THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RIGHTS
EVIDENCE
VANCOUVER, Wednesday, September 7, 2022
The Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights met this day at 9:10 a.m. [PT] to examine such issues as may arise from time to time relating to human rights generally.
Senator Salma Ataullahjan (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good morning. I am Salma Ataullahjan, a senator from Toronto and chair of this committee.
Today we’re conducting a meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights, and I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the members of the committee who are participating in this meeting. We have Senator Arnot from Saskatchewan, Senator Busson from British Columbia and Senator Jaffer from British Columbia.
Having held two meetings in June in Ottawa, today we are continuing our study on Islamophobia in Canada under a general order of reference. Our study will cover, amongst other matters, the role of Islamophobia with respect to online and offline violence against Muslims, gender discrimination, as well as discrimination in employment including Islamophobia in the federal public service. Our study will also examine the source of Islamophobia, its impact on individuals, including mental and physical safety, and possible solutions and government responses.
We are pleased to be here in Vancouver and to hear from witnesses about Islamophobia in this part of the country. This is the first of our public hearings outside of Ottawa. Tomorrow we will be in Edmonton, and in two weeks, we shall be in Quebec City and Toronto.
Let me provide some details about our meeting today. This morning we shall have two one-hour panels with a number of witnesses who have been invited. In each panel, we shall hear from the witnesses, and then the senators will have a question-and-answer session. There will be a short break around 11:00 a.m.
In addition, the committee has set aside some time at the end of the morning to hear some short five-minute interventions from members of the public but without a question-and-answer session. If you would like to participate in that part of the meeting, you need to register beforehand with the committee staff sitting at the table just outside of the room.
Before we hear from our first witnesses, the committee needs to deal with two housekeeping motions.
The first motion we need is about quorum because not all committee members are travelling. The motion is:
That notwithstanding usual practice, pursuant to Rule 12-17, the committee be authorized to hold meetings without quorum on September 7, 8, 20, 21 and 22, 2022, for the purpose of receiving evidence, provided that two committee members are present.
Senator Arnot, are you prepared to make that motion?
Senator Arnot: I make that motion. Thank you.
The Chair: All in favour? Thank you.
Secondly, we need a motion permitting photography during the meeting:
That the committee allow electronic, photographic media of its public meetings in Vancouver, Edmonton, Quebec City, and Toronto with as little disruption of its meeting as possible.
Senator Busson, are you prepared to move this motion?
Senator Busson: Yes, I am, Madam Chair.
The Chair: All in favour? Thank you.
Before we begin our first panel, I will ask Senator Jaffer to come forward. As you know, I am in an advisory role with the NCCM, so I have a declaration of conflict of interest and, therefore, will not chair this panel. Our deputy chair, Senator Bernard, is not travelling with us, so Senator Jaffer has graciously agreed to assume the chair for this portion of today’s hearing of our study.
Senator Mobina Jaffer (Acting Chair) in the chair.
The Chair: Thank you for your confidence, Senator Ataullahjan.
I shall now introduce our first panel of witnesses. We have one witness, and he has five minutes to speak. I’d like to introduce Mr. Kashif Ahmed, the board chairman of the National Council of Canadian Muslims. Mr. Ahmed has spent a lot of time on this issue. He’s well known for his very active work on this issue to make us all equal Canadians.
Mr. Ahmed, it’s an absolute honour to welcome you, and we look forward to hearing from you. You can start your presentation now. After you speak, senators will ask questions. Thank you.
Kashif Ahmed, Board Chairman, National Council of Canadian Muslims: Thank you, Senator Jaffer.
Good morning, Madam Chair and honourable senators. I begin by acknowledging that I’m joining you today from the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Nations. I thank the committee for the invitation to appear before you and for initiating this landmark study of Islamophobia in Canada.
I serve as the chair of the board of directors of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, and by background, I am a corporate lawyer and a resident of Metro Vancouver.
Very briefly, the NCCM is an independent, non-partisan and national advocacy organization. Our mission is to protect Canadian human rights and civil liberties, to challenge discrimination and Islamophobia, to build mutual understanding and to articulate the public concerns of Canadian Muslim communities. The NCCM has a long-standing track record of working with all levels of government and with community partners to advance effective and meaningful public policies that ensure a more just Canada for all and that uphold our constitutional rights and freedoms.
As I think about why we are here today discussing Islamophobia, I am reminded of the unmistakable fact that Canada has become the leading country among the G7 for targeted killings of Muslims motivated by Islamophobia. Violent Islamophobia across Canada is extremely dangerous and requires a whole-of-government approach. From the Quebec City mosque attack to the London attack to the IMO mosque attack in the Greater Toronto area, Canadian Muslims have witnessed ugly violence directed against them because of their faith identity. We have also seen violent attacks against Black Muslim women in Edmonton and the street harassment of Muslim women in Vancouver.
That says nothing, however, about systemic Islamophobia and how it affects Canadian Muslims every day — such as how Canadian financial institutions have “de-banked” mosques and local charities without transparency and without recourse or how government agencies and security bodies have a history of disproportionately targeting Canadian Muslims.
Just over one year ago, the federal government hosted the National Summit on Islamophobia in the aftermath of the devastating terrorist attack in Ontario that claimed the lives of several members of the Afzaal family. After conducting extensive consultations with the Muslim communities from coast to coast in the prelude to the summit, NCCM put forward 61 policy recommendations for adoption by various levels of government to address Islamophobia in both its violent and systematic forms. A total of 35 recommendations were directed to the federal government, 19 were directed at provincial governments and 7 were directed at the municipal level.
Recently, the NCCM released an accountability report, one year after the Islamophobia summit. As part of that report, which I have with me here today, we have documented that 27 of our recommendations have been addressed by different levels of government. Although much has been done, much more remains.
At the federal level, the creation of the Office of the Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia, the listing of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups as terrorist entities and the commitment to the creation of an oversight body for the CBSA are some of the recommendations that have been implemented.
Here in British Columbia, the provincial government has committed to introducing new anti-racism legislation that will push for an equitable society for all people regardless of their race, skin colour or faith. We look forward to working with the B.C. government in making that legislation a reality.
In terms of next steps, we emphasize that Islamophobia deserves not simply study but action from this chamber. As we look ahead, NCCM strongly urges this committee to put forward the following policy recommendations: first, the creation of a freestanding provision in the Criminal Code to mandate a special process to deal with hate crimes, including stiffer penalties for violent offenders and a rehabilitation path for young offenders or those who can benefit; second, a reform of the Security Infrastructure Program to streamline funding for places of worship; and third and last, an investment in anti-Islamophobia public service announcements to educate the larger public and help drive behavioural changes.
Subject to the committees’ questions, those are my submissions today. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Ahmed, for your presentation.
I’m going to move to questions, but having read your presentation, I’m just making a remark that I’m sure NCCM knows how many times you recommend things before things will happen, but I see that a number of your recommendations have been put in place, so congratulations for that.
Senator Arnot: Welcome to the committee, Mr. Ahmed. I’m very pleased to meet you here this morning and very pleased to know that you’re a Saskatchewan Roughrider fan, born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, and a graduate of the College of Law at the University of Saskatchewan. We have a big connection.
