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A supply teacher at a Thornhill, Ontario high school has been removed from teaching at the school pending an investigation after students confronted her over a Palestinian flag displayed on her laptop.

The confrontation, captured on video and shared by HonestReporting Canada, took place at Westmount Collegiate Institute, a public school in one of Canada's most heavily Jewish communities.

Hey @WCI_YRDSB, is it common practice for your teachers to provoke and create a hostile environment for their students?

Teachers are there to EDUCATE. Using classroom authority to push an anti-Israel political agenda or make Jewish students feel targeted is unacceptable.

Jewish… pic.twitter.com/GC2DHEwAnn

— HonestReporting Canada (@HonestRepCanada) October 16, 2026

In the recording, one student says 90 percent of the school is Jewish. That figure hasn’t been independently verified, but the surrounding community’s Jewish population is well established. For many of these students, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t a debate topic. Some have family in Israel. Some have family who were there on October 7.

The teacher, brought in to cover an English class, openly said she supports the Palestinian cause. When a student asked her directly whether she’s antisemitic, she said no.

She didn't take the flag down. Instead, she told the students they’re welcome to display flags of their own and invited anyone who was uncomfortable to speak with her one-on-one. Each time the students asked whether she’d remove it, she steered them back toward private conversations.

But a student’s backpack and a teacher’s desk aren’t the same thing. A teacher has authority over that room.

She also knew how charged a flag can be in a classroom. She told the students about past incidents involving tensions over flags. She brought this one anyway.

That flag was carried by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023, when they murdered around 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostages. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas’s founding charter, which it has never revoked, contains explicit antisemitic language, including a passage invoking the killing of Jews.

It’s also the official flag of the Palestinian Authority. For years, the PA ran what’s known as “pay for slay,” paying stipends to imprisoned terrorists and the families of those killed carrying out attacks. PA President Mahmoud Abbas announced in February 2025 that the program was finished. The U.S. State Department says the payments continued through new channels and under a different name. The PA denies it.

The Palestinian Authority has continued making payments to terrorists and their families, despite promises to end the pay-for-slay programs, the US State Department informed Congress last month.
✍️ @DanielleGreyman https://t.co/XDQlUx5KWz

— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) April 30, 2026

I contacted the York Region District School Board, Westmount Collegiate and the school’s trustee, Estelle Cohen.

Cohen said several parents had reached out about what she called an “extremely upsetting incident” and that she alerted senior board staff right away.

“The Board took immediate action and removed the supply teacher from the school. This case is now under investigation,” Cohen told Rebel News.

When I asked whether the teacher had been suspended from teaching anywhere in York Region or only pulled from Westmount, Cohen said:

“At this time she has been removed from teaching at Westmount, pending investigation. The Board will not release internal findings due to privacy protocol.”

So she’s out of one school. Nothing in that answer says she can’t teach at any of the board’s others. And whatever the investigation finds, the public won’t be told. Neither, it seems, will the parents who complained or the students who were in that room.

This board has addressed the issue before. In October 2024, YRDSB circulated guidance quoting Ontario’s then-education minister: “While everyone is entitled to their own political opinions, they are not entitled to disseminate political biases into our classrooms.”

So the rule already exists.

The students at Westmount asked the hard question, and they kept asking when they didn’t get an answer. Now the question is whether the York Region District School Board will show the same backbone.