How a Small Canadian University Went to War on a Professor Because He Said He Stood With Israel

How One Pro-Israel Comment Led to Suspension, Defamation, and Termination at the University of Guelph-Humber

(Convocation at the University of Guelph-Humber)

There are scandals that erupt loudly, filling front pages and provoking parliamentary outrage. And then there are scandals that unfold quietly inside institutions so small that almost nobody notices.

The latter are often the more revealing.

The University of Guelph-Humber is not one of Canada’s large or prestigious public universities. It is a small joint campus operated by the University of Guelph and Humber College, with roughly 6,000 students. In most national rankings of Canadian universities, it sits near the bottom tier of the academic hierarchy.

It is not the sort of place that commands national attention.

This may explain why what happened there has received almost none.

If the same sequence of events—suspension without charges followed almost immediately by the spread of defamatory allegations of violence and safety risks—had unfolded at the University of Toronto, Harvard, McGill, or York University, it would almost certainly have triggered a serious debate about academic freedom, defamation, antisemitism, and procedural fairness in Canadian or American higher education.

Instead, it occurred at a small campus that few people outside Ontario have heard of. And so the story has largely passed unnoticed.

It begins with a professor named Paul Finlayson.

For roughly fifteen years, Finlayson taught business courses at the University of Guelph-Humber. During that time, he developed a strong reputation among students and faculty.

The campus ran a recognition program known as “shout-outs,” in which students were asked to identify their favourite professors. According to Finlayson and numerous students, every year the program was conducted, he received more votes individually than the rest of the business department combined.

He wrote four textbooks. He built courses. He stayed late, students called him on the weekend when they were jammed up on a project, his classrooms were known for their humour. His student evaluations were consistently strong. He accumulated no disciplinary record. He minded his own business.

By the ordinary standards of academic life, it had been a modestly successful and largely uneventful career. CNN was not calling for his opinion. He was not an academic star, but he was still a dependable lecturer at a small, relatively unknown university. Students frequently said his classes were the only ones in which they actually learned something.

Then came October 7.

After the Hamas massacre in Israel, Finlayson responded, as millions of people around the world did. In an online exchange with a man in Pakistan who had called for the eradication of Israel, Finlayson replied that he stood with Israel and described Hamas as Nazis, pointing out that Hamas emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood—an organization founded in 1928 that historically expressed admiration and solidarity with Hitler’s National Socialist party.

Finlayson’s comment was directed at someone with no connection to his university.

Finlayson says he still has no idea how the exchange reached the University of Guelph-Humber administration.

But once it began, events at the heavily Muslim campus moved quickly. He was suspended almost immediately, without charges or explanation. At the time, he had no idea that a routine social media post had set such dire machinery in motion.

Criticism of an organization designated as a terrorist group by the Canadian government was unacceptable at the University of Guelph-Humber. Even more striking, Finlayson’s own union local, OPSEU 562—an organization to which he had paid thousands of dollars in mandatory dues for representation—treated such criticism as a “hate crime.”

On November 27, 2023, the University of Guelph-Humber Assistant Vice Provost (AVP), George Bragues, acting at the direction of his superior, Vice Provost Melanie Spence Ariemma, immediately removed Finlayson from campus without providing any clear explanation. The only communication from the AVP was a casual comment that the reason was related to what Finlayson had said on social media, though Baragues said he knew no more than that and noted that he was simply following orders.

Finlayson was then instructed not to contact students, staff, or faculty. Humber College Public Safety and university counsel would follow with repeated letters warning him not to communicate with anyone—effectively imposing what he later came to believe was an unlawful communication ban.

When someone is forcibly silenced in this way, it becomes extremely difficult to defend oneself.

Finlayson says that, after he was suspended, it felt almost surreal. Within hours, students began contacting him—confused, alarmed, and asking what on earth had happened. Why wasn’t he attending his classes?

But that was not their most important question; students reported that staff and faculty approached them on the floor of Guelph Humber’s single four-story building and repeated an extraordinary story about an incident that had supposedly led to Finlayson’s removal.

