Anti-vaccine movement · Canada

Yellow Stars on Wellington Street

How Canada’s anti-vaccine movement borrowed the Holocaust, made room for antisemites, and what is known so far about the shooting outside a Belleville synagogue.

Terry Polevoy, MD · Posted 23 September 2026 · Belleville section last updated 2 October 2026: police declared the attack hate-motivated, and former fellow soldiers disputed part of the reporting on his beliefs.

New, 2 October: antisemitic flyers in Belleville, and the neo-Nazi network that printed “Every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish.” Read the section →

Yom Kippur, Belleville

On the evening of Sunday, 20 September 2026, about two dozen people were inside the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ontario, for the start of Yom Kippur. Parked outside in an unmarked car was Constable Jeff Smith of the Belleville Police Service. He was there on assignment: Belleville police say they routinely post officers at the synagogue during major holy days, and congregants had also reported a suspicious vehicle outside the building a week earlier.

At about seven o’clock, according to Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, a man armed with a shotgun opened fire on him. Smith was hit while still in his car, got out and fought back for nearly three minutes until a second officer, Constable Mike McCurdy, arrived and joined the gunfight, which ended the attack. McCurdy was not hurt. The SIU estimates that twenty to thirty shots were fired; nearby homes and cars were hit. Smith was critically wounded. Nobody inside the synagogue was hurt, partly by luck: the service was running about ten minutes late, and shots tore through the stained-glass windows beside the pulpit where the guest rabbi, Oded Peles of Jerusalem, would have been standing to lead the prayers. Ontario’s Solicitor General, Michael Kerzner, said police had stopped a “massacre in the making.”

Belleville police identified the man as Sean Ward, 29, of neighbouring Quinte West. He died in hospital in Kingston the following night. Within days, reporters added three things: unnamed military sources describing his beliefs; a CBC News investigation of his online activity, with a childhood friend speaking on the record; on 24 September, Federal Court records showing that a plaintiff matching his profile had been suing the military over its vaccination policy; and on 25 September, an independent writer’s interviews with soldiers who served with him. The ledger below separates what is on the record or in documents from what has only been reported.

What his fellow soldiers say. Global News’s claim that Ward blamed Jews for COVID-19 while in uniform is now disputed. On 25 September the independent writer Natasha Graham published interviews with former colleagues from 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, who, like Global’s sources, are not named (“Sean Ward and the missing years”). They remember a quiet, well-liked soldier and an expert marksman, describe his vaccine refusal as a matter of bodily autonomy, and date his hatred of Jews to after the 7 October 2023 attacks. Graham also publishes a Snapchat story, supplied by one of her sources and dated 11 September 2026, in which Ward mocks Jews over the Epstein affair.

Their account has limits of its own. One says only that Ward never explicitly blamed Jews for COVID, while conceding that he came to hate them. One infers the timing from what was in the news rather than from anything heard. One says he had no contact with Ward after he left the army. A fourth says Ward said nothing hateful in a conversation a week before, yet CBC places the slur-and-“killer” username on 2 September and Graham’s own Snapchat post on 11 September. And “bodily autonomy” is not what Ward’s lawsuit says: the public claim in T-2050-23 records that he refused the vaccine on religious grounds. Neither Global’s version nor the rebuttal can yet be checked against a named witness or a document.

By 20 September there was no ambiguity left. Whether his antisemitism was voiced in the barracks in 2021 or took hold in the years after his release, the record so far runs one way: vaccine refusal, a release he resented and sued over, and four years later a shotgun outside a synagogue on Yom Kippur. What radicalized him in between is not yet known.

What the argument needs is the pattern, and the pattern is on the public record. For five years Canadians have watched a movement that began as opposition to vaccines and public health orders take up the imagery of the Holocaust, provide stages and audiences to people with documented histories of antisemitic statements, and parade within sight of Parliament beside a swastika. If the unnamed sources are right, Belleville is where that road can end. If they are wrong, the road is still there.

The scientist who saw it coming

Peter Hotez, a Jewish pediatrician and vaccine scientist in Houston, has become one of the anti-vaccine movement’s favourite targets. In January 2023 he reported receiving swastikas in the mail, along with phone calls and stalking. That June, after he declined to debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Joe Rogan’s podcast, activists confronted him on the sidewalk outside his home. In late 2024 he read an audience an email telling him that seventy-five years ago, people like him were “tried, convicted, hung by the neck until dead”: the Nuremberg trials, recast as a threat against a Jewish doctor. Hotez has written that pandemic-era extremists invoked Nazi imagery against vaccination while blaming Jews for the virus and for profiting from the vaccine, and that the tropes go straight back to the plague years. He describes himself as a Jewish vaccine scientist targeted by both movements at once.

