OTTAWA — Canadian universities have participated in Qatar-backed research projects in scientific fields Canada classifies as sensitive, and coordinated campaigns sought to make causes including Gaza a decisive issue in the 2025 federal election, while broader Muslim voter-mobilization efforts target up to 80 ridings, according to a new report alleging that Canadian institutions have become unusually susceptible to Islamist influence.
The 200-page study, published by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, or ISGAP, argues that these developments are not isolated. It portrays them as parts of a longer campaign of Islamist “entryism”—the cultivation of influence inside democratic institutions by activists, organizations and foreign-state partners.
Among its starkest assessments is one from Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former British ambassador and senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“Amongst comparable Western countries like the U.K., France, and Australia,” Fitton-Brown said, “Canada stands out as being furthest down the road to Islamist infiltration and consolidation.”
The Bureau reviewed many of the report’s underlying citations. Several central assertions—including registered lobbying, meetings with government and security officials, election-finance filings and Qatar-backed university projects—are supported by public records or fit within a broader body of confirmed reporting.
The records do not, by themselves, prove the report’s more sweeping conclusions. But some of its stronger arguments assert that Canadian organizations are influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, that Qatar financed particular projects to alter Canadian policy or campus discourse, and that advocacy against Islamophobia could constrain legitimate national-security scrutiny.
ISGAP places this activity within a longer strategy of targeted electoral leverage. It says one principal Muslim voter-mobilization organization identified between 60 and 80 federal constituencies where the Muslim population approached or exceeded the previous margin of victory, concentrating its efforts in ridings where a coordinated voting bloc could exert outsized influence.
During the 2025 campaign, the report says, more than 100 Muslim organizations supported a declaration presenting unified voting as a “collective responsibility,” while candidates in 45 ridings were endorsed according to their positions on Gaza, Islamophobia and related policy commitments.
The report further asserts that leadership links connect these voter-mobilization organizations to a broader network of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned institutions. It notes that a director of one organization formerly led a national Muslim civil-liberties group, while the executive director of another previously served as foreign-affairs secretary to Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s former president and a longtime Muslim Brotherhood leader.
Several directors, ISGAP says, have simultaneously held positions within a major Canadian Muslim charity.
ISGAP describes itself as nonpartisan and dedicated to academic research on contemporary antisemitism. Its leadership has included—and continues to include—former Israeli officials.
The report argues that the Muslim Brotherhood’s approach to Western democracies is not conventional integration but tamkeen—the gradual accumulation of influence and authority through institutional entrenchment. It traces this strategy to two foundational texts, The Project and the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum, the latter of which explicitly includes Canada in a North American campaign conducted “from within existing societal structures.”
What appears outwardly as moderation and adaptation to Western culture, democratic norms and laws is therefore portrayed by ISGAP as covert, long-term positioning.
The machinery operates across four mutually reinforcing fronts, according to ISGAP: controlling narratives around Islamism, Palestine and Islamophobia; embedding interconnected networks inside charities, schools, universities and professional bodies; translating that presence into political mobilization and policy outcomes; and using litigation and reputational pressure to raise the cost of scrutiny.
Qatar supplies the state-level infrastructure and funding in ISGAP’s telling, that allows the strategy to operate at a scale unavailable to a non-state movement.
Canada’s central failure, according to the report, is its refusal to examine that system as a whole.
It points to government reviews and investigations into Muslim Brotherhood-aligned networks in the United States, France, Britain and Austria.
But Canada, it says, has undertaken no equivalent inquiry “at any level,” despite being explicitly identified in the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum.
The result is a national-security blind spot in which Canadian institutions address individual charities, grants, advocacy campaigns and controversies separately, while overlooking the coordinated strategy that allegedly connects them, according to ISGAP.
One of the report’s most consequential sections probes concerns over Qatar’s relationships with Canadian universities.
