Hundreds of organizations and citizens, including members of the Jewish community, have told Toronto’s police board how they think the force should manage protests, demonstrations and occupations.

The call for input on demonstrations by the public body that oversees the Toronto Police Service comes amid an increase in anti-Israel protests that have, for many Jewish Torontonians, been part of a difficult, overwhelming year. 

The city has seen an unprecedented number of protests after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, which killed 1,200 people in Israel, and the subsequent nearly year-long war in Gaza, where the Hamas-run health ministry says more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Some residents of the city felt targeted by protests in predominantly Jewish neighbourhoods, including on the Avenue Road and Highway 401 overpass earlier this year, which Chief of Police Myron Demkiw later explicitly prohibited.

More recently, incidents of harassment and intimidation by pro-Palestinian protesters in residential neighbourhoods were recorded during the June 9 Walk With Israel. (Police made six arrests at the event.)

In updates to the board over the past months, Chief Demkiw has said the force has managed hundreds of protest events since Oct. 7, 2023; on April 30, he said TPS had already managed more than 650 demonstrations in that time. A few of the biggest protests, most of them during 2023, reportedly numbered as many as 20,000 to 25,000 people.

In separate incidents in 2024, police charged protesters for offences including violence against officers and a police horse at a Cabbagetown-area protest.

Most recently, Toronto police arrested and charged a 21-year-old woman Sept. 8 for assaulting a peace officer and failing to leave premises during a Sept. 6 protest, a TPS release said.

The protest had marched from King’s College Circle, the site of the two-month-long encampment at the University of Toronto downtown campus to the university’s asset management offices at 777 Bay St.

One of the Jewish groups that submitted its recommendations for policing protests, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), held a webinar Aug. 14 about the public consultation, and made suggestions on individual public submissions while outlining CIJA’s recommendations to the police board.

CIJA’s director of community security, Gerry Almendrades, called the conversation a timely one based on others he heard while attending the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Halifax in early August.

“The big topic of discussion was how international events are affecting domestic policing,” he said, which he pointed out goes back farther than Oct. 7, mentioning the last Israel-Hamas conflict in May 2021.

“International events have a tendency to affect Jewish Canadians. It expands beyond being a conflict between Hamas and the State of Israel. Now, it affects Canadians in Canada,” said Almendrades.

“In my assessment, when we have protesters walking through Jewish neighbourhoods or going through or setting up on the Avenue Road Bridge because really demographically that is a Jewish neighbourhood, in that case, that is no longer the right for peaceful assembly. That is a now an act of intimidation.”

The consultation is one step in a legal requirement from Ontario’s Community Safety and Policing Act of 2019 to develop a policy specifically around protests, Dubi Kanengiser, the TPSB’s executive director, told The CJN in a statement.

The board decided to open the topic up to public submissions “due to the unique complexity and considerable public interest in this matter,” Kanengiser wrote.

Public submissions were accepted from June 28 to Aug. 30, and the police board later updated the consultation web page to note that “hundreds of organizations and individuals” had participated.

Hate-motivated incidents in Toronto have continued to increase, according to Toronto police, and have disproportionately targeted Jewish people and buildings in Toronto.

So far in 2024, TPS says there have been 273 hate crimes, with antisemitism remaining the single biggest category, accounting for 45 percent of those hate crime occurrences. The most common charges laid by TPS related to hate crimes have consistently been mischief (often involving graffiti and/or property damage, including fires in some cases), assault, and uttering threats, while hate crime occurrences are up 55 percent in 2024 when compared to the same time last year.

In two cases related to protests in 2024, officers made arrests on the relatively rare charge of public incitement of hatred. The specific offences included one person who displayed the flag of a terrorist group as recognized by the Canadian government, for which charges were later dropped; and in another incident, a 45-year-old man spewed anti-Jewish speech such as “go back to Europe” at a pro-Palestinian counter-protest at City Hall’s Nathan Phillips Square, where agitators came to disrupt a rally recognizing 180 days of the hostages’ captivity in Gaza.

