Over the last six months, residents of Whitby, Ont., have discovered multiple Nazi swastikas around town, including carved into the walls of their main library’s washroom and burned with chemicals onto a popular soccer field. Police are investigating, but no one’s been caught.
The antisemitic incidents have shocked the local Jewish community of 1,000 families, members of which say, by and large, that most people feel relatively safe in Whitby. They’re also grateful for the latest support from the mayor, town council, Durham regional police and local faith groups.
In response to the events, last week, the Town of Whitby voted to ask Ottawa to ban the Nazi swastika, also pledging to develop better internal protocols to handle future hate symbols when discovered. The town’s motions have had a domino effect, and politicians in neighbouring communities are taking notice. Durham Region councillors will consider the same swastika ban on Feb. 12, while Pickering will consider it at the end of the month.
On today’s episode of The CJN Daily, we hear from Rabbi Tzali Borenstein, spiritual leader of Chabad of Durham; Whitby town councillor Chris Leahy, who brought the original motions forward; Whitby Mayor Elizabeth Roy; and professor Tessa Troughton, whose child has witnessed Nazi salutes at her local high school, including students mimicking Elon Musk.
Transcripts
Note: Transcripts are AI-generated and may contain minor errors.
Ellin Bessner: And she joins me now from Oshawa. Welcome to The CJN Daily.
Tessa Troughton: Hi. Thank you very much.
Ellin Bessner: Longtime listener, right? First time being on the show.
Tessa Troughton: Longtime listener. And I do email you when I have things that I need to get off my chest about what it’s like to be a Jew in the Durham region.
Ellin Bessner: Well, I’m so glad you did because you’ve twigged me onto this story about the town of Whitby having a council meeting just a few days ago where they approved a motion to study what to do about hate in their community, as well as to support a ban on swastikas, which B’nai Brith has been calling for on kind of a national level. But what’s come to a head?
Tessa Troughton: Well, I’d say, like, my daughter experienced an incident in her high school probably about two weeks ago. So that layered onto the three incidents of swastikas in public places in Whitby. Plus, we had our synagogue in Oshawa egged, and previously we had some graffiti posted there which may or may not have been anti-Semitic. It’s unclear. And we had a break-in. So, you know, it’s just sort of like a convergence of events. And I felt it was important to speak up.
Ellin Bessner: All right, well, let’s break down all those things for me. Speak to me a little bit about what happened to your daughter, first of all.
Tessa Troughton: Oh, you know, these things never happen. You know, like the context is sort of the political situation in the United States and things that the children or the teens might have seen on the Internet about that. But some boys were doing the Nazi salute in class, and it was a few of them, I think at least four. And she told us about this. My husband approached the principal. He emailed the principal with his grave concerns and said this is not the first time. In fact, if I recount correctly, this is the fourth time that my child has experienced this in, you know, 10 years in the school system that there have been kids who are interested in Nazi gestures, let’s say. Yeah. And sometimes accompanied by words. So I was pretty ticked off by that.
Ellin Bessner: What grade is this?
Tessa Troughton: This is high school. This is grade 10. But it happened as early as grade three years ago. So seven years ago. Grade four happened a couple of times.
Ellin Bessner: Is she the only Jewish child in her class?
Tessa Troughton: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ellin Bessner: Or what about in the school?
Tessa Troughton: Probably, as far as I know. And I’ve been able to successfully advocate for my daughter’s safety in the school. And I’ve also registered everything that has happened on the B’nai Brith website. And I’ve spoken to principals and informed them. Oh, I just want you to know that these incidents are registered on the B’nai Brith hate website that your school is named there. And I’ve leveraged in that manner. It’s been successful. Overall, I think there’s a huge lack of education. I think there has been goodwill in my daughter’s school board, which is not DDSB. I don’t want to name the board, but I think there has been goodwill from the administration, but there’s just a monstrous lack of education of the children, the teachers, and the administrators.
