To Canadian cops, Hank Idsinga is a legend: a by-the-book Toronto homicide investigator who has worked on some of the most challenging and heartbreaking murders in the history of Canada’s largest city.
To Torontonians, he is remembered as one of the public faces of Project Prism, an investigation that brought Bruce McArthur, a prolific serial killer who targeted men in Toronto’s Gay Village, to justice. Prism shone an often unflattering light on relationships between the LGBTQ community and the Toronto Police Service (TPS), but Idsinga stood out as a sympathetic, principled, and entirely committed public servant who fought against injustice from within the system.
And that’s what comes out in Idsinga’s memoir, The High Road. His plain spoken prose belies tremendous empathy for all the lost souls he has encountered over a career — first as a beat cop, then as a detective. He honours the victims (especially the children), the people dealt a losing hand by circumstance, the families destroyed by violence, and the fellow cops who looked into the abyss and never came back. Plainly put, Idsinga, now retired, is a mensch.
He also has a fascinating backstory — Idsinga’s grandfather, Arthur Jacobs, was a German Jew and decorated veteran of the First World War who married a German Catholic woman. After Kristallnacht, Arthur’s status as a “privileged Jew” (a recipient of the Iron Cross, married to a non-Jew) was voided and he ended up being sent to the gas chambers. Arthur’s three children, including Leni — Idsinga’s mother — were hidden by Catholic nuns in a Dutch orphanage during the war. Leni became part of the massive postwar Dutch emigration to Canada, where she met and married Idsinga’s father, Ids Jan. In a poignant aside, Idsinga reveals that he wears cufflinks engraved with his grandfather’s tattooed concentration camp number.
Idsinga is private about his faith and his culture, but he fully acknowledges how the past has shaped him. “The intergenerational trauma from wartime experiences is very real…” he says, “Like most other Holocaust descendants, I had…dreams in my childhood — nightmares interspersed with images of gas chambers and swastikas.”
This trauma, and the sense of mission it engendered within him, is what led Idsinga to a career in policing. It is also what has given him an acute ear for bigotry within that world and against marginalized communities, such as the LGBTQ population, people of color, and Jews. Idsinga alludes to various antisemitic incidents carried out by senior TPS officers against members of the Toronto Jewish community and also fellow officers.
Antisemitism in Canada is at a frightening level. Police-reported hate crimes targeting Jews have increased by more than 70% since October 7, 2023. As Idsinga himself acknowledges, any police service reflects the society it polices. But if, as he implies, a particularly vicious form of antisemitism is part of the command culture at TPS, then Toronto’s Jews — and, by extension, Canadian Jews — are facing a serious problem.
Angus Smith is a retired Canadian intelligence official, writer and Jewish educator who lives in rural Nova Scotia.
