At least six doctors and healthcare workers were suspended at Toronto’s SickKids hospital for social media posts supporting Palestinians while doctors at St. Michael’s around the corner were allowed to share an hour-long lecture about Israel to staff and students.
Another half dozen physicians were removed from their roles assessing medical students’ residency applications at Queen’s University because they signed a petition calling for a ceasefire.
Meanwhile, medical schools are silent when it comes to doctors and a program director disseminating a list of students who signed the same petition with the intention of influencing their medical residency applications.
These are just some examples of what doctors describe as a recurring “double standard” in Canadian medical schools and hospitals where students and doctors say pro-Palestine advocacy is being silenced, even when similar actions for other causes—including support for the Israeli government—are allowed.
According to an investigation by The Breach based on interviews with more than a dozen doctors and students, individuals have faced temporary suspensions, removal from tasks they’ve performed for years, or admonishment for being “unprofessional” without being told who they harmed or how. This is happening in Canada even as the Israeli military continues its ongoing destruction of Gaza’s health-care system.
Two weeks after unfounded claims of antisemitism by right-wing activists about a Toronto protest that marched past Mount Sinai hospital led to national headlines and a denunciation from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, The Breach’s investigation reveals what’s happening inside some Canadian hospitals: pervasive retaliation against expressions of Palestinian solidarity.
“Our advocacy for Palestine was treated differently than every other advocacy that many of us have engaged in,” said one Ontario doctor who shared their experience with The Breach.
“It’s [an] abuse of power and disproportionate response,” said another.
Physicians and students who recounted their experiences asked for their names to be kept confidential in order to share their stories without fear of further repercussions from their hospitals or university administrations. The Breach has corroborated their accounts by obtaining photos, emails, responses from administrations, an audio recording, and other forms of evidence where possible.
SickKids hospital is seen in downtown Toronto. Photo: Ken Lund/Flickr
A tale of two Toronto hospitals
December and January are typically the busiest months for hospitals across Canada, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s also when managers at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto—the largest pediatric hospital in Canada—suspended at least six physicians and healthcare workers for posting about Palestine on their social media accounts, according to two doctors familiar with the situation.
“I was automatically suspended with no ability to challenge the suspension based on a private social media post on Instagram advocating, as a health professional, against human rights violations of Palestinians,” said Joe, one of the physicians who was suspended from SickKids. Their name has been changed to protect against further backlash from hospital administration.
On a private social media account that does not list their real name or affiliation with SickKids, Joe shared a report about allegedly egregious conduct by the Israeli military.
“There was no specific allegation of a specific policy I had broken or compromised,” Joe said, recounting their meetings with hospital leadership. “There was zero transparency, zero ability for me to protect myself or even understand what processes were undertaken.”
Joe said their supervisors told them they could not speak to colleagues about their social media activity or suspension, and couldn’t share their side of the story with colleagues because it was part of a “confidential” investigation being conducted by the administration.
SickKids has not responded to repeated requests for comment about the suspensions.
Jackie Esmonde is a labour lawyer in Toronto who is representing some of the physicians at SickKids to contest the suspensions internally.
“Generally what I’m seeing are vague allegations of improper conduct or unprofessional conduct on social media relating to the use of certain words like genocide [and] occupation,” Esmonde said. “The people that I work with never had any allegations of unprofessionalism in the past.”
Joe and Esmonde said physicians have been put on leave while the employer investigates their “unprofessional” conduct online. These suspensions have ranged from three weeks to over a month, according to Esmonde.
Labour lawyer Jackie Esmonde is representing physicians at SickKids who are contesting their suspension. Photo: Jackie Esmonde/Cavalluzzo Law
Joe said they have used the same private social media account, which neither uses Joe’s real name nor mentions any affiliation with SickKids, to criticize other governments in the past— Canada, U.S., Iran, and more—with no feedback or backlash at work.