I am aware of the work of the National Council of Canadian Muslims in my role as chief commissioner of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission. I did a lot of work with the executive director in the past, Mr. Ihsaan Gardee; and, of course, he came to Saskatchewan a number of times, actually, to do some work with our commission. I have respect for your organization, the work it does in the community and the advocacy that it provides to Canada, really, from your perspective.
I wanted to make a comment. You’re really keen on action, and you have three recommendations. There’s one issue I would like to raise with you and maybe get your comment on. It revolves around the power of education and providing curriculum in the grades K to 12 system in Canada to try to bring to students the concept of the rights of Canadian citizenship but also the responsibilities that come with those rights, which is a forgotten topic but probably one of the most important ones, and the fundamental responsibility to respect our fellow citizens as a duty of Canadian citizenship. I have spoken to you in the past about the Concentus Citizenship Education Foundation, and we heard evidence from Mr. Daniel Kuhlen earlier this year.
I bring that forward because my central premise is that if you want to change the culture in the community, then you should really be in the schools and working with students to ensure that they understand what it means to be a Canadian citizen and the fundamental competencies of Canadian citizenship, which, in my opinion, include the five Es, which is that all students need to be enlightened, ethical, engaged, empowered and empathetic. That empowerment does give a foundation for action in the community on these in issues in advocacy.
I know that, in the past, the National Council of Canadian Muslims has supported the Concentus materials, and I’m hoping that you may make some comment on that issue here this morning.
Mr. Ahmed: Thank you, senator, for the question.
You rightly point it out that education is at the core of this issue of how to combat Islamophobia, but racism in general and the different forms that we see of it today.
While my recommendations today were directed in particular to the Senate committee, given its federal nature, the NCCM has a whole host of recommendations that are directed at provincial governments, and one of our key asks is curriculum reform at the provincial level.
In Ontario, the NCCM was able to draft and push for a piece of a legislation called the Our London Family Act in the aftermath of the attack in London, Ontario. That act included a whole piece on reform to the education system in Ontario to speak to the very issues that you just raised today, and that is what is being taught to our children, particularly at the primary school level and the secondary school level.
We definitely take that issue to heart. We have a whole department at NCCM that’s dedicated to purely education and public schools. I think our team has visited almost every school board in Ontario at some point in the past five years, and that needs to grow to places like British Columbia, Alberta and elsewhere. There is definitely a need and desire to do that. Although I can’t comment specifically on the program that you reference that’s come from Saskatchewan, education is something that we’re looking at and something that we are committed to speaking further about.
Senator Busson: Thank you very much for being here. This is certainly a challenging and interesting time to be dealing with this incredibly important topic of Islamophobia.
I can’t resist asking a question, since you’re the chair of the national council, regarding Quebec’s Bill 21. Although it’s in Quebec, it’s been the subject in my circles and people that I exchange with. It’s been the topic of conversation since it was first introduced and through its legal wranglings and the notwithstanding clause, et cetera. I would like to get your opinion of how that act in Quebec has affected the attitudes, the goals and the objectives of your organization and certainly the view of Muslims generally across Canada.
As a secondary, but I’ll just state it now so that we can have it all on the table, amongst your recommendations and the work that you’re doing within your organization, is there anything that you see going forward that might be able to be a counter to that kind of a legislation?
Mr. Ahmed: Thank you, senator, for the question.
It goes without saying that Bill 21 in Quebec goes to the heart of NCCM’s advocacy against Islamophobia. It’s the worst-kept secret in terms of what Muslims are facing in the country today. When we speak to Quebec Muslims, Bill 21 has fundamentally changed the way they view themselves, the way they view themselves in Quebec’s society and the way they interact with Quebec’s society. It really is institutionalized second-class citizenship that a whole section of observant people of faith cannot serve in certain public sector positions in Quebec solely because of who they are and what they wear. That is a huge issue of concern. As you know, NCCM is a primary litigant in that case. The case will be heading to the Quebec Court of Appeal later this year for a hearing, and I expect that case will ultimately also end up at the Supreme Court of Canada.
What I can say, though, in terms of tangible actions that we can take against Bill 21 in terms of the federal government, is that one of our asks at the Islamophobia Summit was for the federal government to commit to intervening in the Bill 21 litigation in the event it reached the Supreme Court, and we were pleased that earlier this year Attorney General Lametti did make the commitment that when the case does reach the Supreme Court, they would intervene vis-à-vis the attorney general. That is a critical step. In our view, there must be a federal government intervention at the Supreme Court of Canada on this case. We essentially have to wait to see what the courts decide, but our organization and our communities in Quebec are committed to ensuring that Bill 21 is eventually removed.
Senator Busson: I’m wondering if you could expound a little bit on your council’s impression or its view of how this legislation is affecting Muslims and other Canadians outside of Quebec.
Mr. Ahmed: I think Bill 21 has brought home the message to Canadian Muslims writ large that their rights can be taken away very quickly and that the safety of the constitution that we thought we had can be removed with the invocation of the notwithstanding clause. That sense of being able to rely upon the constitution at this time to protect us has been damaged. The Muslim community, as well as NCCM, is watching very carefully what happens in Quebec because we fear that what’s happening in Quebec could one day, at some point down the road, also happen elsewhere in Canada. We would never want that to happen. At this point in time, we see no reason as to why that would happen, but it remains an issue of concern. It’s definitely coloured the perception of the community. It’s raised concerns. From a practical point of view, we’ve seen a number of people move out from Quebec to other parts of Canada to be able to work in their chosen profession, for example, teaching. Members of the community have interacted with Quebec Muslims who have migrated from Quebec to other parts of Canada, and they’ve heard firsthand the challenges that they face.
Bill 21 is a common conversation in our community, but we’re hopeful that, with our litigation and the various pieces of action taken by not just NCCM but our allies in the civil rights community, that we will be able to ultimately have Bill 21 removed.
Senator Busson: Thank you.
Some of the conversation I hear is that generally, for people that aren’t even directly affected but that are conscientious observers to all of this and just generally Canadians, there’s a feeling that this is fuelling the Islamophobia generally across the country. Could you make a comment about that?
Mr. Ahmed: Well, there’s no doubt that in Quebec, Bill 21 has been viewed, although Premier Legault disputes it, to allow or give a licence for people to target visible Muslims with discrimination and hate. There’s no doubt about that. We’ve seen those cases in Quebec. It’s been documented. Bill 21 has contributed to Islamophobia in Quebec. It’s contributed to the public discourse that is often negative towards Muslims in the rest of the country. There’s no doubt about that connection.
Senator Arnot: Mr. Ahmed, we’ve heard recently that fully around 80% of incidents of intimidation, harassment and violence against Muslim people in Canada and Muslim citizens in Canada is not reported. I see that you’re recommending a freestanding provision in the Criminal Code to deal with this and to have special processes to deal with hate crimes. It seems to me, and part of the foundations of this study, is that Islamophobia is not taken as seriously in this country as it should be. I’m just wondering what your thoughts are about how the Muslim community can feel more comfortable in coming forward to authorities and reporting these incidents to ensure that they’re dealt with in a more expeditious and effective manner than they have been in the past.
Mr. Ahmed: Thank you for the question.