The story being circulated was that Finlayson had been arrested on campus, handcuffed by police, and taken away to jail after assaulting a student. There was only one version - the student’s shirt had been torn, and the scene had ended with the professor dramatically led away in handcuffs. They also said that Finlayson has had many criminal encounters like this in the last five years.

The tale was remarkable for its sheer absurdity. Finlayson was known among students as one of the mildest-mannered professors on campus. He had never even raised his voice in class. There wasn’t even a seed of truth; it wasn’t gossip, it was manufactured and sharply focused, deliberate character assassination.

He had said he stood with Israel, and the weight of the small university collapsed on him; it was a sin they deemed unforgivable.

The staff were pulling students aside aggressively and repeating the same story. ‘Finlayson had been arrested, handcuffed and taken off to jail.’

“It was surreal,” Finlayson said. “I had never even met the new Vice-Provost. I had no communication with the union. I kept my head down, focused on teaching my students, and then one morning the institution—apparently led by this VP and her professor friend Wael Ramadan—declared war on me.”

Below are screenshots showing Humber College staff communicating with students, repeating the criminal and reputation-destroying libel against Finlayson, along with a message from a supportive student who informed Finlayson that faculty members were also repeating the “assault” story about him to classes.

So, within hours of Finlayson’s suspension, false and destructive narratives had gone directly from senior management to faculty and staff, apparently with the directive to aggressively propagate the defamation.

Notably, these events occurred four weeks before Finlayson was even informed of the official allegations against him.

The allegation was not merely inaccurate. It was entirely fabricated. A few students who actually knew Finlayson apparently laughed when they heard it, but its destructive march proceeded with steely determination.

There had been no assault. There had been no arrest. There had been no handcuffs. There hadn’t even been a raised voice. Finlayson had been thrown off campus directly after his meeting with the AVP.

Finlayson said he was thrown by the sheer absurdity of the story, but he also observed that a certain schadenfreude—the pleasure some take in seeing others brought low—seemed to be in full force.

Despite the lack of evidence and the fact that the campus is covered in cameras, most eagerly consumed the rumour. Students were reported to be excited; they may have never met Finlayson, but they were jumping on desks, proclaiming to professors and whoever would listen that it was true, there were witnesses.

It was the biggest news to hit Guelph-Humber in years.

Except it was a deliberately invented lie. And a lie that could have only started in the executive suite.

Within a few weeks, Finlayson was told that the story had already hardened into campus folklore—the sort of tale that, repeated often enough, quietly promotes itself from gossip to “fact.”

In academia, a reputation is normally built slowly, layer by careful layer, through years of teaching, research, and course development. Yet the edifice he had spent years constructing was undone in a matter of weeks, buried under a rumour that had been repeated so frequently it began to masquerade as history.

Defamation, particularly when those in authority decline to correct the record, spreads with remarkable efficiency. Epidemiologists use models to track the transmission of disease; a similar approach can be used to model the spread of defamatory content within a small institution.

Here, the conditions were ideal: management offered no correction, the accused was harshly muzzled, the story circulated in a single building, students shared common spaces and study areas, and the narrative was repeated by figures of authority. Under those conditions, the rumour did exactly what such rumours tend to do—it spread.

Some students said they tried to challenge the claims, but their efforts went nowhere. The rumour was being repeated by authority figures who invoked unnamed witnesses and hinted at inside knowledge. It was unstoppable.

Yet the allegation had an obvious problem. Modern campuses are filled with students carrying phones capable of recording anything that happens around them. If such a dramatic event had actually occurred, it would almost certainly have been captured and circulated instantly.

And on that same day, another disturbing piece of information reached Finlayson.

A student sent Finlayson a screenshot of a message from a staff member stating that a senior administrator had told them that he would be fired no matter what happened. Any forthcoming due process was already being proclaimed a fiction.