By contrast, around the corner about five minutes from SickKids, two senior physicians at St. Michael’s Hospital delivered an hour-long lecture titled “Modern Antisemitism” to medical students and staff during pediatrics rounds on Nov. 30. These rounds are teaching sessions, typically held weekly, that are meant to share updated health-care-related training and information to staff and students.
An audio recording of these rounds shared with The Breach shows the doctors providing examples of pro-Palestinian advocacy they consider to be antisemitic. Their list included calling Israel an apartheid state, describing Zionism as settler colonialism, the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and protests against corporations like Indigo and Starbucks.
During the lecture, they repeated the claim that babies were beheaded by Hamas on Oct. 7— an allegation that was walked back by the Israeli government for lack of evidence—and said international agencies like Save the Children were silent on children who were taken hostage by Hamas, when in fact these groups had repeatedly called for all children held hostage to be released without condition.
Student and staff complaints to hospital leadership after the presentation focused on the lecturers’ comments about Muslim people, according to emails seen by The Breach.
“Arab Israelis do tend to be on the lower socio-economic status rungs and I’m by no means an economic expert, but it’s very similar to how a lot of Muslims are in Canada as well, how they’re faring economically,” one of the physicians said during the presentation.
After stating that “Arab Israelis” earn less because they don’t serve in the Israeli army and because many Muslim women don’t work, the physician said, “Certainly in Canada, we should also be doing a much better job to help our newcomers and our Muslim-Canadians, but no one really calls Canada an apartheid state for having a large population in the lower socio-economic class.”
But those are not the reasons that human rights groups describe Israel as an apartheid state. Palestinians who live within Israel are considered citizens but not “nationals” with equal rights, according to an Amnesty International report outlining what it describes as an apartheid system both in the occupied territories and within Israel’s borders.
[A video is embedded in the document. Its URL on YouTube is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkkZuDVNr9A ].
One of the complaints from a physician and professor about the presentation at St. Michael’s suggested the presentation was used as a platform to push a political agenda. “This presentation was full of false and misleading information, racism, inciting hate, propagating biases and stereotypes about BIPOC and their socioeconomic statuses, and maliciously spreading Islamophobia,” they wrote to hospital administrators.
In early December, Aria—a doctor in a leadership role in the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto-affiliated hospital, whose name has been changed because of a potential risk to her employment—said she and several others initiated meetings about these complaints with directors at Unity Health, the Catholic health-care network that oversees St. Michael’s, St. Joseph’s, and Providence hospitals in Toronto.
“We asked them for three things: One, that they stop these rounds from happening again,” Aria said. “The second is they do an investigation into what happened and why they were put on, and [third], give feedback to the presenters of the harm that this has done.”
In an emailed statement in response to questions from The Breach, Unity Health said the presentation is “not being offered” at the other two hospitals.
“Unity Health is aware of this presentation and has taken steps to acknowledge the hurt and concern that it has caused among some of our colleagues,” the spokesperson said, without specifying what steps have been taken.
Staff and students at St Michael’s were not offered training in Islamophobia or anti-Palestinian racism, according to Aria.
“There is this double standard as to what can be said about Israel versus what can be said about Palestine,” she said.
‘It’s unheard of’
At Queen’s University School of Medicine in Kingston, Ont., several doctors who train physicians-to-be and decide medical school residency placements have faced immediate repercussions for signing a petition.
Nova had been an active member of the residency program at the university. But in December, they said they and five other physicians were removed from these roles.
In an email to these physicians obtained by The Breach, the dean of Queen’s University School of Medicine wrote, “The decision to request the recusal of a few faculty members was based on concerns that were brought to our attention from medical students about the perception of potential bias, based on the petition circulated by the Health Workers Alliance for Palestine.”
This petition, which the Queen’s University physicians had signed, calls for a ceasefire, an end to the destruction of Gaza’s health-care system, and an end to the “ongoing occupation of Palestine and the apartheid system.” As of Feb. 26, this open letter has been signed by 3,718 health-care workers in Canada.