At the NCCM, we regularly counsel our community members to report any incidents of hate or discrimination or, in the case of your question, violence or intimidation to the police. There is a history in the Muslim community of being a bit shy about reporting these types of incidents. Part of it is culture; part of it is fear; part of it also is a bit of lack of faith in police services to actually do the job. There have been a number of incidents where apparent hate incidents have happened and law enforcement has not taken them seriously. There are several contributing factors to why there is not as much reporting from the Muslim community. We’re trying our level best to improve that.
The supports that are in place for victims of hate crimes also need to be addressed. The trauma and the harm that emanates from this kind of violence is far-reaching. It’s very difficult when I see that our staff teams have to be trauma counsellors instead of advocates when families can’t afford psychology services and therapy in the aftermath of an assault or an Islamophobic incident. These are all issues that we’re dealing with on a regular basis, and one of our recommendations at the summit and as well at the federal level was that there should be a national victim support fund, money allocated by the federal government to take into account the victim services in the light of hate crimes.
Senator Arnot: Mr. Ahmed, do you have any comment about what should be occurring between the Muslim communities in Canada and the municipal police forces to encourage and build support and understanding so that there is more confidence in the community to report these issues and work more closely with the community to prosecute where necessary?
Mr. Ahmed: I think that comes down to the relationship that’s between law enforcement and the particular community in question. What were the interactions in the past? Has law enforcement taken reports seriously from that community? For example, if we’re talking about Vancouver, has the VPD or the RCMP taken seriously concerns and reports from the Muslim community?
I think law enforcement needs to continue with outreach with the Muslim community on hate crime awareness and prevention. Without that, the community feels isolated. Law enforcement has to play its role in enforcing the law and recommending charges where appropriate so that these kinds of crimes are punished to the fullest extent and that a deterrent is shown. Just to give you an example, it took weeks after the London attack for that attack to be characterized by prosecutors as a terrorist incident. The Muslim community continues to see a double standard such that when violence is perpetrated against the Muslim community, it is, “You know, well, there could have been something else going on here,” instead of looking at the obvious evidence before us that, in fact, these were ideologically motivated terrorist incidents.
All of these situations have a cumulative effect of harming the trust of the Muslim community, so there is certainly a lot of work to do.
The Chair: I have many questions. Senators, if you have any further questions, please stop me because I don’t want to take the whole time. We have the absolute luxury today that it’s just the three of us, which has never happened to me or any of us.
I want to go first to what you were saying to Senator Arnot about calling crimes terrorist crimes. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Quebec with the community, and for the longest time, they were very upset that Bissonnette was never held as a terrorist crime. I don’t think it was; I could be wrong. I haven’t read your recommendations, but was one of your recommendations not to be so reluctant? When that happens, the faith of the community is lost because immediately you see a double standard.
Mr. Ahmed: Yes, senator.
Our concern is not so much whether or not the Criminal Code provisions on terrorism offences are used but rather that they be used properly and in a way that is equal when such crimes are before us and when they’re investigated.
NCCM has a long-standing concern with the Anti-terrorism Act and the way the provisions have been used to disproportionately target racialized and Muslim communities, so we’re not asking for the Anti-terrorism Act to be implemented every time. The concern is the perception. The concern is the double standard. The concern is that when Muslims are the victims of these crimes, they are not terrorist incidents and that only a crime that’s committed by a Muslim can be characterized as a terrorist incident or a terrorist offence.
The Bissonnette case and other cases that have unfortunately emerged since that time have demonstrated to us that there is no clear understanding as to how our justice system and our prosecutorial functions apply the law, and we remain concerned when it comes to the application of terrorism offences to these kinds of incidents.
The Chair: This is not the question I was going to ask, but I will ask it now. You were mentioning all the different reasons why the community is not trusting the police, even though I think the police are doing a good job, and one of the things is the use of the terrorism act immediately after 9/11 and continuing. I have heard mothers say to me when they get that knock on the door, they think it’s CSIS or the police coming to get their son, or that’s their perception, for no reason. That’s one reason why I understand that our communities do not want to go to the police. You must have a lot of experience with this issue because I know at one point — I don’t know if it was your organization — cards were issued saying, if police or CSIS knocks on your door, here is what to do. I used to have it in my purse, but I can’t find it. There was lots of reaching out to communities on how to deal with CSIS or police knocking on the door. Can you expand on that, please?
Mr. Ahmed: Senator, that speaks to the systemic nature of Islamophobia, and that’s a great concern to us. The history of the Muslim community with security agencies in the country has been fraught. It’s been very difficult, and there’s still a lot of distrust from the Muslim community towards the motivation of law enforcement and security agencies. For a number of years, we have raised concerns at the highest levels of government about security practices engaged by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, by the RCMP and others, and that remains to be a major work in progress. It’s been about 15 years from Maher Arar inquiry, and we’re still talking about these issues.
I can say that, at the NCCM, we continue to push for greater accountability from our security agencies. We have recently seen that Member of Parliament Salma Zahid has put forward a private members’ bill that tries to enshrine the duty of candour into law. That private members’ bill arises from the fact that successive federal court judges have found that CSIS has misled the courts in obtaining warrants for particular operations. The courts have raised this time and again. We have heard from the director of CSIS and the highest levels of CSIS that this is something that they’re wanting to fix and reform, but we are still waiting for that reform, and we’re still waiting for those fixes.
We’re going to continue our work to hold our national security agencies accountable because it’s things like that, misleading the courts, that do not engender any kind of trust from the Muslim community when it comes to security operations. It’s sad because a community should have some faith in the integrity of our security agencies and their operations, but issues like that continue to come to the fore and challenge our ability to have a more trusting relationship.
The Chair: For me, misleading the court is the last step. It’s misleading you when you knock at the door, given the effect it has on a community member. I got those calls when I was practising law as well, and it’s very fearful. One of the main things that we need to raise is how the community gets treated, and that’s why there’s a reluctance to go to the police. But I have lots of questions, so I should get on with that.
Yesterday, we met informally with a very active group of women. We were very impressed by their presentation. One of the things that they brought up — and I had never heard this before, although I’m sure you have — is gendered Islamophobia. I’ve heard it, but I’ve never thought about it as much as I had last night. I was wondering if your organization works on the issue of gendered Islamophobia, because there’s no doubt at the moment that Muslim women are being attacked a lot on the streets and in the grocery stores. Should there be a campaign of how to protect these women? I don’t know. Maybe you have some thoughts on that.
Mr. Ahmed: Thank you for that, senator.
Yes. NCCM considers gendered Islamophobia part and parcel of our advocacy against Islamophobia. Our education department works a lot on that issue as we do a whole host of anti-Islamophobia education across the country. Gendered Islamophobia is the most common type of Islamophobia because Muslim women who are visibly Muslim are the primary targets when it comes to violence and intimidation. We have, hopefully this afternoon or this morning, some further witnesses from the Muslim community of B.C. who can speak to the female experience with Islamophobia right here in B.C.
What I can say is that there needs to be more work done on that. We have partners in the community, like the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, the Federation of Muslim Women and other groups like that who are working alongside NCCM to make sure that gendered Islamophobia is a key focus area, not just for us but for all the policy-makers that we speak to. For all of the legislators that we speak to, we want to make sure that the experiences of Muslim women are put forward and are understood by everyone.
