Deborah Lyons shares why she quit as Canada’s antisemitism envoy: ‘It was hard to get people to speak up’

In her first media interview since stepping down early as Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, Deborah Lyons spoke to The CJN frankly about why she left.

There were no medical or mental health issues that prompted her decision, she says. It was, in part, exhaustion after spending nearly two years “waking up every day to a fight”. It was hard to get people to speak up for the community. Some wouldn’t even agree to speak with her personally. Over time, she grew “despondent and despairing” over how few Canadians have stood up against the anti-Jewish hatred that has flared up in this country since she took the job, soon after Oct. 7, 2023.

Despite serving a term as Canada’s ambassador to Israel from 2016 to 2020, Lyons’ appointment raised eyebrows in some quarters—including in the Jewish community—because she herself is not Jewish. Nonetheless, she maintained to The CJN how important it was for her to accept the job to show what allyship can look like and to fight for a better Canada.

Now, however, she is leaving the post highly critical of various Canadian sectors: Canadian business leaders, religious leaders and politicians have failed to support the Jewish community. Governments, she believes, found it easier to hold summits to fight carjackings and tariffs—yet could not cooperate when it came to combatting hate.

On today’s episode of The CJN’s flagship news podcast North Star, Deborah Lyons sits down with host Ellin Bessner for an in-depth interview to explain her resignation and why Canadians need to stop being bystanders in what she calls a fight for the future of our country’s children.

Transcript

Deborah Lyons: And to my very good and dear friend Irwin [Cotler], it is because of him that I am here. When he first mentioned this to me as we were sitting having lunch in Jerusalem in April of 2022, I said, “Oh no, Irwin, I couldn’t possibly take it on. It’s too big, it’s too incredible.” And it didn’t take very long before my own heart and soul convinced me that, in fact, this was exactly what I should be taking on.

Ellin Bessner: That’s what it sounded like on October 16, 2023, in Ottawa when Liberal cabinet ministers of the day joined Canada’s Nobel Prize–nominated human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler to present his successor as a second federally appointed Special Envoy to preserve Holocaust remembrance and to fight antisemitism. This happened just a week after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which led to an explosion of anti-Israel protests on the streets of Canada. It took Cotler a lot of arm-twisting to convince Deborah Lyons that she was the right fit for the post. The thinking was it might be best to have an experienced global affairs diplomat to serve as the government’s point person on antisemitism.

Lyons had served in some tricky countries facing conflict. She’d previously been head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, and before that, she was Justin Trudeau’s first ambassador to Israel after he took office in 2015. Having someone who was not Jewish may have raised eyebrows, but he hoped it might open more doors to speak to Canadians about standing up to hatred.

During her term in office, Lyons successfully lobbied to get a bigger budget. She hired more staff, and she made helping Canada’s Jewish university students a priority. Her office produced a handy guide to help public servants understand and recognize antisemitism, using a definition which the Canadian government adopted in 2019, called the IHRA definition. Just last week, her office released a survey of some of the shocking problems faced by Jewish kids in Ontario’s public schools.

In May, Lyons celebrated her 75th birthday. Her family was urging her to find joy in life again after she spent over 600 days waking up each morning to a fight, having people not want to speak to her because of her job as champion of the Jewish community and because of the silence she says she received from much of the business world, faith leaders, and even politicians who, she said, found it easier to tackle auto theft and tariffs than hate.

Deborah Lyons: 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 picking blueberries or, you know, going to hockey games!’

Ellin Bessner: I’m Ellin Bessner. And this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Wednesday, July 23, 2025. Welcome to North Star, a podcast of The Canadian Jewish News, made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.

Although there’s no mandatory retirement age for her job the way there is for Canadian Supreme Court justices or senators, being “in the ring”, as Lyons calls it, 24/7, since October 7, has been the toughest job she has ever had. But Lyons says she decided to step down three months early with a heavy heart: she feels the work isn’t done. She regrets she wasn’t able to bring Canadians together to stand up for each other, that people didn’t want to meet with her for a respectful dialogue. And while there were pockets of solidarity, she feels Canadians have been mostly bystanders and should receive poor marks for their reluctance to stand up and speak out against hate, including hate against the Jewish community. The outgoing Special Envoy joins me now from her family cottage in New Brunswick, where jam-making is underway, and she tells us why whoever replaces her should be Jewish.

Deborah Lyons: Great to be with you again, Ellin.

Ellin Bessner: Well, our listeners have been concerned about why you decided to leave three months early, some for worry about your health, others for other reasons. Can you tell us why you stepped down?

