Canadian Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre speaks during a campaign event on 12 April, 2025, in Ottawa, Canada. Photo: DAVE CHAN / AFP
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre on the campaign trail Saturday vowed to deport foreigners from Canada for criminal hatemongering, accusing pro-Palestinian protesters' "hate marches" for contributing to a spike in anti-Semitism.
Poilievre was campaigning in an Ottawa electoral district contested by Liberal leader and Prime Minister Mark Carney, who this week drew the ire of his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu over remarks on the war in Gaza.
"We will bring in tougher laws to target vandalism, hate marches that break laws [and] violent attacks based on ethnicity and religion," Poilievre told reporters.
"Anyone who is here on a visitor visa who carries out law-breaking will be deported from this country," he added, words echoing messaging from the administration of US President Donald Trump, which has deported pro-Palestinian student protesters.
Poilievre has in the past sought to distance himself from Trump, whose economic attacks and threats to annex the United States' northern neighbour have outraged the Canadian electorate.
The Canadian conservative decried pro-Palestinian protests, saying they were contributing to a worsening situation with regard to hate crimes.
He condemned "the targeting of synagogues and Jewish schools with hate, vandalism, violence [and] firebombings".
In Canada, the Jewish organisation B'nai Brith said in a report that the number of anti-Semitic acts more than doubled over the past two years.
Since the 7 October, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza, there have been several firebombings and shooting attacks on Jewish schools and synagogues in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
In response to the 7 October attack, Israel launched a devastating military offensive in Gaza, levelling swaths of the territory and killing at least 50,933 people, mostly civilians, according to health ministry figures. The UN considers the data reliable.
Pro-Palestinian encampments at universities and marches that sprung up in response to Israel's conduct of the war have been mostly peaceful but police have in some cases charged protestors.
On Tuesday, Carney was heckled at a rally by a protestor who shouted that Israel was perpetrating a genocide in Gaza.
Carney responded by highlighting Canada's restrictions on some arms shipments to Israel, to which Netanyahu responded on X: "Instead of supporting Israel, a democracy fighting a just war with just means against the barbarians of Hamas, he attacks the only Jewish state."
Carney later clarified that he did not hear, nor supports, the Gaza genocide claim and called for "every effort to establish a ceasefire in Gaza."
- AFP
