Gad Saad has lived in Canada since his family fled Lebanon in 1975 after someone showed up at their home to kill them. But last month, the professor of marketing and evolutionary behavioral sciences announced on social media that he had given up on Canada and decided to leave.
“The taxation system is astounding, rendering it nearly impossible to accumulate enough money to truly retire,” Saad wrote about the first reason for his decision. It’s true. The typical Canadian pays 70 percent more in income taxes than the typical American. The second reason is far more alarming. “The government’s open immigration policies have made it unsafe for my family to remain here (due to the exponential increase in Jew-hatred),” he wrote.
Saad said basically the same thing on Joe Rogan’s podcast in May. “I’m now leaving in large part because it became difficult for me, if not impossible, to be a high-profile Jewish professor who supports the right of Israel to exist.” Saad had already taken a leave of absence from Concordia University in Montreal and will continue working as a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.
Saad’s decision made it even more painfully obvious that Canada has an antisemitism problem. As of mid-July, B’nai Brith had documented 27 violent antisemitic incidents so far this year, compared with 10 during all of 2025. As The Free Press’s Rupa Subramanya reported in June, Jews account for about one percent of Canada’s population of 41.6 million, but were the targets of more hate crimes reported by police in 2024 than all other religious groups combined.
