Freddie Ponton 21st Century Wire For years, “foreign interference” has been the scarecrow Ottawa drags out whenever Beijing or Moscow are on the menu. Beijing, Moscow, Tehran… the enemy list is familiar, rehearsed, and politically safe. However, a new report from Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) blows straight through that narrative at the moment when politicians act outraged about Chinese influence, a close military partner has been running its own operations on Canadian soil and getting away with it. The document isn’t written in the soft language of a funding appeal; on the page, it reads like a case file that follows how Israeli diplomats, ministries and cut-outs bankroll opinion polls, undermine consumer labelling rules, organise propaganda junkets, pump out racist disinformation and ship spyware into Canada’s policing ecosystem. The report also makes a broader point that shouldn’t be missed. These episodes are not random. To the contrary, they sit inside a much larger state effort to shape opinion abroad. CJPME notes that Israel’s 2026 budget reserved about $730 million for overseas image management, or hasbara, suggesting that what has surfaced in Canada is likely only a fraction of the full operation. REPORT: Israeli Foreign Influence, Interference, and Transnational Repression in Canada, May 2026 (Source: CJPME) EN_-Israeli_Influence_Interference_and_Transnational_Repression-_2026_Final What’s in the investigative report has nothing to do with some fuzzy “diaspora” culture war; it shows Israel moving pieces inside Canada through Canadian firms, front groups and parts of the security apparatus to protect its image after the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the assault on Lebanon, while exposing how this foreign state goes after people who refuse to look away. In 2023, the Toronto Star reported, as cited by CJPME, that Canadian security agencies had flagged Israel as one of six states “potentially engaging in influence activities” in Canada, alongside China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Not long after, “The Breach Investigation” cited in the report found that the Israeli consulate in Toronto had secretly commissioned a poll through Aurora Strategies Global to inflate apparent Canadian support for the war in Gaza. The mechanics matter. Israeli officials used a Canadian firm to place polling in the public sphere, dressed up as neutral research while hiding the real client. Liberal insiders in the “Lib Friends of Israel” WhatsApp group were reportedly told the poll had been done on behalf of the consulate and discussed getting it in front of the Prime Minister’s Office before release. Calling this “debate” is a stretch; what you see here is perception management bankrolled from abroad. The same pattern shows up in trade and regulation. After a federal court ruled that “Product of Israel” labels on West Bank settlement wines were misleading, Israel’s Ministry of Justice secretly hired Torys LLP, a Toronto law firm, to intervene while staying out of public view. The firm was retained to advise on food regulations, prepare talking points for discussions with Canadian authorities, and attend court hearings on Israel’s behalf while its role remained concealed. Canada ultimately appealed the ruling, siding with settlement wineries. What’s at stake here is whether Canadians are allowed to know if they’re buying goods from occupied territory. If a Chinese state-owned company pulled the same stunt on labelling goods from Xinjiang, you can bet half the cabinet would be lining up at the microphones by morning. When the state playing those games is Israel, the file sinks into the grey zone and appears to stay there. The report also splits the junket story in two, and that distinction is useful. One stream is covert with Canadian intermediaries such as the Ontario-based Exigent Foundation organising trips for right-wing journalists and personalities, with at least two late-2025 trips quietly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the tune of almost $175,000 CAD, according to “Press Progress” reporting cited in the report. The other stream is official, and involves the Israeli consulate in Toronto directly sponsoring a week-long “Canadian political leadership mission” in late 2025 for municipal politicians and media figures, covering travel inside Israel, accommodation, meals and program costs. That second category may not always meet the strictest definition of covert interference, because the Israeli state is not necessarily hiding its role. But the ethical problem is obvious enough. The entire purpose of these trips is to cultivate a carefully selected layer of Canadian public figures, build support for Israel, and send them home with a guided political narrative. The lack of proper disclosure only deepens the problem. A similar play had already surfaced in June 2024, south of the border, where Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs secretly financed a bot‑driven influence campaign aimed at US progressives and lawmakers, fronted by a Tel Aviv marketing firm and only exposed when Haaretz and the New York Times pulled the threads. The report runs through the glossy, front-of-house lobbying, then rolls up its sleeves and digs into the muck underneath. It traces racist, anti-Muslim disinformation pushed through fake organisations and AI-generated accounts aimed at audiences in Canada and the US. Haaretz and the New York Times, as cited by CJPME, reported that Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs backed a covert influence campaign using fake English-language sites and hundreds of fake accounts, while Canadian officials later confirmed they had corroborated “elements” of the operation and raised concerns with Israel. At a time when people were watching atrocities in Gaza in real time, the purpose was to distort the conversation, stigmatise Palestine solidarity, and muddy public