End the underreporting of Jewish Canadians in the census

Jews are an ethnicity. It doesn’t make sense for Jews not to be included in the census.

I thought the utility of the census relied on being able to compare each with the last. Doesn’t changing questions and approaches undermine the continuity and comparability of data? Aside from making it hard to compare one census with the last, as a secular Jew, I distinctly noticed the absence of this category during the last census. It didn’t sit right, so I thought I would search the internet to see if others felt similarly and found this petition. I was born in Eastern Europe, which my parents left in large part because of antisemitism. Though under and an atheist communist regime, my family was never allowed to feel like an ethnic national of that country. It did not matter that we did not go to synagogue (there were none), we were still Jews. If you ask my elderly mother why she made the risky decision to abandon her and my fathers professional careers in that country and start all over again with two small children in Canada, she would say the main reason was anti-semitism. Canada asking me to identify my origin as European, while geographically accurate does not reflect my identity. I’m not sure who decided that Jewish was only a religion and not an ethnicity, but it certainly wasn’t someone with an experience like mine.

both secular and religious Jews counted.