The Chair: Probably this is the most unreported crime, because women do not want to bring attention to themselves, at least on this issue. Before I go to other questions, do you have any material on gendered Islamophobia that you can share with our clerk? We definitely want to look at it further, and it will really help see. If you can provide any other information on that, please do so.
Mr. Ahmed: I will certainly undertake to find out if we have some information to share.
The Chair: Thank you.
I’m very interested in your hate crime recommendation, and I wanted to look at what you mean by a special process to deal with hate crimes. What exactly do you mean?
Mr. Ahmed: Senator, the current system in the Criminal Code basically provides judges with discretion in the face of a hate crime offence to use the bias motivation as part of the sentencing principles for a hate crime offence. There’s actually no stand-alone provision that defines what a hate crime is and how it is to be prosecuted.
What this recommendation is about is that we need to have clarity in the Criminal Code as to what is a hate crime, and that’s a question that needs to be answered because several police forces across the country use a different definition of a hate crime, and that needs to be clarified at the legislative level as well in order to achieve what we’re asking for here.
In terms of a special process, what we mean by that is there should be a process laid out in a prospective provision in the Criminal Code that describes exactly how a hate crime would be dealt with, and that includes things like the penalties that would be particularly applied in such a case, whether there’s a minimum or a maximum, and are there any alternative methods of prosecution that are available under that provision. While I don’t have a specific draft, and I’m not a criminal lawyer, I can say that the current version of the Criminal Code doesn’t have anything like what we’re recommending, which is a free, stand-alone provision that deals specifically with hate crime offences as hate crimes, not as a sentencing principle when a judge is sentencing a convicted criminal for the offence of, for example, an assault or other violent offence. Our hope is that by having a freestanding provision, this will act as a further deterrent in the criminal justice system against these kinds of heinous crimes.
The Chair: You talk about a different treatment for young offenders or a rehabilitation path for young offenders. I was surprised to see that because normally when it’s a young offender, the court looks after that and there are different paths. Why did you feel it was specifically necessary here? I was interested in that.
Mr. Ahmed: That’s a great question, and it goes to an ethical concern that we have as Canadian Muslims. We’ve noted that some of the most prominent perpetrators of violent attacks against Muslims have been, unfortunately, young people, and we believe young people should be given the opportunity to, where appropriate, find a path towards rehabilitation. We have a great knowledge as a community, as a racialized community, about what the criminal justice system can do to people, so we do want to have an avenue open that allows for young offenders, and also others, not necessarily only young offenders but also folks who show a real desire and a real remorse for what happened and what they did, to find perhaps a different path to atone for what they have done. We don’t simply think that harsh criminal penalties are the only path forward, and that comes from our experience as a community that has experience with the criminal justice system. We have heard from our allies in the other communities, like the Black community, the Aboriginal community, about how they have also dealt with the same situations, so we take a more holistic approach to how we deal with these types of offences.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Arnot: Mr. Ahmed, Canada has been described as the most successful experiment in pluralism the world has ever seen, and I agree with that. We need to go much further, however. There’s a fragility attached to that observation directly related to the knowledge, understanding and commitment that all Canadians have to our multicultural, multitheist and multiethnic country. There was an Ipsos-Reid study in, I believe, 2018 that indicated that only 38% of Canadian adults over the age of 40 supported multiculturalism.
I’m just wondering sir, if you have any comments on how our Senate report could perhaps bolster that and make recommendations about a much more robust national education program targeting adult Canadians who may not have had the benefit of some of the education that younger Canadians now have. I notice in your third recommendation it speaks to that issue in some ways, but I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about what a robust national program to build understanding and support for the foundations of multiculturalism and why multiculturalism is a such a central part of what it means to be Canadian.
Mr. Ahmed: Thank you for the question, senator.
When we think back to multiculturalism in Canada, 1988 seems a long time ago when the act was first passed. I agree with you that there is a need to ensure that the historical legacy and current examples of multiculturalism in Canada are taught and shared with our young people. It really speaks to education. We need to have real, concrete plans across all provinces to deal with this issue. Some years ago, when we were having issues with national security concerns involving the Muslim community, the NCCM said to law enforcement, and which holds true today, that we can’t spy and arrest our way out of the problem. I would reiterate that today. We can’t spy and arrest our way out of this problem either. There needs to be a real focus on education. There needs to be a real focus on how the federal government can work with provincial counterparts on the issue of multiculturalism and on the issue of race relations. I understand the federal government has increased funding for the Canadian Race Relations Foundation in the past budget, which was very impressive and much needed. We need to go a lot further.
This is going to involve difficult conversations between different levels of government and stakeholders. I’m afraid that we’re not having that discussion at the federal level right now. I’m concerned that the political atmosphere in the country has become far too charged and far too polarized. We really need to think about how to bring that back, and it will take the goodwill of a lot of different people to make that happen. I share your concern, and I agree with you. We need to think not just as NCCM but as Canadians about how we can move the needle forward on building that better understanding. Building mutual understanding goes to the core of NCCM’s work. It’s not just policies and legislation that can fix the problem. We need to change hearts and minds, and that takes education. That takes elbow grease. That takes a lot of effort.
Senator Busson: I think your answer to the last question that my colleague posed has sort of addressed my query, but I wanted to just make a comment around your comment about law enforcement and the justice system generally.
I think all of us in the room are of a consensus that the justice system is certainly not as victim-based as it should be and seldom reaches the high standard of satisfaction for anybody that’s involved in that, and coupled with that the perception of danger, the perception of lack of safety, the perception of threat in any community, including racialized communities, which is as dangerous and debilitating as the actual threat itself as terrorism strives to continue.
You talked about outreach from the police and law enforcement, and that’s a subject near and dear to my heart. In Canada, yet in the Criminal Code, Canadian police officers aren’t called law enforcement officers; they’re called peace officers. Yesterday we saw a bit of that feeling when two members from the management of the Burnaby detachment attended at the mosque we were so wonderfully greeted and hosted at.
I’m wondering if you have any ideas or thoughts about how the police can do more to reassure people. There are bad apples everywhere. In the organization I used to work for, the outreach included trying to hire more Muslim members. I had the joy and the satisfaction of meeting a number of members. One in particular I can think of was killed on duty, and the outreach and the amount of care and attention that the Muslim community brought to the RCMP at that time really opened a lot of doors. Do you have any idea how we can break that barrier and build more of that trust? I know you talked about the lack of trust, and I see that every day. A lot of people in the Muslim community and other racialized communities come from places where the police generally are their enemy. Do you have any comment on my comments, please?
Mr. Ahmed: Thank you, senator.
The Chair: Mr. Ahmed, unfortunately, we have very little time; so you have a minute to answer. Thank you.
Mr. Ahmed: I’ll make it quick.
It’s a difficult issue, senator. I think the first thing that can be done by law enforcement is to better investigate and prosecute hate crimes offences that are directed against racialized communities and, in this case, the Muslim community. That builds trust. Of course, no one’s calling for charges to be laid when it’s not deserved, but offences need to be properly investigated. Time and time again, whether it’s Edmonton, whether it’s other places, we have seen law enforcement not take appropriate action despite pleas from the community, so we need to see better policing in respect to those issues. Second, when Muslim youth see themselves reflected in the police through the hiring and promotion recruitment of racialized Canadians, I think we will see a continuous improvement on that issue, but it’s definitely a work in progress and there’s no quick fix to that problem.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Ahmed. The committee sincerely thanks you for your presence, and I would like to also say that you have given and dedicated a lot of time, and I won’t say just on Islamophobia. What you’re fighting for is that we all be treated as equal Canadians. That’s your fight and has been for a very long time. Thank you for taking the time to be here today.