Deborah Lyons: I think it was simply time. You know, this is a job that certainly from the beginning of October 2023, and you know, after the horrific attack in Israel, really, this job turned upside down as did the lives of many of us. And it was 24/7, Ellin, without question for the first year, 24/7 and pretty much 24/6 for the second year, if not 24/7. 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, Ellin, let me make it really clear—absolutely, I have left the position and I’ve left it strong. I feel with a strong base for my successor and we can talk more about that. But I am not leaving the issue. I am not leaving, you know, 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.

Ellin Bessner: So was it a health or mental health reason, too? Did the strain and the stress worry your family?

Deborah Lyons: You know, 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 mean, 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 postings that I’ve had. No, I think, you know, 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. You know, at some point you have to stop and I think just 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, Ellin, and I think 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.

Ellin Bessner: And how is Canada doing in that regard?

Deborah Lyons: I would say that 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, to speak with clarity, to speak with conviction about what we were 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. 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, Ellin, 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.

Ellin Bessner: What do they need?

Deborah Lyons: They needed help in finding the right words because people became, partly because of social media, but not just social media, people became concerned about, “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 favoring one over the other?” 

You know, I had one of the ministers say to me–I was very impressed with him—our former Minister of Defence, Minister [Bill] Blair, he said, “You know, at 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 up and 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, and 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?

Ellin Bessner: Well, I know recently, June 24, there was a summit of 700 Christians and Jews. This is the Simeon Initiative, which the media wasn’t invited to, but we know about it.

Deborah Lyons: Yeah, I was certainly invited to it and unfortunately couldn’t make it, but my staff were there, and Father Andrew Bennett did, as Andrew does, a fantastic job with many people, and that was absolutely excellent. I think also educators standing up, teachers standing up, university presidents… we’ve gone through this many different times, but also just the everyday citizen 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’s something we’ve got to do a lot more thinking about, and we need to improve our performance.

Ellin Bessner: So are you giving Canadians a failing grade on standing up to hate?

Deborah Lyons: 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 these recent tests in the last two years have brought us a little bit to our knees. And I think that I wouldn’t give it a failing, but I certainly wouldn’t give it top marks.

Ellin Bessner: Is it fixable and you’re leaving with a heavy heart. You said those words.

Deborah Lyons: Yeah, well, I use those words because I would love to continue in the job, and it was without question the toughest job I ever did. 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 were 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 certainly, I think whatever is happening to our Jewish community is happening to all of us. So we’ve got to pay a lot of attention to how we address hate.

Ellin Bessner: You were said earlier, and I want to pick up on something that I’ve been curious about. You said you got a lot of hate. Your predecessor and colleague and mentor, Irwin Cotler, had death threats against him. He had to be on 24/7 [security]. Is that what you were alluding to? That you personally also had death threats too?

Deborah Lyons: So let’s be clear. What Irwin has had to deal with is something quite separate and distinct and involves a particular country. In my particular case, it was, you know, nasty stuff on social media, of course, some threatening emails, some, going into events, as you said, speeches and so forth, in some cases losing colleagues, in some cases losing friends who were not happy with me doing the job and thought that I was….

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. 

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 this past two years has 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.  We’re even finding surveys have their own sort of structured isolation built into them, and so that’s almost a whole new science that’s opening up that we’re going to be exploring. And not to mention law enforcement, not to mention our legislation, not to mention how our ministers and members of Parliament communicate, and not to mention, and this is critically important, Ellin, and this is where 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 it was so much easier for them to come together around car theft, auto 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.

Ellin Bessner: Well, you had the antisemitism forum.

Deborah Lyons: That was exceptional in March, right before—

Ellin Bessner: The election, and then there was one in 2021 under Trudeau as well. So they did get together three levels of government.

Deborah Lyons: No, no, no, no, no. Let me clarify. First of all, the summit in 2021 was a summit on antisemitism, full stop. The summit in March of this year was a summit on antisemitism and law enforcement, but they were trying to get it done as a leadership campaign was underway, and then an election was about to be called. So it happened in short order. It did not become a full federal provincial municipal conference to address hate.

But what happened, Ellin? And you watch this, because I can assure you. my team that I’m leaving will be watching it, and I will as well. 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. 

Ellin Bessner: Bubble legislation.

Deborah Lyons: Bubble legislation. I mean, it was a huge success. Now, those commitments that were 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. So 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 Carney is 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, 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 workplaces? 

Ellin Bessner: Okay, you mentioned this government. Let me ask you about Prime Minister Carney. And to preface this, you had regular meetings with Prime Minister, former Prime Minister Trudeau. Have you met Carney? 

