one anecdote or story or person that you met that gives you some kind of hope?
There were many people whom I met who gave me hope. But there were too many others who dampened that hope.
I would say that we spent way too much time in the negative and much less in the positive, we and everybody who was engaged in this drama that is still unfolding. I think that it was the people who stood up, and I don’t want to mention one name because if I do, I’ll forget another name. There were a number of people who are out there trying very hard to work on behalf of their communities to make a better place, both in the political world and in community leadership. And I think those people who were trying to move forward on respectful dialogue.
I just think that we were constantly dealing with, not so much a question of tone deaf, but it’s just that people were listening and hearing at different frequencies. And so we just were not connecting. So that was where the big despair comes from.
But there are a number of people out there who are continuing to push to try to bring those frequencies merging.
And I think, frankly, Prime Minister Carney is going to work pretty hard to make that happen, from what I hear him say, and certainly the ministers I’ve spoken to. I think there’s a lot of people across Canada who will be joining us in that effort. But we’ve got to get there soon. I never could have imagined that two years into this job, we would still have this degree of divisiveness. So lots to get done.
I’m very appreciative of all the work you’ve done, and it’s not an easy job to be out there. I know you had to face, at the beginning, the Jewish community saying, ‘But she’s not even Jewish. Why would they appoint her?’ Are you over that insult now?
Yeah. I was never insulted by that. Never. I mean, never. I frankly would never have taken this job if that kind of comment could have hurt me, could have insulted me. I never would have taken the job if I didn’t understand that to have a non-Jew fight at this particular time for the Jewish community in a country like Canada was exactly the right thing to do.
I surrounded myself with fabulous staff, most of whom are Jewish, but not all, and with all kinds of advisors, many of whom are Jewish, but not all.
But I have said that I think that the next person replacing me probably should be Jewish, and then maybe after that non-Jewish, who knows? I do think that this cannot be seen as Jews having to fight for themselves. This is a matter of Canadians fighting for Jewish Canadians and for all of Canada. That’s what this is about.
When I’m doing this work, I’m doing it as much for a Christian child, a Muslim child, a Sikh child, a Hindi child, an Indigenous child, a Jewish child, because it’s about the kind of Canada we need to have, where we’re not cruel with one another, where we care about one another. And when we see someone hurting and in pain and being abandoned by our society, we step in.
So why do you think the next one should be Jewish?
Because I think that in fairness, alternate it, you know, like shift it around. You know, we should be demonstrating that we fight for one another. We’re not going to corral people into their battlefields and say ‘Only you can fight for yourselves because the rest of us are off, you know, picking blueberries or going to hockey games!’ You know? Like,` grow up, people! Grow up and care and look after our children and look after their future because there’s a little bit of jeopardy at play here!
It’s been an honour to work with you these past two years. Thank you for taking the time again to speak with us and the Jewish community on The CJN’s North Star podcast.
Thank you so much, and I’ll see you in the fall. We’ll get into a little bit of trouble together.
