Paul Finlayson #

Introduction #

Paul Finlayson is a Canadian business-faculty professor who says he was fired from the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto for defending Israel online. According to Finlayson’s account to Fox News Digital, he lost his job after taking a strong stance about the massacre and kidnapping of Israelis and foreigners — including Americans and Canadians — in a LinkedIn reply posted in November 2023, as antisemitism surged across Canada following Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. The words that ended his career were his own, published under his own name, and the discipline that followed rested on an internal harassment investigation rather than any public statement from the university, which declined to answer questions about his case.

Background Information #

Finlayson taught on the business faculty at the University of Guelph-Humber, a Toronto institution, and describes himself as non-Jewish. By his account, he was popular in the classroom: he said he was “very well-liked” by students, who ranked him among the highest in the business department faculty, and that his academic work included formulating courses and writing textbooks. The backdrop to his case was the wave of antisemitism that followed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack, which killed around 1,200 people in Israel with roughly 250 taken hostage; Canada, like the United States, designates Hamas as a terror group. B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights later recorded 6,800 antisemitic incidents in the country in 2025 — a 9.4% increase over 2024 and the “highest volume” the group has recorded since it began tracking.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation #

Allegations. The account here is largely Finlayson’s own, told to Fox News Digital; the discipline rested on a discrimination and harassment complaint resolved through an internal investigation whose findings appear in his termination letter. Nothing was criminally charged or adjudicated in court, and the University of Guelph-Humber has not publicly stated its side.

The triggering post came in November 2023, when Finlayson replied on LinkedIn to an overseas educator who he said was “calling for the eradication of Israel.” The thread’s author later deleted his post and all corresponding comments, but the National Post quoted Finlayson’s response in a December 2023 article, and students found the reply before the thread was erased. In it, Finlayson wrote: “If you say ‘from the River to the Sea’, you’re a Nazi,” adding: “I’m not neutral. I stand with Israel. I stand against antisemites who want nothing but dead Jews: who take millions from their education and health care budgets and spend it on making war…You stand with Palestine means you stand with Hitler. You don’t want peace, you want dead Jews…They murdered 1,400 innocents and took 250 hostages and the people celebrated rapist monsters as heroes.”

The discovery of the reply led to outcry among students. Finlayson said that while he was meeting with a student in his office on Nov. 27, an administrator waited outside, eventually presenting him with a suspension letter. A copy of the letter, provided by Finlayson, cites “inappropriate online comments” and places him “on leave pending the outcome of the investigation”; it also directed him not to contact “any of your departmental staff or students or broader members of the [university].” According to the termination letter Finlayson provided, after a “formal complaint of discrimination and harassment,” an investigator found his “conduct violated the Ontario Human Rights Code and Humber’s Human Rights and Harassment Policy, and that [he] engaged in reprisal under both of those instruments.” Humber’s harassment policy warns that anyone who attempts Reprisal “may be subject to disciplinary action” and says the school upholds “the right to equal treatment without Discrimination” on prohibited grounds that include antisemitism.

Public Reaction and Consequences #

Finlayson says the post made him the target of a campaign that damaged his professional standing and job prospects, and that rumors about the accusations against him destroyed his academic reputation. “My trial has been by defamation, and it continues by defamation,” he said of what he called the “Kafkaesque” situation. He says his union, OPSEU Local 562, refused to represent him; the union did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

The university’s side of the story is absent from the record: the University of Guelph-Humber did not respond to Fox News Digital’s questions about the suspension, the investigation and the firing, or about whether anti-Israel posts shared by its students and a University of Guelph professor violated the Humber policy. Fox’s reporting also noted material Finlayson considers comparable but untreated: the University of Guelph’s “UofGforPalestine” Instagram page, which describes itself as the account of “students, staff, and faculty who stand in solidarity with Palestine,” shared posts bearing the inverted red triangle Hamas uses to mark targets, and in November 2024 shared photos of a guillotine that appeared on a walking path in Guelph with the stated message “Death to empire, death to colonialism and imperialism, death to the war machine.” A University of Guelph-Humber professor whom Finlayson believes brought the case against him has posted on his own LinkedIn account calling Israel a “terrorist state” and stating the world “cannot have both” peace and Israel; that professor did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment, and the belief that he instigated the complaint is Finlayson’s own, unverified.

Current Status #

Finlayson was officially fired by the university in July 2025, roughly twenty months after the LinkedIn reply. No criminal charge was ever involved; the termination followed the internal complaint-and-investigation track described in his termination letter, and the university has offered no public account of its decision. Fox’s reporting placed his case inside a wider Canadian moment of record antisemitic incidents, while noting that three York University staffers charged in a November 2023 hate-motivated mischief case were initially suspended but that at least two appeared to still hold current university profiles as of the article’s publication.

Impact on Their Career/Life #

Finlayson says the aftermath cost him the things a teaching career is built on: his position, his professional standing, and a reputation he says rumors reduced despite years of high student rankings, course development and textbook writing. His case illustrates a version of cancellation in which the punished speech was itself a public statement of opinion rather than a leak or an exposure — quoted by a national newspaper, discovered by students, and answered with suspension and firing through a process whose findings he says he received but whose substance the institution has never defended in public. He remains, in his own telling, a man on trial by defamation.