anger with racism and panic. One more piece in the report deserves more attention than it has received. CJPME flags the risk of electoral interference. It says there is no public proof yet of direct Israeli electoral interference in Canada; yet it points to Israeli-linked operators such as Team Jorge and Black Cube, both implicated abroad, as a warning that this threat is neither abstract nor far-fetched. From lobbying to intimidation inside Canada This is where the report broadens from interference to repression. CJPME argues that Israel’s activities in Canada are not confined to opinion-shaping or lobbying; they extend into efforts to monitor, intimidate and discipline critics, especially within Palestinian, Muslim and Jewish communities. One major thread is the attempt to restrict democratic rights. The report points to Israel’s Foreign Minister celebrating Bill C-9, which civil liberties groups warn could be used to suppress protest, and to Israel’s ambassador openly lobbying for Canada to “limit” certain freedoms in the name of fighting antisemitism. It also points to Ontario’s failed 2026 attempt to block the Al-Quds Day rally after a meeting between Premier Doug Ford, ministers and Israeli diplomats, with public statements from Ontario officials tying the meeting directly to the injunction push. At that point, you’re no longer just tracking spin; you’re looking at an attempt to discipline dissent. The report then turns to surveillance, profiling and doxxing. Since at least 2023, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has reportedly monitored pro-Palestine organising in Canada, issued reports naming organisers, tracked online engagement, and attempted to frame demonstrations as security threats in order to trigger state responses. Their ministerial report from October 2024 profiled Canadian critics of Israel alongside violent incidents targeting Jewish institutions, implying a connection between dissenting speech and violent acts. CJPME also folds in the wider blacklist ecosystem. It points to Canary Mission, which compiles dossiers on pro-Palestinian students and professors in Canada and the US, and notes that Canadian activists are already caught in this architecture of surveillance and punishment. The report also cites plans by HonestReporting Canada to build a “name and shame” database for law enforcement and media use, and it points to anonymous harassment accounts whose attacks are then amplified by Israeli officials. What’s under pressure isn’t simply the narrative, but the speakers themselves, who dare to speak up, and whose name ends up on a list, who pays for opening their mouth. The spyware section sharpens that danger. CJPME places Israeli cyber firms inside a wider infrastructure of transnational repression, noting NSO Group’s Pegasus, Cytrox’s Predator software, and Paragon as examples of tools that have been used against dissidents, journalists and human-rights defenders across multiple countries. The report also points out that Israeli-linked spyware has already surfaced in Canadian policing: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has acknowledged using tools with similar capabilities, Ontario Provincial Police has been linked to Paragon, and Edmonton police have used facial-recognition technology from Israel’s Corsight AI. That creates an obvious conflict of interest. The same state apparatus that is supposed to protect Canadians from abusive surveillance is also buying into a surveillance ecosystem tied to Israeli military and intelligence networks. CJPME argues that this leaves activists, journalists and targeted communities in Canada exposed on two fronts at once: foreign repression from abroad and domestic uptake of the same technologies. Meanwhile, Parliament’s own flagship document on foreign interference refuses to say any of this out loud. The NSICOP report never mentions Israel by name, even though its own definitions of covert influence operations and transnational repression plainly fit much of the conduct described above. Three of the six “primary perpetrators” of repression against ethnocultural communities were redacted from the public version, and CJPME argues that Israel is almost certainly among them. Why this should alarm Canadians Some people will still try to dismiss all of this as “Middle East politics” spilling into Canada. The report gives no basis for that comfort. It lays out a pattern in which a foreign state, its ministries, its diplomats, its proxies and its aligned technology firms repeatedly surface inside Canadian political, media and security life. The warning signs are already here. Covert polling, hidden legal intervention, state-backed junkets, racist disinformation, pressure to curb civil liberties, surveillance of organisers, blacklist ecosystems, and spyware-linked policing all appear in the same report for a reason, and when taken together, they describe a durable structure of foreign influence and transnational repression rather than a string of isolated scandals. The report doesn’t stop at sounding the alarm. It also spells out a list of concrete steps and recommendations, inviting lawmakers to name Israel as a threat actor, un-redact the NSICOP report, apply any foreign-influence registry across the board, send home diplomats caught running these operations, sanction the disinfo outfits, shield targeted communities, and cut Canada’s ties to Israeli spyware and the money behind it. So the choice is a simple one. Either foreign interference is a real principle that applies across the board, or it is a political instrument used selectively against adversaries while allies are allowed to shape public debate, pressure institutions, and intimidate critics with impunity. READ MORE CANADA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Canada News Files SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL
Author: Global Affairs
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