Policing Palestine Solidarity: A Crisis of Civil Liberties in Canada
Sid Shniad
Executive Summary
Since October 7, 2023, Canada has witnessed one of the most sustained mass mobilizations in its history. From coast to coast, hundreds of thousands of citizens—students, workers, families, and seniors—have taken to the streets to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to Canadian complicity in what the International Court of Justice has flagged as a plausible genocide. Yet, instead of engaging with this democratic expression, Canadian authorities responded by recasting a human rights movement as a national security threat. This report documents how the state mobilized an unprecedented apparatus of surveillance, inter-agency coordination, and militarized policing to contain a movement that challenged its foreign policy.
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Our analysis of protest data between 2021 and 2025 reveals a policing response that was not driven by public safety needs, but by political bias. While pro-Palestine demonstrations accounted for only 10 % of all protests during this period, they attracted 37% of all police interventions—a rate of repression that eclipses every other social cause, including labour and environmental movements. This disparity becomes even more stark when juxtaposed with the reality on the ground: over 96% of pro-Palestine protests were entirely peaceful. The data paints a clear picture: a movement that posed virtually no physical threat to the public was nonetheless treated as dangerous, with police enforcement escalating dramatically in 2024 to target nearly two-thirds of all protest activity, despite the movement representing less than a quarter of events.
Behind this visible show of force lay a sophisticated strategy of "strategic incapacitation." This was not merely reactive policing; it was a proactive effort coordinated at the highest levels. Through the "ADM NS Ops" committee, federal intelligence agencies (CSIS, RCMP) and Public Safety Canada integrated with municipal police forces to monitor peaceful organizers, effectively turning local dissent into a matter of national intelligence. On the ground, this translated into "Project Resolute" and similar operations that cost taxpayers millions while deploying riot squads, drones, and mounted units against peaceful crowds. The legal system was simultaneously weaponized: activists faced pre-dawn raids on family homes, tenuous "hate-motivated" charges for political slogans, and restrictive bail conditions designed not to ensure safety, but to strip key organizers of their ability to speak or assemble.
The crackdown has exposed critical vulnerabilities in Canada’s legal framework. The proposed Bill C-9 (The Combatting Hate Act) currently before Parliament threatens to codify these repressive tactics by creating "bubble zones" that criminalize protest around community institutions, regardless of the political nature of the events inside. By removing safeguards for hate speech prosecutions and vaguely defining "hate symbols," the Bill risks handing police the power to interpret cultural symbols—like the keffiyeh—as criminal evidence. Simultaneously, the lack of federal protection for "political belief" in the Canadian Human Rights Act has allowed institutions to fire, harass, and debank advocates with impunity. Unlike in Quebec, where political discrimination is illegal, federal law currently offers no shield for those persecuted for their views on Palestine, leaving allies particularly vulnerable to institutional retribution.
The policing of Palestine solidarity in Canada represents a profound failure of democratic accountability. By treating principled dissent as disorder and political speech as hate, the state has set a dangerous precedent that threatens the civil liberties of all Canadians. This report concludes that the only path forward is a structural reckoning: a Federal Commission of Inquiry to expose the political interference behind these operations, the immediate withdrawal of Bill C-9, and the amendment of federal human rights law to explicitly prohibit political persecution. Without these changes, the machinery of repression built today will remain, ready to be turned against the next movement that dares to challenge the status quo.