Paul Rinkoff is unit commander of the Toronto Police College and uniform co-chair of the TPS Jewish Community Consultative Committee, and says the service is increasing its visible presence both at protests and in Jewish neighbourhoods.

“We continue to see consistent acts of hate crime disproportionately targeting the Jewish community and of course, the tremendous impact these crimes have on feelings of safety and security of our community members,” wrote Rinkoff in a statement to The CJN.

Rinkoff said the police service’s response has included, among other measures, more officers being added to the Hate Crimes Unit, deploying members of the public safety response team to protests, and providing antisemitism training to officers.

CIJA’s submitted recommendations also included antisemitism training, both for officers and at the police college, said Matthew Rowe, a policy consultant with CIJA who outlined its policy recommendations in the Aug. 14 webinar.

Rowe mentioned the different forms that hate crimes, including hate speech incidents, have taken on at protests, including the UofT encampment, which occupied a grassy downtown quad last May and June before a judicial injunction ordered it dismantled in early July.

“We’ve seen also on different recent public demonstrations, campus occupations, that there have been antisemitic slogans, symbols and behaviour. These have created a climate of fear and intimidation,” said Rowe.

One example at the UofT encampment included prominent and repeated use of the inverted red triangle, used by Hamas to represent weapons locking on and destroying Israeli targets, a meaning which protesters dispute.

On safety and security, Rowe said, “increasingly, it is the Jewish community being targeted.”

“These aren’t just political protests against the government of Israel. If they were, they would be targeting the consulate and not Toronto Jewish community institutions, places of worship… and some of these public gatherings that we’ve seen have turned hostile, have prevented people from going about their daily business, and even in some cases outright violence,” he said, citing the overnight shooting at Jewish girls school Bais Chaya Mushka, in North York in late May.

But in addition to a “robust approach” to the crimes, Rowe said, there needs to be a balance with the protection of civil rights, and that CIJA stands by the right to protest.

“But there are rules around where and when you can protest… It is not proper to be directing protests towards members of the Jewish community, or indeed, any marginalized community, so our policies have to strike a balance between maintaining public order and, of course, protecting our communities.”

Rowe said CIJA wants to see a zero tolerance standard established “for any form of hate speech or violence without exception.”

“We believe that this could involve training officers to recognize antisemitic symbols and rhetoric,” he said, mentioning CIJA’s recommendation for enhanced officer and cadet hate crime education at the Ontario police college level, and with requirements for all serving officers to have updated training in both antisemitism and hate crime enforcement.

“We want specific content… how (can) officers address the presence of antisemitism hate crime action within the context of a public demonstration?

“Understanding the historical context, meaning, and impacts of antisemitic, symbols, and genocidal hate speech, as well as understanding the tactics, and the symbols that are used in hate speech and propaganda,” are key, Rowe said.

He said that should include “foreign language material”, which often gets a pass.

CIJA recommended that demonstrations should not be permitted to obstruct building entrances or prevent people “from going about their everyday business,” including not blocking bridges or roadways, he said in reference to the overpass blockages and a protest in February 2024 that stopped outside Mount Sinai Hospital, where demonstrators chanted “intifada.”

On the Avenue Road bridge overlooking Highway 401, pro-Palestinian protesters in early 2024 marched, set off smoke bombs and draped flags on the overpass. In some cases, counter-protesters waving Israeli flags came onto the bridge and the two groups faced one other, separated by a line of police officers.

“We’ve seen this happen in the past, and we want to ensure that synagogues and community and social service organization are off the table when it comes to protesting,” Rowe said.

“There are lots of very ample venues—at Queen’s Park, at City Hall, in front of the Israeli consulate—that are appropriate venues for protest. Community institutions, and in particular religious institutions, are not one of them.”