Ellin Bessner: Wait, you mentioned what was going on in the United States two weeks ago. So you’re talking about Elon Musk’s.
Tessa Troughton: Yeah, yeah, the gesture.
Ellin Bessner: And so they weren’t doing it at her, it was just, they were doing them and she saw it. It wasn’t an attack on her or was it, as far as you know?
Tessa Troughton: I don’t think it was. Although afterwards she was approached by some kids and told that she was a snitch because the boys were consequenced and they had to do a special project and spend the whole day with the principal and do a project on the Holocaust and all this kind of thing. But education shouldn’t be happening backwards; it should be happening forwards, and it should be happening in advance, and I mean clearly in advance of grade three. Somehow, I don’t know how that could be possible.
Ellin Bessner: Aside from that incident, you said earlier there was your synagogue was egged. Was this after October 7th?
Tessa Troughton: Yeah, yeah, this is a couple weeks ago. Our synagogue was egged. They partially egged it and then the front doors and then they left us the carton of eggs. So I don’t even know how to interpret this. Last year there was some graffiti that was drawn on the side of the shul and, you know, some of us think it was anti-Semitic, others don’t think it was anti-Semitic. I have the photo of it, you know, there’s a dollar sign and, you know, this kind of thing. So, you know, you have to interpret that the way you interpret it. I think it was probably anti-Semitic. We also had a break-in in the past month and, you know, we talked about it as a board and overall believed that that was anti-Semitic because we think it was an unhoused person who, you know, managed to break in and sleep there for a while. They stole all the laptops that the children use in their Hebrew program, and it’s just been a very frustrating time, and everything that’s happening in Whitby, I’m glad that we’re being proactive. I’m ecstatic that the mayor of Whitby has been supportive. I think this legislation about making the swastika a hate symbol, it will be very useful. And so school boards and the town of Whitby are approaching this. Well, DDSB, I know, is approaching it, and the town of Whitby is approaching it. I really want to see what the city of Oshawa can do about this because, you know, Oshawa, Whitby, like it’s basically the same thing. We’re right next to each other, and I haven’t heard a peep from Oshawa about it.
Ellin Bessner: Why do you think that this is all happening and nobody knows about it? Whereas if a sign, for example, not a little sign, a sign in Toronto has like a sticker put on, it’s front-page news, I feel like this is going on in smaller communities just a few minutes drive east of Toronto. But this is the first we’re hearing about this stuff.
Tessa Troughton: You know, I think everybody is terribly busy, terribly busy with their work and their kids’ hockey games and their very, very busy lives. And I think nobody wants to deal with it and nobody wants to, you know, start emailing journalists and registering things on the neighborhood. I think it’s just everybody’s just, you know, just trying to survive the Canadian winter, which is hard enough. But yeah, we’re very close to Toronto, and we tend to quite often be overlooked. Right. There are various Jewish communities here, various little, you know, clusters. And we all have our different flavors, and because of that, we stick, you know, with the place where we feel comfortable. We don’t necessarily all get together and start, you know, raising hell.
Ellin Bessner: Right, there’s the Chabad, there’s the Orthodox, there’s the conservative. Actually, I don’t even know if there is a conservative.
Tessa Troughton: Beth Zion is conservative, egalitarian. Right, right, yeah. And you got Jackson, there’s a reform. Yeah, we got egged, we got graffitied.
Ellin Bessner: So what do you want governments to do? Like, there’s Whitby, there’s Durham region, there’s Oshawa, Pickering, they’re all sort of Clarington.
Tessa Troughton: Yeah.
Ellin Bessner: Whitby was the first one in the area to say yes. The municipality voted on it, yes, to move forward. Is this the answer, do you think, or are there other things that need to be done?