Deborah Lyons: So, unfortunately, Prime Minister Carney asked me for a meeting, but it was after my departure date. I had already sent in my departure letter for July 8, 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’m very impressed, Ellin, with the outreach that I received, and I’m sure this is true of others, including my counterpart on Islamophobia. But I am getting an enormous amount of attention from this new government. Our team has gotten an enormous amount of attention, an exceptional amount of communication. Particularly, 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?” 

Ellin Bessner: But there haven’t been, like, photo ops. And this is a criticism that you’ve received I read from Vivian Bercovici. You didn’t go to the Nova Music Exhibition in Toronto with Carney and didn’t go to the various events where, you know, there was a lot more photo ops with the other one [Trudeau], that’s all. 

Deborah Lyons: I don’t measure my progress on photo ops. Maybe people do, and if they do, I wish them luck. But for us, we were busy getting a lot of solid work done, and never did I 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. 

Ellin Bessner: Understood. You mentioned that you’re working towards finding a successor, so that means that they’re going to replace you. It’s not finished. That’s not cutting. Like [Opposition leader Pierre] Poilievre wanted to pull the position, remember? And the special representative for Islamophobia’s position. 

Deborah Lyons: Yeah, it was regrettable. You know, I tried to meet with Mr. Poilievre when I was in the job, and 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 politically. 

Ellin Bessner: Wait, so he never met with you at all in the two years that you were there? 

Deborah Lyons: No, we didn’t. We met at the Parliament buildings when my colleague Michal Cotler 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 Lansman in particular and Shuv Majumdar and some others. I mean, they’ve been really, really active. 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. 

Ellin Bessner: All right. So what about the replacement? There’s going to be? 

Deborah Lyons: Oh, I’m very confident that they’re going to replace me. Absolutely. No question. And we talked about several different candidates. 

Ellin Bessner: What was left unfinished that you want us to know? That kind of is a regret. 

Deborah Lyons: I would like to do more on respectful 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 I was a part of that gulf, 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. It disappoints me. 

Ellin Bessner: Not today, but 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. And you actually, you even appeared with her early on in your career. You made a point to try to go together with her to events to be in solidarity. And I’m wondering how that dialogue has continued, if at all, to now, or is it so far apart right now that it’s too fraught, nobody’s talking? 

Deborah Lyons: Okay. To be clear, she also tried. I mean, you know, this wasn’t just me alone. Amira 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. But 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. 

Ellin Bessner: Okay. I always like to try to find a silver lining in anything. So at the end of this conversation, is there one anecdote or story or person you met that gives you some kind of hope? 

Deborah Lyons: Yeah, I mean, there were many people who 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. 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. And, you know, it was… I think there were a number of people who are out there trying very hard to work on behalf of their communities to a better place, both in the political world and in the 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 deafness, but it’s just that people were listening and hearing on 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 connected, continuing to push to try to bring those frequencies together. And I think, frankly, Prime Minister Carney’s going to work pretty hard to make that happen, from what I hear him say, and certainly the ministers I’ve spoken to. But I think there’s a lot of people across Canada who will be joining us in that effort. But we 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. And I’m going to go back out there after a good Maritime summer and at least work part-time and keep at it, as I know you will.

Ellin Bessner: I know you had to face at the beginning, the Jewish community saying, ‘But she’s not even Jewish. Why would they appoint her?’

Deborah Lyons: Yeah, yeah. I was never insulted by that. Never. I mean, I frankly would never have taken this job if that kind of comment could have hurt me, 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 were 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? 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.

Ellin Bessner: I understand this. Why do you think the next one should be Jewish?

Deborah Lyons: 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. You know? Grow up people! Grow up and care!

Ellin Bessner: And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like for this episode of North Star, made possible thanks to the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.

You can watch the full interview with Deborah Lyons on The CJN’s YouTube channel, and you can read more about the story on our website at thecjn.ca.

North Star is produced by Zachary Judah Kauffman and Andrea Varsany. The executive producer is Michael Fraiman, and the music is by Bret Higgins. Thanks for listening.

Show Notes

Related links

• Read reaction from the Jewish community as Ambassador Deborah Lyons announces she is stepping down on July 17.
• Hear Deborah Lyons’s first interview after being appointed special envoy to replace Irwin Cotler, and her later one after releasing the new IHRA handbook in the fall of 2024.
• Her last initiative before resigning was a study of antisemitism in Ontario public schools.

Credits

• Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
• Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
• Music: Bret Higgins

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