A vibrant grassroots mobilization has seen rallies in support of a Free Palestine crop up in cities across Canada. Photo: Sikander Iqbal/Wikimedia Commons
“Unfortunately, decisions had to be made in an extremely short time frame,” the dean continued in her email. “This is not intended as a criticism of your actions. Your behaviour is not egregious and there was no intention to imply that.”
According to Nova, neither the dean nor anyone else has provided further details about the complaints against them.
“I’ve done this job and mentored students from all walks of life, including Jewish, [for years] so that has never been an issue for me, because the issue is not the religion, as we know,” Nova said. “In December, I cried almost every night and felt like I don’t belong here…I felt really betrayed.”
According to another Queen’s School of Medicine professor who is familiar with the removals, there were other signatories of the same petition, some of whom are department heads, who were not removed from residency reviews.
“It’s unheard of,” the physician said when asked how often doctors and professors are stopped from reviewing students’ medical residency applications, known as Canadian Resident Matching Service (CaRMS) file reviews. “Never happened that I’ve been aware of and it seems that it also is not something that happened in other universities. It seems unique to Queen’s and seems unique to this situation.”
A spokesperson for Queens University sent an emailed statement that did not answer The Breach’s questions about staff suspensions for signing the petition.
“Several learners within The School of Medicine have expressed concern with the Canadian Residency Matching Service (CaRMS) process,” they said in a statement, without specifying what concerns were raised.
“We take these concerns very seriously and recognize the need to fully examine the CaRMS process in order to provide learners and other participants with confidence in the decisions reached and to ensure that the appropriate procedures and measures are in place to address considerations related to the integrity of the match process.”
According to Dr. Yipeng Ge, a University of Ottawa physician who was suspended for posting about Palestine on his social media accounts, and then refused to return when the university offered to reinstate him months later, the concept of professionalism is being “weaponized against medical learners and physicians.”
The idea of professionalism is being arbitrarily applied to silence pro-Palestine advocacy online, Ge told The Breach in an interview. He noted that he was never questioned or reprimanded for his support of Ukraine when Russia invaded that country two years ago.
“It really solidified my gut feeling that I had way back in November that this institution, and the people that hold significant power within the institution, are causing a lot of harm to medical learners in the form of anti-Palestinian racism,” he said.
Yipeng Ge was suspended from the University of Ottawa for posting about Palestine on his social media accounts. Photo: Change.org
According to Ge, physicians and students making posts about Palestine are also being accused of creating a lack of safety for Jewish patients, despite no patient complaints.
“For someone to accuse someone else in the profession that there’s a concern for patient safety is…a grave and significant and severe concern,” he said.
“It is being disproportionately used in a very malicious way now to call into question people’s competency, without an appropriate look at [whether there is] actual concern for patient safety and [whether there is] true bias.”
Political bias in med school selections
While doctors and students have been punished for their pro-Palestinian statements, a program director at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine involved in residency selections was able to organize, without major repercussion, to prejudice the selection process against students advocating for Palestinian rights.
In December, CBC News reported that a handful of doctors in a private Facebook group called “Canadian Jewish Physicians” were sharing a compiled list of 271 medical students who had signed the same online petition, with the intention of influencing the residency match process—the system that matches medical students with residency programs once their applications are approved.
A week after that reporting, CaRMS and the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada (AFMC) issued statements about “protecting the integrity” of the medical school residency program.
“Questions on politics, religion, cultural affiliation, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or marital status are NOT permitted in the interview process,” read the statement from CaRMS and AFMC.
“No external lists, data, or letters may be shared, disseminated, or utilized at any stage in the resident selection process.”
On the day the CBC article was published, in another private Facebook group called “Canadian Jewish Physician Women,” the program director of dermatology at the University of Ottawa, Dr. Carly Kirshen, asked for a copy of the same list of students who signed the open letter.
While any physician or professor, even at the associate professor level, can review residency applications, a program director has more general oversight and authority over students.
“What I found really shocking was that was the first time I saw somebody actually identify themselves as a program director, as someone in a position of power, not just someone doing a file review,” said Eva, a doctor who is part of both private Facebook groups and has shared screenshots of Kirshen’s comment with The Breach.