He saw the Canadian version early. In May 2022, three months after the convoy left Ottawa, Hotez opened McGill University’s Global Health Week in Montreal with a lecture titled “COVID-19 Vaccines: Science vs Antiscience.” Beforehand he told McGill that the United States, “and now Canada and Western Europe,” had to treat anti-science as a political threat driven by far-right authoritarian groups, not as a misinformation problem. In his 2023 book he cited the convoy as evidence that the movement was going global, and he told CBC News that the American anti-vaccine movement had deliberately piled on to inflame what was happening in Canada. He has since spoken at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (2023) and in conversation at the University of Manitoba (2025). His point is the one this page makes about Canada: much of the energy here was imported.

An old story in a new mask

None of this began with COVID-19. When plague swept Europe in the fourteenth century, Jews were accused of poisoning wells and massacred for it. The claim that Jews spread disease, or profit from the cure, is among the oldest antisemitic accusations, and historians have found antisemitism among organised vaccine opponents in Germany around 1900. Belle Jarniewski, a Winnipeg Jewish community leader, described the modern version to CBC in 2021: Jews and “global elites” created the virus, then a vaccine to profit from it.

The modern form has two strands. One blames Jews directly, through Israel, the Rothschilds, George Soros or an invented “Jew vaccine.” The other never names Jews at all. It speaks of a cabal, a New World Order, a Great Reset, globalists, planned depopulation. Those words carry the older accusation without saying it, and they are the vocabulary most people at an anti-mandate rally actually use. That second strand is how a movement mostly made up of people who harbour no hatred of Jews ends up carrying antisemitic ideas to new audiences.

2020: blame before the vaccine

The first measurable effects in Canada came before any vaccine existed. B’nai Brith Canada’s audit for 2020 recorded 2,610 antisemitic incidents and reported that more than 44 per cent of that year’s violent incidents were related to COVID-19. Most targeted Hasidic Jews in Boisbriand, Quebec, after misinformation spread that the local Hasidic community was ignoring public health rules. The oldest response to plague, blaming the Jews, arrived first.

B’nai Brith’s audit has critics, who object that it counts some criticism of Israel as antisemitism and does not publish its full methodology. The Boisbriand incidents are not the kind of case those objections concern, and Statistics Canada’s police-reported data point the same way: Jews are the most frequently targeted religious group in Canada.

2021: the yellow star arrives

In August 2021, as Quebec tested its vaccine passport at a handful of businesses, dozens of protesters gathered outside a Montreal-area gym wearing yellow stars marked “sans vaccin.” The Montreal Holocaust Museum called the comparison offensive and inaccurate, and reminded protesters what the badge had been for: identifying Jews for arrest and deportation. Quebec’s minister responsible for fighting racism, Benoît Charette, condemned the protesters, and CIJA’s Eta Yudin called it a problem for society as a whole, not only for Jews.

The badge spread. By September CBC was reporting yellow stars at protests outside hospitals across the country, and a protester in Calgary holding a photograph of Anne Frank. In Winnipeg, a restaurant owner confronted by public health inspectors compared the orders to Nazi brutality.

One episode from that summer complicates the story in a useful way. François Amalega Bitondo, a Montreal anti-vaccine organiser who had worn the star, phoned Daniel Amar, executive director of the Montreal Holocaust Museum, to talk about the criticism. Amar came away convinced he was dealing with ignorance rather than hatred.

“It was clear the guy was not at all antisemitic.”Daniel Amar, Montreal Holocaust Museum, to JTA, 2021

Bitondo stopped wearing the star but kept the comparison. That is the problem in miniature. Most people who reached for the Holocaust during the pandemic were not antisemites; they were reaching for the biggest injustice they knew. But every such comparison shrinks the Holocaust to the size of a vaccine passport, and a movement that normalises it has lowered its guard against people for whom the Holocaust is not a metaphor.