Tessa Troughton: I think it’s a really good step in the right direction. And I think as Jews, it’s incumbent upon us to really keep an eye on the process and make sure that there’s follow-through. Make sure that we’re not just ticking the box here and, you know, make sure that it really gets these procedures for what to do. Make sure that it becomes integrated into, you know, the city website, the region website, that kind of thing, so people know what to do because people don’t know what to do. We don’t know if we’re going to move our synagogue to a safer place or get out of this, you know, rough and ready area. We don’t know. But we really just have to stand up for ourselves. Like, it just takes time. It takes time and everybody is terribly busy with all the things that we do, and, you know, this is like having a part-time job, you know, dealing with all this stuff. You know, as Jews, we need to stand up and be counted, and we need to, you know, get together as much as possible. A lot of people like to just do their own thing and sort of jet in, jet out for holidays or go to Toronto for holidays. But we really need the moral support and to stand together.
Ellin Bessner: Thanks so much for coming on our show, and now you get to listen to yourself next time.
Tessa Troughton: My pleasure.
Ellin Bessner: Ellin, it was really nice to meet you. Thanks.
Tessa Troughton: Lovely to meet you. My pleasure.
Ellin Bessner: And he joins me now from Whitby. Welcome to The CJN Daily.
Chris Leahy: Absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Ellin Bessner: Well, thank you very much for coming on to explain a little bit of the backdrop to how you and your colleague on council decided that you wanted to put this motion forward. Can you just give us a little bit of the. Where this came from, that for your motion on antisemitism and swastikas?
Chris Leahy: First, we want to start off with some of the background. I honestly believe that, you know, Whitby is the best community in Canada. It’s where I’ve lived my entire life. I was raised here. I raised my family here. But again, Whitby, like a lot of Canadian communities, is not perfect. And we saw that last August. We woke up to the news that some idiot had burned a swastika into the playing field at Prince of Wales Park. When people do those things, whether it’s a person or a thug, a
Chris Leahy: set of thugs, however you want to label it, they basically shatter that idyllic sense of security that generally we all seem to share and have in our community of Whitby, where I’ve lived my whole life. Even though we’re 160,000 people, we still call ourselves a town. We’re always trying to have that kind of more idyllic setting. We woke up to that part of the challenge. There was also the response, essentially. The press release from the town stated, you
Chris Leahy: know, a terrible incident of hate was in the park, and we condemn it. Now, once I got wind of this, now I’m not the spokesman for the town; I’m just an individual councilor, but it just doesn’t sit well with me. So that’s where it was. That’s where I went to. No, we need to call it for what it is. There was a Nazi swastika chemically burned into a huge area of the field. This is not something that some kids just thought they were going to do on their way walking through the park one day.
Chris Leahy: No one carries around chemicals to burn things into fields like this. That was the first incident. So the town got together with the mayor and members of the council. We organized a town hall with Rabbi Borenstein here from Chabad Durham and members from the Jewish community across Durham region. We were listening to some of the challenges that are hard to fathom. It’s something that I don’t experience every day, but when you’re listening to the residents that we represent, like
Chris Leahy: we had students up there who go to the public high school, Sinclair, just up the street. My daughter goes there now. Some kids were drawing swastikas on their desks, and they didn’t feel well. The school and the board condemned it, but they didn’t feel fully supported by the board in their experiences. The school board was at the town hall and was listening. And I have to give them credit; they have created a task force, but it’s
Chris Leahy: also being spearheaded by Emma Cunningham, the only Jewish trustee in the Durham public board. Again, that’s really positive. They’re seeing some progress and putting some attention to it. So that was in August. Fast forward to January. I also sit on the library board as the council designate. It was brought up that someone had carved swastikas in the library bathroom.