Senator Salma Ataullahjan (Chair) in the chair.
The Chair: I shall now introduce our second panel of witnesses. Each witness has been asked to make an opening statement of five minutes, but we decided that since we have ample time, you can go above the five minutes to six or seven minutes. We shall hear from all witnesses and then turn to questions from the senators.
We will start with Dr. Neila Miled, who is the Anti-racism Advisor, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia. Dr. Miled, you have the floor.
Dr. Neila Miled, Anti-Racism Advisor, Faculty of Medicine of the University of British Columbia, Office of Respectful Environments, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion: Hi, everybody. I’m here to speak about this phenomenon, and particularly I want to say that Muslims are living in a precarious existence in Canada, and the discomfort with Islam and Muslims is deeply entrenched in the Canadian policies, media and school curriculum.
I’m talking to you today to bring to you the voices of the Muslim youth I conducted my research within my PhD dissertation. My study was conducted in a high school with Muslim youth aged 14 and 19. My research study explored how Muslim youth aged 14 to 19 attending Canadian public high school negotiate their identities and sense of them belonging in Canada and how their school experiences impacted this process.
I acknowledge that for several years I had to deal with the uneasiness of researching young people carrying the label Muslim and trying to get them to answer my research questions. It was hard to ask them the question: How does it feel to be a Muslim? Probing for responses about how they negotiate their “Muslim-ness” and “Canadian-ness” meant asking them the real questions, du Bois’ question, the famous question: How does it feel to be a problem? Based on my research findings, I confirm that Muslim youth feel insecure and excluded from the imagination of the Canadian nation. This is not pessimistic; this is realistic.
I’m going to say a few quotes. “As a Black Muslim woman, I face a lot of discrimination and hate in so many places,” Fatemeh said. “As a Black Muslim, I was always seen as the bad boy, the troublemaker,” said Ahmed. Hadija said, “My veil makes people look at me in a strange way. My mom was attacked once, and it was a terrible experience.” The heartbreaking one is this one: “I was born here. English is my first language, but I never felt I belong here. I was always attacked and asked to go home. Where is home? I have no other place to go to.”
All participants in my study expressed their daily encounter with hate, but the essential impact of Islamophobia, according to them, is how it impacts their lives, opportunities, education, employment, and if they will ever have the chance to be considered Canadians.
Islamophobia impacts Muslims in differentiated ways. It is important that visibly Muslim women and Black Muslims are the most marginalized. Black Muslims are double alienated. Being Black and Muslim, the intersection of Muslim-ness and Blackness makes them at the margins of what Canadian identity represents. Visibly Muslim participants expressed the feeling of insecurity and being constantly threatened and emphasized the concerns about safety of visibly Muslim women.
I’m not going to go through the statistics. We all know them. What’s important for me here is that census figures indicate that Muslims are well educated. Among those 15 years of age and older, 56% of Muslims had some form of post-secondary education compared to 44% of the total population. However, a higher education level doesn’t mean or correspond to higher income. There are more Muslims in the lower income bracket, earning 30,000 and less per year, than any other religious group. Muslims also have the highest unemployment rate after the Indigenous people.
The youth expressed that violence is not only physical but also carried through different policies and targets Muslim women. The media represents them as faceless and powerless. I personally prefer anti-Muslim racism — the anti is expressed through the absence, the silence, and the eviction of Muslims from the decision-making processes.
Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Miled.
Now, we will turn to Hasan Alam, who is co-founder and community liaison for the Islamophobia Legal Assistance Hotline.
Hasan Alam, Co-Founder and Community Liaison, Islamophobia Legal Assistance Hotline: Good morning, chair, honourable senators and committee members. My name is Hasan Alam, and I am one of the co-founders of the Islamophobia Legal Assistance Hotline, and I currently serve on the steering committee and as a community liaison for the hotline. In my role as a community liaison, I engage Muslim communities here in British Columbia, meet with them and speak with them about Islamophobia, and I also liaison with the media and government.
The Islamophobia Legal Assistance Hotline, or ILAH, was created in 2016 by a diverse coalition of individuals and organizations in the legal community here in British Columbia after we witnessed a nationwide increase in reported incidents of racial- and faith-related discrimination against Muslims across Canada. The purpose behind creating the hotline was to offer a free and confidential legal service in multiple languages to individuals that have been impacted by Islamophobia, both people who are Muslim and those who are perceived to be Muslim, because we know that often people who aren’t even Muslim often are the victims of Islamophobia because they are perceived to be Muslim. As you are aware, Islamophobia continues to be an issue in Canada, and our country has suffered more mass killings motivated by Islamophobia in the last five years than any other country in the G7.
In terms of how our hotline functions, an individual that calls our hotline first speaks to a volunteer that takes a description of the incident or situation the caller is dealing with, and the calls to the hotline are answered by volunteers belonging to an organization called Access Pro Bono. Based on the situation the caller describes and their language needs, they are then connected with a lawyer with a corresponding area of legal expertise and language proficiency who proceeds to provide them with legal advice on a pro bono basis. The legal issues that we see arising from the hotline stem from human rights complaints, issues with immigration and criminal law matters. In particular, we’ve seen an increase in employment law matters as well. The individuals who call the hotline report incidents ranging from being denied a job or a promotion based on their Muslim identity, prejudicial comments in the workplace, the classroom, or while taking transit or walking on the street, and experiencing racial profiling from border agents as well.
From March 6, 2016, when the hotline was launched, the Islamophobia hotline has received hundreds of calls but has received 113 confirmed complaints of Islamophobia. When I say confirmed, I mean complaints where we have, in fact, identified an issue of Islamophobia and the person chooses to move forward with a legal suit. There are hundreds more calls that we receive where the individual reports the incident but chooses not to proceed with the complaint or they cannot identify or we cannot concretely prove that it was in fact an incident of Islamophobia. The figures show that 68% of the calls involved issues of discrimination in employment, at school, at the hospital, by the CBSA, in prisons and on transit; 28% of calls involve issues of harassment, and 4% of the calls unfortunately involved issues of physical assault. Unfortunately, as you can tell by these statistics, Islamophobia permeates all sectors of our society. As I mentioned earlier, often the person calling the ILAH is not even a person of Muslim background but perceived to be Muslim.
In creating the ILAH, we recognized that those impacted by Islamophobia often lack the financial resources to access legal advice given how costly accessing our legal system is. In addition to financial barriers, the individuals or communities impacted by Islamophobia face a host of other intersectional factors that prevent them from accessing assistance. These factors include English not being their first language, a lack of knowledge or familiarity with the support services available to them, precarious citizenship status that makes them hesitant or fearful to reach out to law enforcement or government agencies for help out of fear that their precarious immigration status may lead to them being deported — whether that fear is grounded in truth or reality, we don’t know, but that is a fear that permeates — and often a distrust of state-associated agencies, such as law enforcement, based on past negative experiences and/or perceptions.