So, the verdict came weeks before even a hint of adjudication. Warnings from university lawyers and Public Safety followed, all threatening Finlayson with unspecified financial penalties if he spoke to anyone about the matter.

When Finlayson desperately asked staff to stop lying, he received no response, only a threat from the Humber Public Safety Manager that if he asked anyone else to stop slandering him, she would call the police and have him charged with Criminal Harassment. It amounted to an illicit gag order.

The university even maintained a Police Foundations program, and several faculty members were former police officers with extensive connections, which lent an air of seriousness to the threat.

The irony was stark: while a completely fabricated criminal story about Finlayson circulated freely, the university warned that if he asked those spreading the false allegations to stop, he could himself be accused of harassment and face disciplinary consequences.

In other words, the rumour could travel unchallenged, but the attempt to defend oneself risked punishment.

Finlayson had not yet received any charges.

Yet on the very day he was suspended—without any charges—Finlayson was informed by colleagues that his termination had already been decided. At the same time, a staff member (who was also a student) told another student—an exchange captured in the screenshot above—that senior administration had determined he would be fired regardless of the outcome. In that same communication, she repeated claims that he had a supposed five-year history of criminal conduct. These allegations were also circulating more broadly among staff and faculty.

As a final blow, the president of his local union, OPSEU 562, informed him that, based on its communications with management, it regarded him as guilty of a hate crime. Of course, the union kept its communications with management secret; their odd political partnership was formed that day.

It was, to put it mildly, not a good day for Professor Finlayson.

Only four weeks after this suspension and precisely one minute after the university closed for the winter break, Finlayson received notice of a human rights complaint filed against him by Vice-Provost Melanie Spence-Ariemma. She was the top administrator, a functional president of the university.

As he suspected by this point, the complaint cited his remark describing Hamas as Nazis and alleged that, because of that statement, he posed a safety risk to students. It further claimed that his comments had offended all Muslims and stated that both Spence-Ariemma and an accuser in the human rights complaint, her longtime faculty colleague Dr. Wael Ramadan, regarded Finlayson as a threat to campus safety or claimed that an unknown student or parents had said this.

Finlayson stayed home from a long-awaited family vacation, desperately trying to defend his reputation and the false charges that staff, faculty and management had so thickly spread throughout the campus.

Finlayson says he immediately noticed what he considered a suspicious detail in the human rights complaint filed by Spence-Ariemma. The allegations echoed the defamatory rumours that had begun circulating among staff and faculty four weeks previously, on the very day he was suspended.

The narrative spreading across campus—that he was absent due to criminal misconduct rather than a management decision—mirrored the language of the Human Rights Complaint almost exactly.

In Finlayson’s view, the rumours had effectively supplied a storyline that the complaint then adopted, with repeated references to “safety,” “violence,” and “threats.”

Using a form of probability analysis known as Bayesian reasoning—a method that evaluates how likely an explanation is based on the pattern and timing of available evidence—the analysis suggested roughly a ninety-five percent probability that the defamatory narrative spreading across campus and the human rights complaint filed by the Vice-Provost originated from the same source.

Bayesian logic works by weighing competing explanations against the evidence. When highly unusual claims—such as allegations of criminal violence—suddenly appear in the same time frame and use overlapping language, the method asks how likely it is that they arose independently versus from a common origin. In this case, the statistical pattern strongly favoured the latter explanation: that the rumour circulating among staff and faculty and the later formal complaint were not separate developments but part of the same informational source.

The conclusion is not presented as an accusation but as a probabilistic inference based on the observable pattern of how the information appeared and spread.

It is not courtroom proof.

But it raises a troubling question.

If students did not invent the story, and if staff and faculty were repeating it within hours after the suspension, where did it originate? The pattern strongly points to an internal source.

For the next few months, Finlayson existed in a bureaucratic limbo: suspended, publicly accused, prohibited from speaking to colleagues, and desperately fighting to protect his reputation and career.

Eventually, the university hired an external investigator.

Finlayson describes the investigator’s report, which took over a year to produce, as comic in its defects.