The people at the microphone

Those people were present, and some were prominent. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network has documented years of social media posts by Chris Saccoccia, known online as Chris Sky, one of the most visible Canadian anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine figures, including a post referring to the “Jewnited States of America” and posts praising passages of Mein Kampf. Helmut-Harry Loewen, a retired sociologist who studies hate groups, told CBC in 2021 that Saccoccia had a record of disputing the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. He went on to speak at rallies across the country, including a small-town “freedom” rally in 2023.

Pat King, one of the most visible promoters of the 2022 convoy, had posted videos in 2019 describing an “endgame” he called the “depopulation of the Caucasian race.” His villains in those videos were Muslims, refugees and the United Nations rather than Jews, and he should be described accurately. But the idea he was repeating, the Great Replacement, was built by white nationalists who put Jews at the centre of the supposed plot, and it is the idea cited by the gunmen at the Pittsburgh and Poway synagogues.

Canadian anti-hate researchers were careful to say that most people opposed to pandemic measures were not part of the far right, and had been drawn into a web of misinformation. That is true, and it is why the presence of people like Saccoccia matters. An audience that would never have attended a white-nationalist meeting spent two years listening to speakers with that history, as allies.

Wellington Street, 29 January 2022

The convoy reached Ottawa on 29 January 2022. That afternoon Michael Cooper, the Conservative MP for St. Albert–Edmonton, was interviewed by CBC on Parliament Hill while a protester behind him flew an upside-down Canadian flag bearing a swastika. Cooper said he had not known the flag was there, condemned it, and said its bearer did not represent the thousands of peaceful protesters. Photographs from the same weekend show at least one man carrying a full Nazi flag, and Confederate battle flags were displayed too. Most swastikas on signs were aimed at the government, casting the mandates as Nazi rule. At least one was not.

The organisers’ response set the tone for what followed. Asked about the swastika, the convoy’s lead spokesperson, Benjamin Dichter, told The CJN that people troll and do stupid things, and asked who cares. In an online discussion reported by PressProgress on 31 January, he went further, calling the swastika a false-flag operation by the federal government, while declining to condemn the Confederate flags. Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson said the organisers had not once condemned the antisemitism of the Nazi symbol or the Confederate flags.

In April 2022 the House of Commons heritage committee studied hate symbols, prompted in part by what had been seen in Ottawa. A witness from the Jewish community described the Nazi flag waved on the steps of the Château Laurier and what it said to Jewish Canadians:

“This individual wants me, my children, my family and my community dead.”Testimony, Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, 27 April 2022

A private member’s bill to criminalise the public display of hate symbols followed. So did a more elaborate version of Dichter’s false-flag claim. Before the Public Order Emergency Commission in November 2022, a lawyer for convoy organisers alleged that a political consultant had brought the Nazi flag to discredit the protest, at the direction of government officials. The consultant’s firm denied it. Commissioner Paul Rouleau refused to hear the witnesses the lawyer wanted, finding the allegations had little foundation in evidence. The planted-flag story survives in parts of the movement anyway. Faced with a swastika in its own ranks, the movement’s leadership reached for a conspiracy within days, and never asked who had brought it.

From metaphor to target

The pandemic ended; the movement did not. Its organisations turned to schools, gender policy, climate and the Middle East, and their audience moved with them. B’nai Brith recorded 6,800 antisemitic incidents in 2025 and concluded that conspiracy theories about Jewish influence had moved from the fringes into ordinary Canadian life. The federal Integrated Threat Assessment Centre reported in June 2026 that Canadian Jewish communities had been increasingly targeted since February, and Global News reported in July that authorities had disrupted four violent extremist plots against Jewish targets.

Much of that rise has causes unrelated to vaccines, and this page does not suggest otherwise. The narrower point is that the anti-vaccine movement was one of the channels that carried antisemitic ideas to people who had never met them. It supplied the comparison (mandates are the Holocaust), the enemy (a hidden elite behind the virus and the vaccine), and the stage (rallies and livestreams where people with antisemitic records were welcome). It asked its audience to see public health workers as Nazis and themselves as Jews in 1942. Some fraction of that audience was always going to take the next step and decide the real enemy was the Jews.

Sean Ward was one of them. Police have now said so: a deliberate, hate-motivated attack on Belleville’s Jews, by a man heard shouting that the officer would die for them. His own online conduct, documented by CBC weeks earlier, pointed the same way. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and the Jewish Federations of Canada thanked Constable Smith, then made the more important point: Canadians should not accept a future in which synagogues can open only with armed police at the door. On Yom Kippur 2026 in Belleville, that is what it took.