In the past six years that the ILAH has been operational, I wanted to share with you a few reoccurring issues from both the phone calls we’ve received and from the community outreach work that we have done and that we have noted. The first issue is that when individuals call the hotline, it often is not clear to them whether what they are experiencing is in fact Islamophobia. This is because when people or organizations engage in acts of anti-Muslim prejudice, it is rarely done in an explicit manner. The prejudicial act or attitude is often masked as a micro-aggression or as a decision or policy whose justification is not Islamophobic but whose impact is felt as being prejudicial.
Another issue we have identified through our community outreach work is that even when people explicitly experience an act of Islamophobia, the individual impacted often does not have the knowledge or vocabulary necessary to describe that incident as Islamophobic. They know something is wrong, they know something is off, but they don’t have the framework to identify that act as an act of discrimination.
Lastly, there tends to be a hesitancy on the part of people that experience Islamophobia explicitly to seek help through the ILAH and/or to report that incident elsewhere. I think this hesitancy stems from a number of places, and I think the first one, which we’ve identified, is that many immigrant communities have a deeply ingrained sense of belonging to what I would call the model minority framework where they have been socialized to believe that they are lucky to be here in Canada, that they should keep their heads down, work hard and not attract attention to themselves by speaking out. Secondly, Muslim communities, given the history of surveillancing that they’ve experienced since 9/11 here in Canada, the history of racial profiling, they also don’t want to attract attention to themselves.
I think one of the ways to address these issues that I’ve highlighted for you is to provide a nationwide network of education aimed at raising awareness about what Islamophobia is, the forms it takes on, the underlying attitudes and ideologies it is grounded in and what people can do in response to it. This education should take place in all sectors of our society including but not limited to our schools, colleges, universities, workplaces, law enforcement, border agencies and within government itself. The goal of this education is to not only empower those who experience Islamophobia to take action but also prevent it from happening in the first place by teaching people about the harmful biases and attitudes that cause Islamophobia.
I think bystander training is also incredibly important. What we hear from people who call the hotline time and time again is, “I wish someone who saw this happening did something about it. I wish they intervened.” That is something that we aren’t seeing happening. We need people to intervene and speak up when they witness these experiences because the person on the receiving end of Islamophobia is often frozen or in shock and feels helpless, and we need people with more privilege to step up and do something about these incidents, whether it’s on the street, on the bus, in the workplace, at the border or wherever.
I will conclude by stating that although the hotline is an important service, it is only a Band-Aid solution. It provides a potential remedy to individuals who are already the victims of Islamophobia, but it does not prevent Islamophobia from happening in the first place. That is why we at the ILAH believe it is incredibly important to deal with the underlying causes of Islamophobia in Canada, and there are many of them. I’ve highlighted some of them, but one that we are particularly concerned about, given the studies and given what many of our agencies here in Canada are saying, is the rise of white supremacy in Canada. White supremacy is on the rise here, and the prejudicial rhetoric that stems from it is becoming normalized within the realm of social media, the public sphere and even politics. It is radicalizing and empowering, in particular, young white males to engage in racist and hateful behaviour both online and in our everyday public sphere.
In 2019, David Vigneault, the director of CSIS, told the Senate committee on national security that it is increasingly preoccupied with the threat of violent right-wing extremism and white supremacists. This is the same ideology that motivated Alexandre Bissonnette to open fire on worshippers at a Quebec mosque, and it’s the same hateful ideology that motivated Nathaniel Veltman to brutally run over a Muslim family of five in London, Ontario, but it is also the ideology behind the more, can I say, benign forms of Islamophobia that take place every day. I urge you to dedicate time, energy and resources towards studying this spread of this ideology and stopping it.
I think I’ll conclude with those comments and open up the floor to questions. I thank you for the time and opportunity.
The Chair: Thank you, Hasan.
We will next turn to Tahzi Ali, who is the assistant secretary of the British Columbia Muslim Association Board of Women Council.
Tahzi Ali, Assistant Secretary, British Columbia Muslim Association Board of Women Council: Good morning to the committee members and my panellists here. I’m with theB.C. Muslim Association, and the B.C. Muslim Association has many mosques, schools and centres around B.C. It started in 1966, and that is when Muslims established a centre. We were a handful, under 100 Muslims probably at that time, whereas now there are over 100,000 Muslims in B.C.
My testimony today is more from a local B.C. Muslim community perspective. I came to Canada in 1973. I was seven years old. Seeing the growth in the community from a lens of a young girl who didn’t know how to speak English to seeing the community grow, here we are today. We have a second and third generation of Muslims in B.C., and we also have new Canadians. We have refugees that have come and have added to the population. The growth has been exponential. Our centres and mosques are full, completely full, when we have events, when we have prayers, when we have religious events, large events, where the capacity is absolutely exceeding.
What does that say when you have an increase in numbers? You have a diaspora. You have multi-generational Muslims in B.C. That tells you about the issues that the Muslims have faced. Being in the mosque myself, I’ve been a part of the director level and at the grassroots level. Muslims see mosques as a safe place. They see it as a safe place. It’s open from morning to night. They can walk in, and they can talk to whoever is there. They can express how they’re feeling and what they may be going through. The directors at the mosque are tasked with making sure that they are supporting the communities and that they are listening to them, yet resources are limited.
In our centres, we have focus groups and we have town halls. We are constantly struggling or trying to develop programs where we can bring and gather our Muslim sisters and brothers, where they can share what they’re going through and talk about mental health. Mental health is the biggest conversation piece today because it’s not only the second and third-generation Canadians and students and whatever they’re going through but also the new immigrants as well.
We have a commitment to provide service to our community, and yet from our perspective, we struggle to find the resources, the support and the funding in order to support our community with mental health resources and mental health programs. We can say to them, “Here’s a counsellor you can go to speak to,” but the fact is that our community feels comfortable within our institutions. They feel comfortable walking in. They feel comfortable talking to whoever is available. They are looking at us to provide them with the resources they need in order to find a job, in order to know how to speak and in order to know how to communicate. The brother next to me mentioned that our culture is heads down, do your work and don’t cause waves, but that oppresses them. That oppresses them in a way that they don’t get ahead.
When I talk about “they,” it’s mostly women. It’s mostly women that I’ve heard are too shy to ask for prayer space in a mosque or are too shy to go for an interview. The anxiety is already building with them thinking about, “How am I going to sit in front of the interviewee in my hijab? They are already judging me based on how I look, not by my resume, not by my education, none of that.”
I had a university student at SFU who wears an abaya, which is a long dress. She dresses modestly and is the most beautiful, smartest young woman but was taunted even by her teacher, a professor, an educator, at SFU. How disheartening is that? What does that tell the students that are there? “Hey, that’s okay. You are the image I see in the media. You are the image in front of me. That’s who you are.” Media plays a huge part in that as well.
There was a country where women took off their hijab, and it was perceived as freedom. Hijab is perceived as oppression. I myself had a hijab journey. I didn’t wear a hijab till about 15 years ago. It was a personal, religious journey for me. The perception is out there.
Mothers come to the mosque and talk about their sons who are incarcerated. What do we do? How do we help them? How do we support them? We don’t have the resources to help them. We have to manage their guidance through the system, which is the system.