Howard Levitt — one of Canada’s most prominent labour lawyers — has famously described external workplace investigators as “firing squads.” ¹investigators brought in not to determine the truth but to confirm the conclusions management already wants. Finlayson says his case perfectly illustrates that description. He received a little over an hour of meeting time, no phone calls, and no follow-up in one year of ‘investigation.’

Much of the time involved the investigator badgering him and defending the man of thousands of anti-Semitic posts, the management’s favourite Islamist, Dr. Wael Ramadan, a man who posted 25 times a day across social platforms, almost exclusively vicious attacks on Jews and Israel.

Ramadan would post pictures of Jews with Hitler mustaches drawn on them and accused Jews of being behind any damaging movement, accusing Jews at one point of causing the Holodomor, the starvation in the Ukraine and Russia caused by Stalin’s forced industrialization.

Defence witnesses put forward by Finlayson were ignored, exculpatory evidence was dismissed, and the investigator’s conclusions seemed to mirror slander that was already circulating within management. The allegations contained no evidence, no names, no times or dates, and no clearly identified accusers. Hearsay was treated as gospel, and the investigator issued an open invitation to anyone who had ever had a beef with Finlayson to step forward and anonymously attack him.

As a result, Finlayson says he still does not know—and likely never will—whether most of the alleged complainants actually existed or were invented by the Human Rights Manager, the investigator, or recruited by Ramadan, the VP, or an unknown individual.

What he finds particularly strange is the claim that multiple students supposedly reported feeling physically unsafe after hearing that a professor had described Hamas as Nazis.

Finlayson filed an appeal challenging the report. The university’s response was astonishing. The appeal was returned to him unread. His union local, OPSEU 562, had long since stepped aside, refusing to represent him, as their hard political stance against Israel made him unsuitable for union representation.

Aside from the kindness of random Jewish strangers, a few faculty and the odd Jewish students, he had been abandoned. He was not allowed to hire a lawyer; the union still controlled his fate even though they had renounced his rights as a member.

While Finlayson was being investigated for a single pro-Israel comment, another professor at the university and coincidentally a co-accuser in the internal human rights complaint against him was a Dr. Wael Ramadan, a prominent Palestinian in his community, a man who had been long accused of running down Jews in the classroom and whose social media was a veritable river of anti semitic and hate propaganda sewage.

Ramadan bragged to students that he would make sure Finlayson got fired. Over 75,000 persons were solicited via organizations like StopZionistHate, and the hysteria, gossip and malice reached Salem proportions. Finlayson began to get threatening messages at home; his family and children were frightened, and he installed more cameras.

Of course, Ramadan had never met Finlayson or made any attempt to communicate.

Screenshots below show several of Ramadan’s posts, and others include descriptions of Zionists as devil worshippers, Holocaust inversion imagery, and repeated anti-Jewish rhetoric.

No action was taken against Ramadan by the university. Professor Ramadan, it turned out, was a longtime colleague of Spence-Ariemma.

The conspiracy was beginning to unravel.

The psychological toll on Finlayson and his family was severe.

Finlayson’s workplace safety claim for PTSD or trauma-related injury related to the institutional treatment was eventually approved by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.

(Examples of accuser Ramadan’s public posts on Israel, all Humber College Human Rights Department approved)

Despite the volume and severity of these posts, there is no evidence that Ramadan faced any investigation or disciplinary action. As far as Finlayson knows, he is still teaching both at Guelph-Humber and Sheridan College. They have never spoken.

Meanwhile, Finlayson remained suspended, gagged, and under investigation. The contrast could hardly be sharper.

The institutional pressure on Finlayson continued.

More threats from university lawyers. His access to university systems was revoked. His office was entered, and materials were removed. Once again, the union said it was on management's side, and Finlayson found out only through a loyal student. His papers, collections from his late father who had passed away just before the affair started, were damaged and returned to him only after Finlayson threatened to have the College charged with theft.

The suspension lasted 20 months, ending in July 2025, and culminated in his termination, delivered via a cold-hearted email that simply stated he was fired. No evidence was included.