Chris Leahy: There were about three or several of them carved into the wall, all in the bathroom right by the children’s reading area, and the staff found it. We don’t know how long it was there; it could have been that day or the day before. They locked the bathroom until they cleaned and fixed it all up. They reported it to the police, shared it with the board, and thought that was the end of their protocol. Then I spoke
Chris Leahy: about it, and it happened again a week later at the library, or 10 days later. We saw two incidents within the library within a few weeks. Where this really resonates for me is that myself and other members of the council were just with Rabbi Borenstein and the members from Chabad Durham at Celebration Square, beside the library, celebrating Hanukkah and lighting the menorah. So you’ve got the menorah lit outside and someone in the library carving swastikas
Chris Leahy: into the bathroom. We can’t tolerate this, and we can’t sweep it under the rug, so to speak. I’m not here to speak ill of the DRPS or the library; they’re doing a great job. They just don’t seem to have the awareness or protocol besides reporting it to the police. They had closed the file because they said there was nothing there to do. But after I put out a press release saying that this behavior is unacceptable and that we
Chris Leahy: need to condemn hate in all forms in Whitby, especially this example of antisemitism, everyone started calling the rabbi the next morning after I put out the press release and a video. The town reached out, the library reached out, and the police reached out to the rabbi showing support. Interestingly, the police said they had closed the file, but now they’ve reopened it due to all the media attention, hoping for extra tips to solve it. This is what I understood was said to Rabbi Borenstein from the DRPS.
Chris Leahy: When I spoke to the communications department at DRPS, they said the file was never closed. But that’s not what I heard from Rabbi Borenstein, and that’s not what he said last night at the council meeting either.
Ellin Bessner: Okay, so bottom line, it’s all great to have all these words saying hate is not tolerated and blah, blah, blah, but you guys decided that you needed to do something. What did B’nai Brith and the rabbi and you guys get together on this motion? Or was that your idea? How did that?
Chris Leahy: Yeah, well, part of it was just me pushing for the different pieces because this already happened in August and we went through this scenario before and we condemned it. We’re gonna work together, but almost the exact same thing. We went from a soccer field to the library, and I was hoping that we would do a better job managing it. Nobody’s. Everyone’s coming from a positive place and trying to be helpful. But I still feel that it wasn’t done in the best way possible because it was just recorded, reported to the police, and move on. So this is why I think it’s so important to create a protocol where if it’s on town property and town staff know about it, let the human rights organizations know what’s going on. As we know from the presentation last night from B’nai Brith, they’re recording like 5,000–5,300 incidents of hate, but that only translates to 900 police-reported ones.
Ellin Bessner: Yes, the police statistics from 2023. I know the figure, yeah.
Chris Leahy: And so, here’s this gap. If we don’t step in, then things are not going to change.
Ellin Bessner: So, B’nai Brith has had. Does have a national campaign now, not just with Whitby, to get the Canadian government to ban the display of swastikas. It’s a national campaign. Are you guys the only the first municipality that’s signed on or voted this? Do you know?
Chris Leahy: Yes, we are definitely the first because. And again, total coincidence, that part wasn’t planned. As we’re reaching out and looking for, talking with B’nai Brith, and I hadn’t even talked to them, we just looked it up online and we noticed when we were looking up the swastika information and how we’re working to fight that here in town, noticed that they had the campaign that they’re trying to lobby the federal government to ban the Nazi swastika and Nazi iconography at the criminal code. Because the example was saying that the way that section 319 of the Criminal Code is written is that if you put up the Nazi swastika, and you put it beside someone that’s not Jewish, that’s not criminal. But then when you put it beside and you’re attacking specifically someone of a Jewish background, then that is targeted, and it is hateful, and it is criminal. So that can make it into a report. And it was trying to find that balance between, you know, what’s criminal and then awful but lawful. And if you listen to the council meeting last night that went on for several hours, it was trying to get that message across like you had many members of council, and I know everyone’s on site, so I’m not trying to be critical, but it was the mentality was that, well, this is a police problem, let’s just get the police to do it. This is not a town problem. And what I’m trying to get across, and I’m hoping we can get across in more municipalities, is that we can’t tell the police what to do. Like, I’m a regional counsellor; I raised their budget, we just gave them a 17% increase. I get lots of angry calls because we’re giving the police all kinds of money, and we’re raising people’s taxes. But all we can do is suggest. But what we can direct as councils, town, the region, wherever we. We can direct what the policy is for our town. What I’m really trying to get across is that when there are incidences of hate, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, whatever it is, that we just create a protocol so that we report it to the police. Of course, and that’s already happening. It will continue to happen, but we also report it to the human rights organizations to make sure that they’re tracking and aware and capturing the difference between what’s criminally reported by the police and then awful but lawful. So we need to work on changing those laws federally. So I don’t know if that captures what we’re trying to do because there’s basically the to create a protocol so that we can do a better job and report to human rights organizations. And the second one was to ban the Nazi swastika.