Why don’t our young girls and boys have confidence in the law enforcement? As community leaders, we want to see young Muslim boys and girls become police officers, work for the government and become CBSA officers. You see very, very few Muslim people in the frontline. It is very unfortunate. They don’t trust law enforcement. Why? I asked him my relative. I said, “You’d be a great CBSA officer. You’re large. You’re strong. You’re smart. You’re good.” He goes, “Well, what’s the point?” Growing up, police have always questioned or seen them as a criminal.
Even in high school, even if a group of friends is hanging around in a mall or hanging around in a corner, they are perceived as troublemakers, but why? Because of the way they look or the way they maybe come across as troublemakers, as a group of brown boys perhaps or African boys or minority boys hanging around.
From a Muslim woman’s perspective, there are tons of inequalities and things against them. As a regular woman anyway, we have challenges to be taken seriously, to go up the ranks at work and all of that. Can you imagine as a Muslim woman in hijab, all of the things that are against them, which causes them to fight harder, which causes them to work harder? There’s only so much you could do when automatically you’re judged and perceived based on how you look.
We have a lot of very, very smart, intellectual, bright, young kids in our community who are proud to be Canadian. They are proud to serve their community. We try to encourage them to engage in the community. Don’t just stay in the mosque. Yes, come here, volunteer, help us engage in the community, work with the city, work with the association, be visible.
When you look at the media, when you look at even billboards — a friend recently sent me a picture of a bus in Ontario, and it was a woman in hijab, and that makes me happy. That makes a young hijabi next to me say, “Wow, that’s awesome.” So more representation in the media, whether it’s community billboards, whether it’s the city, whether it’s commercial. Normalize. Normalize Muslims going shopping, banking and doing regular day-to-day things. Media’s a huge thing, and I understand that, but we can do a lot just from the basic city perspective, provincial and federal. More visible Muslims, more visible minorities, need to be out there, need to be interviewed, and their images need to be shown.
When the fliers come out during Ramadan, you should see how these fliers are shared amongst our WhatsApp groups because Muslims are excited. Hey, look. We’ve got these dates in Superstore. They connect. They connect when mainstream entities, organizations and corporations recognize, “Hey, we know there are Muslims here.”
You can cut me off any time.
One of the projects we had through the mosque during Ramadan is prayer mats. We wanted to give a select group of schools a welcome packet. That welcome packet had information about Ramadan and prayer mats, just basic. You would not believe the challenges we had. Most of the schools denied us. The reason we did that is because students had said they’re too shy to talk to their teachers about a prayer space, especially during Ramadan where children are fasting and things like that because they don’t even talk about fasting in the schools. They don’t even explain what’s going on or give us the opportunity. Only a handful of schools accepted our basket, and the other schools said no, so that door was closed.
Healthcare is another avenue. Muslims often speak about disparity in healthcare. During Ramadan, my friend fell in the mosque. The mosque was full, and we’re all wearing our long dress and our hijab. She fell, so another friend and I took her to the local hospital. We were pretty sure her arm was broken. She could barely walk. She was in a lot of pain. We thought by the time the ambulance came, it’s better to just drive her to the hospital. The treatment was — I was shocked. My mind immediately went to, “Well, they’re looking at us as three women in a black, long dress with a black hijab.” What does that image tell you? The intake nurse was very, very rude. He was very physical with her, causing her more pain. I said to him, “You’re causing her more pain. She is hurt.” He said, “Let me do my job,” and he extended, delayed and was very slow in how he was treating us. I took away from that a blatant abuse of power against Muslim women. She ended up being several hours. She ended up having a couple of broken bones. Like, it was a very, very sad and horrible experience, and the ER room was not full.
I talked about this afterwards as well, and this goes back to why we don’t report. Although I vented and complained and am one to report and escalate situations, I didn’t. I didn’t, and I don’t know why I didn’t. I did talk to our local MLA. I talked to a few other people. They said, “Put it in writing.” I even thought about writing a letter to Coastal Health. That’s exhausting. It is exhausting to go to all those lengths for your basic human right, and that may be some of the reason why people don’t report. These are just some of the examples.
Where do we go from here? We need to understand the root cause of this behaviour and also maybe do studies by sector. By sector, meaning education — one of the students said something very powerful to me. “Yes, you can put all the education material out there, but we need teachers to be our allies. If teachers are not our allies, we are a lonely voice.” Thankfully, there are wonderful teachers out there. We attended wonderful events in high schools as well. But it is a very powerful thing for a student to know. The teacher doesn’t have to be Muslim as long as they see them and recognize what their needs are and support them if they have ideas, if they want a prayer space, if they want to hold an Eid party or something where the community comes together.
In conclusion, I would just like to say that we are living in a great country. We’re proud Canadians. We are huge contributors to this society. As Muslim women, our community wants to thrive. There are a lot of great people out there that want to be part of this wonderful progression, and we need to do more studies, more conversation, more dialogue. But at the end of the day, there has been a lot of studies. It is time for action plans. I understand there are issues in terms of provincial, municipal, federal and whatnot, but this testimony today is more from a community level, from what we’re seeing in the mosques, and the dire support that our community is looking for towards us as leaders of the mosque and the community and also you as leaders as well.
Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you.
Before we go to the next witness, senators, we need another motion about permitting filming during the meeting:
That the committee also allow video recording from the media of its public meetings in Vancouver, Edmonton, Quebec City and Toronto with as little disruption of the meeting as possible.
Senator Jaffer, are you prepared to move this motion? Thank you. All in favour? Thank you.
We will now proceed to our next witness. Mr. Sajoo is a scholar in residence.
Amyn B. Sajoo, Scholar-in-Residence and Lecturer, School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University (as an individual): Thank you, senators, for this invitation and for undertaking this study on Islamophobia in Canada.
I think it’s appropriate that this initiative is framed in terms of human rights and not a special pleading on behalf of the specific faith tradition before you or a cultural community. True, Islamophobia is distinctive as a systemic as well as an individualized form of prejudice, but it shares with other such violations, notably against Indigenous and Black Canadians, a long history of social and institutional embeddedness, including in the law.
Ultimately, this is about pluralist citizenship. That is the thrust of my work, not only in the research and teaching that I do at Simon Fraser University but also in the public conversation series that I’ve hosted since 2018 on identity and citizenship, in which Islamophobia is our theme this year. You have in your appendix an image of the panel that we have for the conversation series. You’ve heard from two of my guests in that series, Professors Anver Emon and Jasmin Zine, and an earlier guest whom you’ll be familiar with, John Ralston Saul, bridged us to the return of Indigenous identity as essential to what it means to be Canadian.
Mindful of what this committee has already heard, I want to focus on ethical literacy. This is about appreciating the limits of relying on the law alone — and I say this as a legal scholar — and acknowledging the civic relevance of religion.
When a few months ago Fatemeh Anvari was removed as a teacher from Chelsea Elementary School for wearing a hijab in contravention of Quebec’s secularism law, Bill 21, there was no remedy for what a Quebec Superior Court judge deemed a “cruel consequence that dehumanizes those who were targeted.” The law was shielded by invoking the Canadian constitution’s notwithstanding clause. The court found that invocation to be excessive but “legally unassailable in the current state of the law.” I think it’s Orwellian that in the name of secular liberal values, Bill 21 targets Muslim women, quoting from the court, “violating the freedom of religion and their freedom of expression since clothing constitutes both pure and simple expression and also a manifestation of a religious belief.”