Finlayson had only one official chance to give a defence, a mandated disciplinary /judicial hearing carved into the collective agreement, but it was cancelled without explanation. The union refused again to enforce the collective agreement.

Another institutional actor then reentered the story: Finlayson’s own union.

According to Finlayson, that support never arrived. He says the president of OPSEU Local 562 told him on the first day of the suspension that describing Hamas as Nazis constituted a hate crime.

After that conversation, Finlayson says the president never spoke substantially with him again.

Today, the conflict has evolved into proceedings before the Ontario Labour Relations Board.

Finlayson has filed a Duty of Fair Representation complaint against OPSEU Local 562. He argues that the union abandoned him, aligned itself with management, and formally withdrew representation many months before he was terminated, refusing to file grievances or pursue pay and benefits, and that all this was bad faith because they could not abide Finlayson’s support for Israel.

Indeed, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) in 2024 filed a human rights complaint against OPSEU on behalf of Jewish union members, with charges of anti-Semitism being put forward against the union.²

Certainly, OPSEU had a public record of being very anti-Israel, with demands that Israel be boycotted, divested of and sanctioned.

Finlayson says Humber College and OPSEU Local 562 are now doing exactly what the university did earlier — conducting what he calls trial by defamation. Statements and filings, he says, repeat damaging characterizations rather than address the facts.

“It’s painful,” he says. “It’s the same playbook all over again.”

The case now pits Finlayson against a combined institutional force of lawyers representing Humber College and the union.

Finlayson says one kind Jewish lawyer has said she will accompany him to his hearing.

The legal battle has dragged on for well past two years and, according to Finlayson, has already cost the institutions involved well over a million dollars in legal fees, investigations, administrative proceedings, and other costs.

Yet the central issue remains simple.

After fifteen years of teaching, four textbooks, and a reputation as one of the most popular professors on campus, Finlayson was suspended, gagged, investigated, and dismissed. The reason given was that his statements poisoned the work environment.

Those statements consisted of saying he stood with Israel and that Hamas were Nazis.

Finlayson says he has no regrets. He remembers visiting Dachau and Auschwitz as a teenager. He is not Jewish. But he remembers the history. The pogroms. The expulsions. The Holocaust.

“I can look my children in the eye,” he says. “And I can look my Jewish friends in the eye.”

What he cannot understand is how a Canadian university turned a political remark into a witch hunt against him, noting that although his guilt is not determined by drowning him and seeing if he floats, the accused witches in Salem were at least allowed to face their accusers.

He says not one of the administrators involved has ever spoken to him directly. Not one of them has looked him in the eye, spoken on the phone or responded to an email.

Communication has come only through lawyers and investigators, and the substance of that communication has largely consisted of warnings and threats instructing him not to discuss his case with anyone.

It suggests there may be much they prefer to keep out of view.

As for the proceedings now underway at the Ontario Labour Relations Board, Finlayson says he approaches them with realism rather than optimism.

“I have faith in a just God,” he says. “But I have lost faith in our judicial, human-rights, and labour relations systems. I doubt the full truth on this will ever come out; they seem very committed to keeping it buried.”

In academia, it is guilty until proven innocent, and if they don’t want you found innocent, you will remain guilty.

“Truth is not part of the procedural recipe they use to cook up their rulings,” Finlayson said. “The language of bad faith is so subjective that it is unfalsifiable.”

“I have no appeal rights, or at least no rights that don’t mean I have to spend $70,000. The standards are incredibly subjective. And the odds for anyone standing with Jews or Israel at institutions like the HRTO or the Labour Board and getting a fair hearing are slim. It’s 2026, and Jews in Canada are by far the most persecuted religious group. Yet universities like the University of Guelph-Humber still prattle on about Islamophobia.”

Finlayson says walking into the labour board hearing feels less like entering a court of justice and more like walking into a casino. And the broader context surrounding these events has grown darker.