Facebook users in the group “Canadian Jewish Physician Women” shared screenshots from their group that were published by CBC News. Dr. Carly Kirshen then asked for a list of students who had signed an open letter about Palestine. Photo: Obtained by The Breach
Eva, whose real name has been changed to safeguard against repercussions in the workplace, emailed a complaint about Dr. Kirshen’s post, including the above screenshots, to faculty leadership at the University of Ottawa, CaRMS, and AFMC on Jan. 10. A copy of this complaint was also sent to this reporter at the time.
Eva said she did not hear back from any of the organizations until after she shared this complaint with her colleague, Dr. Tarek Loubani, who then posted it online two weeks later on Jan. 25.
“In that two weeks we heard nothing, and this is right in the thick of when CaRMS file reviews were happening,” Eva said.
It was only when the complaint was public that the associate dean of external relations at the U of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine responded saying Dr. Kirshen had “immediately and voluntarily recused herself from the process.”
A spokesperson for the University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine told The Breach that they “are constantly monitoring and assessing the integrity of the CaRMS match.”
“Upon receiving the concerns related to the integrity of the Dermatology process in January, the faculty promptly constituted a new and independent selection committee that also included a new chair, and the selection process for the dermatology program was initiated all over again,” he said. “Due to the prompt and swift measures that were taken to investigate and quickly resolve the situation, we are satisfied the integrity of the process was maintained.”
In emailed responses to questions from The Breach, CaRMS and AFMC spokespeople said the organizations are not involved in the process of reviewing residency applications, which is under the purview of universities.
According to AFMC, it is not a violation of residency match policies to sign the open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, as the physicians at Queen’s University did.
When asked about how it responded after being alerted to this program director’s comment on Jan. 10, a spokesperson for CaRMS told The Breach in a statement that the complaint was not made in a way that would allow CaRMS to start an investigation of violations.
“We have not to date received an official written complaint from an individual [residency] Match participant regarding a suspected personal violation related to a specific instance of bias in their application process, which is what is required to initiate an investigation by the CaRMS Violations Review Committee,” the spokesperson wrote.
Eva’s stance is to call for Dr. Kirshen’s removal from her role as program director based on “abusing [her] position of power.”
“I’m not against somebody’s political views…but using that political view to motivate your behaviour to discriminate against other physicians and try to damage their careers or damage students’ careers is where it crosses the line for me,” Eva said.
Campaigning inside private Facebook groups
As a Jewish doctor herself, Eva has been a part of these private physicians’ Facebook groups for years. Mostly, she said, people posted about benign topics like recipes, holidays, and children’s books.
After Oct. 7, she noticed political conversations in the groups were quickly veering into organizing campaigns to complain about colleagues’ social media posts about Palestine that they considered antisemitic.
In the case of Dr. Ben Thomson, a nephrologist at Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital who was suspended, threatened, and doxed after posting pro-Palestine views on X, newly obtained screenshots from one of the two private Facebook groups show doctors calling for complaints against Thomson, whether they were true or not.
Doctors in the Facebook group “Canadian Jewish Physicians” discussed complaining about Dr. Ben Thomson despite him being a safe and effective doctor for patients. Photo: Obtained by The Breach
“Every physician who can, please say you are uncomfortable collegially and [that] many of your patients have indicated concern it will impact their care,” wrote one doctor.
“I don’t think he is a danger to patients, just don’t want to financially support him with referrals,” wrote another. “Too bad as [he] was quick to see and thorough.”
Similar posts in the Canadian Jewish Physicians Facebook group include those from an emergency physician at Toronto’s University Health Network who is on the “Inquiries, Complaints, and Reports” committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.
In the aftermath of the CBC article, the physician expressed concern “about the mole in this group.” She also posted asking medical students at Toronto hospitals to let her know if they feel uncomfortable working with “one of my vocal anti Israel woke colleagues.”