Ellin Bessner: Look, this is really important. What happens now? So I guess you voted on it. Was it unanimous?
Chris Leahy: It was unanimous, yes. Yes.
Ellin Bessner: And so what happens now? You have a proclamation. It’s now part of the bylaws. What’s it going to be?
Chris Leahy: So next that. Well, this is again, this is just step one. So we’re going to again reach out to members of the community to speak about the protocol. Because part of the discussion last night was that we just basically encouraged the police to do something. And what I was really insistent, at least on option one, was that we get the. We get a protocol for the town, for town property. So when it’s on town property and a town staffer understands it and recognizes it, that it’s reported and that we report it to the human rights organizations and to all of them, whether it’s to B’nai Brith and CIJA, but if it’s anti-Black racism, like, you know, the National Council of Canadian Muslims or the Urban Alliance on Race Relations. So if we can build that coalition from other different groups that are affected by hate and create a protocol so that it’s. That all hate is not welcome in our community and not just Whitby, but all communities, like that is part of the challenge. Like it’s how do we do a better job. And education is part of it as well. Like hearing some of the emails and phone calls I’ve gotten from members of the Hindu community, again, there’s some fear there that now our swastika is different from the Nazi swastika. Hakenkreuz. And I get that, but we also need to get that awareness that there is a difference and that we’re specifically talking, in this instance of banning the, the Nazi swastika banning, the Hakenkreuz. And the average person in Whitby is not going to know that difference. Like they really are not. The other thing we’re encouraging people to do is what you can do is reach out and you can send me an email to be on the interested parties list. And then what can happen is that I will get that information to the clerk’s office where you can be signed up. So when the report comes out, you’re getting about a week’s or so notice that the report’s coming out, you can read it. And more importantly, if you want to come and speak about what’s good or not good about that protocol or the position that they’re taking, that is where it’s helpful. Because what you’ll see and what’s really important when we try and get things through at the municipal level, engagement matters. Like, we only had nine people. We have 160,000 people in Whitby. Approximately nine people came out to speak last night. And we got difference of opinions. But it really makes a difference because when we hear from the people and residents come out and speak and say what’s right or wrong, we will adjust our approach. When we hear nothing, it’s, everyone just assumes what we’re doing is right. Move forward, don’t make any changes. And that’s where engagement, awareness, people joining the interested parties list. And I encourage people to reach out to me because then I can also provide some background of what’s working, and what’s not, and give some other insight because if you go straight to staff, I won’t know about it until I get the report.
Ellin Bessner: Understood. Look, thanks so much for explaining this to us and to our listeners. Thanks for being on the CJN Daily.
Chris Leahy: Yeah, anytime. Thanks.
Show Notes
What we talked about:
- Read the motions passed by Whitby Town Council on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, to a) support the call to ban the swastika, and b) to develop a protocol to react better to cases of antisemitism when municipal staff discover it.
- Learn more about B’nai Brith Canada’s campaign to ban the display of the Nazi swastika by modifying the criminal code.
- Hear more from Durham District school trustee Emma Cunningham about antisemitism in Whitby, on The CJN Daily’s political panel, from Dec. 2024.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
- Music: Dov Beck-Levine
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