The fear did not stay in Belleville. In Kingston, an hour away, the president of the Kingston Jewish Council, Debbie Fitzerman, was getting messages from a friend inside the synagogue as the congregation lay on the floor. “How sick is it that you need armed police to enter your place of worship?” she told the Whig-Standard. “But it’s a fact of life.” Rabbi Erin Polansky of Kingston’s Beth Israel Congregation called Jews the canary in the coal mine: hatred that starts with them, she said, never ends with them. At Queen’s University, Jewish students told the campus paper they were now afraid to gather in Jewish spaces. And Dustin Atlas, who directs Jewish studies at Queen’s, made the point this page is built on: the answer has to start with understanding what is happening in Canada, and there is a shocking lack of understanding of what the right wing does here.

It is a claim about structure. A movement built on the belief that a hidden, powerful group is poisoning children for profit has the same shape as the oldest antisemitic libel, and the people who hold that libel noticed and came looking for recruits. The movement made room for them. For anyone who has worked on the health-fraud side of this story, the lesson is familiar: the channels that sell the cure are the channels that carry the conspiracy.

The flyer network: the Goyim Defense League

The flyers in Belleville. On 1 October, Belleville police said they were investigating antisemitic flyers distributed in the city’s east end, the same area as the synagogue, and stepped up patrols around places of worship. B’nai Brith Canada says flyers were also posted outside the synagogue itself, and believes the material is linked to the Goyim Defense League (GDL). Police have not said who was responsible.

What the GDL is. The Anti-Defamation League describes it as a loose network of a few dozen core influencers and livestreamers, a larger group of supporters willing to act on the ground, and tens of thousands of online followers. It is led by Jon Minadeo II and runs a video platform, GoyimTV, whose monetized streams fund its street activity. Its website offers ready-made flyers that supporters print and distribute themselves, which is how its material turns up in towns where the group has no visible presence.

Its COVID campaign. In October 2021 the GDL hung a banner over a highway in Austin, Texas reading “Vax the Jews.” A month later members left flyers at homes in Beverly Hills reading “EVERY SINGLE ASPECT OF THE COVID AGENDA IS JEWISH.” After Minadeo issued a video challenge on Telegram in December 2021, supporters left the same flyers outside homes in at least nine states. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the flyers listed public health officials and executives the group believed to be Jewish, and were designed to exploit resentment over COVID restrictions and vaccine requirements. This is the virus-vaccine-Jews conspiracy theory in its least disguised form, printed and delivered to people’s driveways.

Its Canadian footprint. The GDL has been active here since at least 2023:

• 2023, the first wave. Flyers printed from the GDL website were found on 24 streets in Peterborough, and the RCMP and city police investigated links to similar material elsewhere in Canada and to antisemitic graffiti in Ontario high schools. A CIJA security official told CBC that Peterborough and Saskatoon had been “completely papered,” and flyers also appeared in Langley, B.C.
• 2023–24, a Peterborough charge. A 31-year-old Peterborough man was charged in September 2023 after a police search; the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reports that he was charged with wilful promotion of hatred in January 2024. The outcome has not been found.
• 2024, an Ontario man on tour in the U.S. During the GDL’s “Name the Nose” tour in Nashville, Ryan Scott McCann of Ontario was charged with aggravated assault, and was later indicted on further charges, including felony civil-rights intimidation, over the assault of a young Jewish man. The outcome has not been found.
• 2025, a conviction in Quebec. B’nai Brith reports that Pascal Tribout was convicted of wilfully promoting hatred against Jews and of offences related to attempting to make firearms, and that he took part in GDL forums promoting the claim that Jews caused the pandemic.
• 2026, a teenager in Orillia. Between May and June, a masked teenager left bags of birdseed containing antisemitic flyers on windshields and driveways in Orillia, Ontario. A 15-year-old was arrested on 21 June, and someone claiming to be him later wrote about the arrest on a GDL platform. Under the Youth Criminal Justice Act he cannot be named.

Most of the Canadian cases above are charges, not convictions, and people charged are presumed innocent. The Tribout conviction is reported here on B’nai Brith’s authority and the Orillia case on secondary sources; both will be updated when court or news records are found.