An emergency physician who sits on a College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario committee, asked medical students to let her know if they “feel uncomfortable” with “vocal anti Israel woke colleagues.” Photo: Obtained by The Breach
According to Eva, recent actions by some in those Facebook groups aren’t necessarily representative of the perspectives of all Jewish Canadians.
“It’s worth noting that this group is not a monolithic group,” Eva said. “I think it’s a minority of very vocal people and then a lot of people who are probably too uncomfortable to really speak out.”
Still, she said she has “never seen this level of organizing, or attempted organizing, where people are getting together and fairly publicly discussing why signing an open letter about a foreign war means that the person can’t or shouldn’t be a doctor.”
Neither Eva nor any of the other doctors, students, and lawyers interviewed by The Breach said they have seen repercussions against those in the profession who express support for Israel on social media or by signing petitions in the same way.
A crackdown across Canada
While outright suspensions for posting about Palestine online are more rare outside of Ontario, double standards for talking about Palestinians have manifested in other ways at Alberta medical schools.
About two weeks before Christmas, students and staff at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine walked out of their exam rooms to find the names of 6,500 dead Palestinians torn down from a memorial exhibit where they had been posted the night before.
The list of names of people killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, under the title of “Victims of Israeli Aggression,” was one of many exhibits in a student art show called “Disrupt & Resist” held that evening.
Medical students at the University of Calgary say this exhibit listing the names of Palestinians killed by Israel was torn down. Photo: Obtained by The Breach
A spokesperson for the University of Calgary told The Breach that, “the Dean’s Office asked a staff member to talk to organizers about removing this exhibit,” because it was “outside a teaching space” where an exam was underway.
The statement added that “any exhibit or protest that has the potential to interfere with teaching and learning needs to occur in designated spaces. This was not one of those designated spaces.”
One of the students who witnessed and complained about the incident to administration told The Breach that the same space outside the exam room also had a number of displays, including other pro-Palestine pieces, LGBTQ art, and political works including one that critiqued Canada, as part of the show. Photos shared by the student confirm this.
The list of names of dead Palestinians, however, was the only exhibit to be torn down.
While the university spokesperson insists the dean’s office had “asked a staff member to talk to organizers about removing this exhibit,” an email seen by The Breach from this staff member to the organizers reads, “I have been asked by the associate dean Bev Adams to take down the poster boards with the names on it.”
“The names of 6,500 deceased Palestinians [were] ripped in a violent way, where scraps were left on the floor, a page or two were left on the board, and they were thrown into the trash in one of the offices,” said the student, who asked that their name be kept confidential for fear of repercussions from the administration.
According to the student, complainants were told not to expect a public apology or statement about the incident from the administration. The spokesperson for the university said the dean met with student organizers of the art show that afternoon and offered an apology.
That apology, emailed to a number of students, expressed regret that the “display was taken down in the way that it was removed,” and that a “more consultative process should have been followed.”
The University of Calgary is not the only Alberta institution where instructors believe talking about Palestinians can “interfere” with teaching.
Earlier this month, an instructor in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta accidentally sent first-year students an email that was meant for faculty.
In it, she described a hypothetical situation that was meant to teach students about providing culturally sensitive care to patients from different backgrounds.
“The case used to be of a woman of Palestinian descent, however, due to conflict in the region and wanting to avoid ANY potential chance of discussion of this conflict, which could bring up emotions, I did elect to change this, making her a recent immigrant from India instead,” the professor wrote in the email.
The University of Alberta did not respond to requests for comment.
It was shocking to read for many, according to a first-year medical student at U of A.
“In medicine, we treat patients regardless of their ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and certainly regardless of political situations,” the student said. “So it’s strange that in an education setting, they can remove that learning opportunity where you can struggle with more difficult concepts.”
I come from a working-class background. My lost paid job was a teacher, substituting for a number of years before obtaining a permanent position. I obtained my doctorate in 2009. I am an unapologetic critic of capitalism and the way in which various institutions and ideologies reinforce it.
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