As upsetting as the Avenue Road protests were to the community, the ban may have been an overreach, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, the executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, told The CJN for a previous news story. (The CCLA could not be reached for further comment.)

Minority groups, including Jews, need to be especially vigilant about any infringements of their rights, Aviv said at the time, if governments regulate where protests can take place or what people write on their signs.

Days before submissions to the police board closed,a coalition of Toronto organizations critical of the force called the entire police board consultation process a “sham” and a “scam” in a statement announcing a press conference outside Toronto Police headquarters.

More than 10 groups, including Occupy UofT for Palestine, which set up and maintained the King’s College Circle protest encampment, accused the police board of using the submissions to enact further surveillance on pro-Palestine activists by taking recommendations privately instead of at a public board meeting.

“In the current climate, where [Toronto police have] been overly concerned with ‘public order’ related to pro-Palestinian protests and encampments, this submission format limits the impact of community voices on decisions about daily life and public space,” the statement read.

The coalition also said the initiative was a way to justify increasing police budget requests.

“Under the guise of community input, this TPSB process simply serves to justify bolstering the already inflated and mismanaged current police budget of over $1.1 billion,” the coalition’s media advisory stated.

The activist groups called the board’s decision “suspect” in soliciting submissions during a time of sustained protests and pushed back against the “presumption and reporting that these protests have been violent and out of control thus requiring a consultation process on Public Order.”

The group instead called to end what they called the force’s “violent actions towards pro-Palestinian protesters” and “further suppression of all forms of protest and dissent in the city.”

Joanna Baron, a constitutional lawyer and the executive director of the Canadian Constitutional Foundation (CCF), says she disagrees, in part, with some of  CIJA’s recommendations to the police board – in particular about where protests can take place.

The CCF, a non-profit organization dedicated to defending constitutional rights and freedoms, agrees with officer education and zero tolerance for hate speech, Baron says. But she notes that citizens’ rights to protest aren’t limited to outside of government buildings.

And while she calls the videos from Walk With Israel which show masked protesters yelling hateful speech around a Jewish neighbourhood “disturbing,” she says those kinds of incidents can fall under the “awful but lawful” category, if there is no criminal act.

“As disturbing as the footage was of the people marauding through the neighbourhood streets, in order for that to fit the criminal offence of harassment, there would have to be a pattern of conduct. So just walking through a Jewish neighbourhood, and denouncing the Zionists or whatever, I would argue that’s actually protected conduct.

“Now, if they go to somebody’s house every day for a week, or throw rocks through windows, that’s different.”

But the right to protest is not limited to government buildings, she says. “There’s no basis for that in the law.”

It’s a “fallacy” of organizations like CIJA, Baron says, “that they think the solution is more government regulation.”

In the case of the Avenue Road bridge protests, she notes, it was the blockades of the roadway in particular that gave police authority to stop those protests.

“While you have the right to protest, you don’t have the right to blockade,” she said.

Baron says there’s a “red line” that separates criminal hate speech from offensive, even prejudiced speech that might or might not constitute criminal conduct.

If someone is shouting “‘death to the Jews’ or ‘Long Live Oct. 7,” Baron says, that can rise to the level of criminal hate speech.

“Everything [else] that falls within those red lines… may be contemptible, maybe antisemitic,” but it might not constitute criminal conduct, she says.

“There needs to be a high standard, because the result is the sort of highest deprivation of liberty, which is a criminal charge and incarceration,” says Baron.

Speech is highly subjective, which is what makes the narrow standard necessary for hate-motivated offences as opposed to so-called “awful but lawful” ones, she says.

In addition, Baron points out, criminalizing, or “locking these [people] up doesn’t make them go away, doesn’t change their views,” and, she says, doesn’t make Jews any safer.

“[Criminalizing those spewing ‘awful but lawful’ speech] just sort of turns them into martyrs and sends speech underground and makes it harder to track what they’re saying.”