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, her 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.

Related links

• Read reaction from the Jewish community as Ambassador Deborah Lyons announces she is stepping down on July 17, in The CJN.
• Hear Deborah Lyons’ first interview after being appointed Special Envoy to replace Irwin Cotler, in The CJN, 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, in The CJN.

Credits

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

Support our show

• Subscribe to The CJN newsletter
• Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
• Subscribe to North Star (Not sure how? Click here)

There are two framed medical certificates missing from the wall of Dr. Michael Kalin’s office in his medical clinic in Montreal. Kalin, who owns Santé Kildare, earned them years ago from the College of Family Physicians of Canada, which oversees 45,000 family doctors. But the College has ordered him to take them down, after Kalin publicly resigned his membership and withdrew his application to sit on their board, following the College’s publication of a controversial article in their official magazine. Kalin—along with hundreds of his colleagues and Canadian Jewish medical associations—believes the article, titled “The Day the Pagers Exploded”, praises members of Hezbollah, a banned terrorist organization in Canada.

The piece in question was written by a Lebanese doctor living in Beirut who has no apparent ties to Canada. She treated hundreds of wounded Hezbollah members in her local emergency ward in September 2024 on the night thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies suddenly exploded, as part of the stunning Israeli operation to take out terrorists who planned attacks on the Jewish State after Oct. 7.

On today’s episode of The CJN’s North Star podcast, Kalin explains to host Ellin Bessner what the reaction has been to his protest. Because they refused to retract the story or explain how it was published in a peer-reviewed journal that usually talks about care standards for Canadian patients, he speaks frankly in saying there is no longer a place for him in the Canadian organization of family physicians.

Related links

• Read the Canadian Family Physician magazine article about the wounded Hezbollah patients and the complaints and the CFPC response.
• Find out more about Santé Kildare, Dr. Michael Kalin’s family medicine clinic in Côte Saint-Luc, Quebec.
• Learn more about the exploding pagers operation in Lebanon, in The CJN.

Credits

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

Support our show

• Subscribe to The CJN newsletter
• Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
• Subscribe to North Star (Not sure how? Click here)

On July 18, Jewish communities will mark the 31st anniversary of the AMIA terrorist bombing in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in which Hezbollah, backed by Iran, murdered 85 people and wounded hundreds more at the city's Jewish Federation building. Until Oct. 7, 2023, the AMIA bombing had been the worst mass attack against Jews since the Holocaust.

For Irwin Cotler—the acclaimed lawyer, former justice minister and chair of the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights—commemorating this anniversary brings a deeply unsettling sense of déjà vu. For two decades, he has been pushing the Canadian government to take stronger measures against the Islamist regime, resulting in an Iranian murder plot planned against him. Today, Cotler will be speaking on a national Federation panel entitled "The Islamic Republic's Long Shadow of Terror".

On today's episode of The CJN's North Star podcast, host Ellin Bessner sits down with Cotler in his home in Montreal to hear exactly how Canada's lax policies on Iran have come home to roost.

Related links

• Watch the July 18 official ceremony and panel on the Islamic Republic’s Long Shadow of Terror, live at 11 am EDT Friday, sponsored by Canada’s Jewish Federations.
• Hear how Winnipeg’s Argentinian Jewish community remembers the 1994 AMIA bombing by Iranian-backed terrorists.
• Read more about the search for justice in the 1994 AMIA terrorist bombing of Argentina’s Jewish community, in The CJN.

Credits

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

Support our show

• Subscribe to The CJN newsletter
• Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
• Subscribe to North Star (Not sure how? Click here)