Across Canada in recent months, synagogues have been shot at. Jewish schools have been targeted. A restaurant owned by one of Finlayson’s Jewish friends was recently shot up.

“These are terrifying things to see happening in this country,” he says. “I guess I should be thankful nobody has shot up my house.”

For Finlayson, the legal proceedings now unfolding practically represent the final institutional avenue available to him. Beyond that, he says, the options are limited.

“This has dragged on for well over two years,” he says. “It’s difficult to know that two multi-million dollar organizations have you in their crosshairs. They want to do harm to my family and me; that is clear, and it is psychologically devastating. I just wanted to write and teach.

After an industry career, I had discovered at 45 something that I loved, teaching and writing, and because I said I stood with Israel, it was taken from me, and that was not enough; they needed to deliberately destroy my reputation.”

But the questions raised by the case will not easily disappear.

How did a professor/lecturer with fifteen years of exemplary teaching suddenly become a supposed danger to students overnight?

Was the right person fired?

The university admitted years after circulating false charges that the criminal charges were entirely without merit, but never admitted that they could have logically originated only in the management suite. Why did the university wait years to correct the record, after all the damage was done, and then offer no public retraction?

Why did a narrative of criminality begin circulating weeks before he had even been informed of any charges? Within hours of the VP putting charges forward?

How could a single Vice-Provost, spending or initiating the spending of hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds, wage such an intense campaign against a lone professor she had never met and had never spoken to—and why was she so determined to break him and his family financially, psychologically, and reputationally?

Why could she not once listen or speak to him?

What kind of university traffics in defaming their faculty, inventing false charges, all because they don’t like someone’s stance on Israel? Such underhanded behaviour sounds like something that might happen in the 1930s in the longshoreman’s union, but at a university?

Why did another stranger, Prof. Wael Ramadan, also team up with the VP and the university to effectively declare war against Finlayson? Why was Ramadan protected?

And why did a senior administrator on campus declare that Finlayson would be fired before any investigation had even begun?

Was the wrong person fired over this entire scandal?

Readers may draw their own conclusions.

But the episode raises troubling questions about the state of Canadian institutions: how can a small university and its college partner—remarkably acting in tandem with its faculty union, OPSEU—so thoroughly devastate the career of a single professor and continue attacking him even months after his termination?

All of this, Finlayson says, began because he told a stranger unconnected to the university that he stood with Israel and that supporting Hamas meant standing with Nazis.

He has no regrets. But after nearly two and a half years, he sometimes wonders whether the nightmare will ever truly end. His family certainly hopes it will.

At sixty-one, in a weakening economy, he will try to find more teaching work. Yet with a reputation so thoroughly damaged, the prospects are faint. The same group that helped bring about his dismissal at Guelph-Humber also pursued him at another university where he taught part-time. Recently, that institution informed him there would be no work for him this summer.

Support for Israel is not a fashionable position on many Canadian campuses, and expressing it openly can quickly become a career-limiting move.

And so the episode may fade, as many things do in small institutions: quietly and without scrutiny. The University of Guelph-Humber is neither large nor widely known, and it rarely attracts national attention. Perhaps that is why the affair has passed with so little notice. In a place small enough to escape the spotlight, even something this extraordinary can unfold while the wider world barely glances in its direction.

But stories have a way of travelling through quieter channels. If this one moves through Substack and the informal networks of private social media, it may yet find a larger audience.

Feel free to share it if you wish. One clings to the faint hope that enough people—or perhaps even one person possessed of genuine authority and a functioning conscience—might read it and decide that Jewish students and staff at the University of Guelph-Humber ought not to feel compelled to conceal their Jewishness simply to avoid trouble.

For fairness’s sake, any responses from the legal teams at OPSEU, Humber College, or the University of Guelph will be posted on my Substack. Stay tuned.

PART II comes out today

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1. https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/howard-levitt-investigations-workplace-firing-184412694.html

2. https://www.cija.ca/unionized_jewish_employees_taking_opseu_to_ontario_human_rights_tribunal