Now, there’s a withering critique of what the scholars call religious illiteracy when it comes to legislation and courts in Canada, the United States and India. The scholars in question are — I’ve got a footnote in the submission — Nathan Walker, Amarnath Amarasingam and Hicham Tiflati, and this is what they have to say:
This religious illiteracy is entwined with projects of nationalism, electoral politics, and conceptions of secularism. Moreover, this … discourse often has consequences on the ground and results in increased social persecution of religious minorities.
You may ask, what is this religious literacy, and they say it is “more than knowing facts or trivia about religion.” It’s a “fundamental civic competency” and “a set of teachable skills and attitudes that equip citizens with knowledge of how religion, spirituality and non-religion inform everyday life.”
They conclude Islamophobia rests both on a general lack of knowledge of Muslim practices, values, and beliefs, which produces inaccurate assumptions, stereotypes and generalizations, but also an evaluation of Muslims as other and lesser than non-Muslim individuals.
For me, this intersection of civic, legal and faith traditions is why I call this an issue of ethical literacy. So what do we do about it? Exactly what we’ve come to recognize about Canadian prejudices towards Indigenous and Black Canadians, which is truth and reconciliation in policy, practice and public education, involving not only the state but also civil society.
Many of your witnesses have spoken on appropriate legal and public policy action. No less vital is the need for school and university curricula to come to terms with Islamophobia, extending all the way to professional development for those in Canadian provincial and public office. When the Peel School Board in Ontario approved an anti-Islamophobia strategy last October, including mandatory training for teachers, it established what should be a precedent across Canada. I approached my daughter’s elementary school in Vancouver about this only to be told that they felt qualified to handle Indigenous and Black Canadian issues but not Islamophobia.
There’s a significant gap in recognizing the need, and then having the resources to respond. Community and public interest groups would make available human resources to support closing that gap, but federal and provincial funding is vital. The same goes for public engagements through the National Film Board — and I’ll be happy to say more about that in the question session — and the Social Science & Humanities Research Council, or SSHRC, and, of course, professional associations.
A prominent Muslim figure warns, “Knowledge gaps so often run the risk of becoming empathy gaps and the struggle to empathetically open to the other in a diversifying world is of central importance for all of us.” Now, this empathy gap has everything to do, as you know, with populist trends, Canadian and global, in which visible minorities are major targets and Islamophobia thrives. The instigating role of the media has received much attention, and I won’t elaborate on that in my comments, but I’ll be happy to do that later. Yes, we can and should protect the targets through laws on hate crimes, but that will not close the empathy gap unless we also cultivate a civic culture that takes pluralist ethics seriously.
Let me end on a relatively cheerful note. Fatemeh Anvari, the teacher who lost her teaching post, was reassigned to a literacy project for targeting inclusion and awareness of diversity at Chelsea Elementary School. There were howls of protest from parents about the firing of this much loved teacher and queries about how to explain it to their children. She’s quoted as saying, “It’s important to educate and to raise awareness on these topics so that my kids are well aware of what’s going on around them.” I would suggest that this need for an ethically driven response and the sense of belonging and citizenship that goes with it extends beyond kids to the rest of society.
Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
We will now proceed to questions from the Senate. Senators, our previous practice was five minutes, but I think we have a lot of time, so we can be a little bit liberal with the time.
Senator Arnot: Thank you, witnesses, this morning. You’ve been very helpful in putting forward these issues in such a succinct and understandable way.
I’m going to make a comment. Each one of the witnesses has touched upon education. When I came to this committee recently in August, I had and have an agenda, and I’m going to explain that. In my opinion, Canada — and it’s been stated by others — is the most successful experiment in pluralism the world has ever seen. There’s a fragility attached to that, and that fragility is directly related to the knowledge, understanding, and commitment all Canadians have to our multicultural, multiethnic, multitheist country, and that is weak. We have failed in Canada to educate students on these issues. What does it mean to be a Canadian citizen? What are the rights of citizenship? But more importantly, what are the responsibilities that come with those rights, and how do you build and maintain respect for every citizen without exception? Why? Because every human being deserves equal moral consideration. Every human being is someone’s child. All Canadians need to be treated equally; and that, we have failed on. This is what I think is foundational to Islamophobia in the current context.
I say to you that I believe what we need is a set of resources that would be in Grades K to 12 on the basis that we need to change the culture in the community, and by doing that, we need to change the culture in the schools. We have an army of change agents — teachers who help shape the next society, the next generation in society, and we fail to understand the power of education and the need for education on these issues. Many people come to Canada because of the powerful nature of our constitution, yet we failed in many ways, and the failure is exhibited particularly acutely in Islamophobia in the current context.
If we have those kinds of resources, I say that we can identify five essential competencies of Canadian citizenship, and I say that is all citizens should be enlightened, ethical, engaged, empowered, and empathetic, particularly empathetic. I call those the five Es, and I call the rights responsibilities the new three Rs.
Now, I say that to say this: Such a set of resources does exist. The Concentus Citizenship Education Foundation, which was built in Saskatchewan, has these resources. They were customized to the Saskatchewan curriculum. They’ve been recently customized to the Ontario curriculum. I’m hoping that they will be customized to other provincial and territorial curricula with the support of front-line people such as yourself identifying the need for this kind of resource and recognizing the power of education.
Having said that, each one of you have touched on education in various ways, and I’m wondering what your response might be to my observations. I can say that I’ve got many deep-dive questions for each one of the witnesses, but I think I’d rather start with the higher and larger systemic issue that we see in education. I see education as a solution, not all the solution but a critical solution to the issues that you’ve raised here this morning.
Ms. Miled: Thank you so much, sir, for raising this issue and for asking this question.
I have conducted all my research in schools. I have spent years and years navigating those corridors, and I completely agree with you. Nothing would change in Canada if we don’t change the school settings, and particularly teachers and principals and leaders.
I give a very simple example. When I conducted my research in the high school, I was shocked in a positive way with the support that the leaders have provided to the Muslim community. I was shocked, and pleasantly shocked and surprised, by a white principal who put his goal to support these marginalized students, especially, and I remember when I started, it was the wave of the Syrian refugees coming.
So there is hope, but we don’t want to see hope relying on individual initiatives. We want it to be systemic. How does this happen? From my position as an educator, and I was an instructor in the teaching education and the teacher education program at UBC, I remember when I entered my classroom it’s always a shock to my students. It’s a first time they see a woman who looks like me an instructor in that space. Representation in the teaching workforce is an essential thing that we need to implement.
You can ask me about meritocracy. I ask you that question, and I ask it even to those responsible at my university. Who has the capacity and financial abilities to become a teacher? Let me tell you how much it costs, for example, to be a teacher. At least 17,000 a year, with a full-time commitment. I’m talking about a community that is coming at the bottom of financial capacities. Everything is connected to how we can improve and enhance economic participation of Muslims. Unfortunately, despite our high education, we are put on the margins. I consider myself lucky to have the financial means to pursue an academic degree, a master’s degree, a PhD. You know why? It was not a choice. I had to because no one would hire me when I came in as an immigrant, and I had to spend ten years working, taking care of my family and trying to find a space for myself.
Education is real. We need to enhance the curriculum. Look at the books. When I was doing my research, a student came to me and said, “Why do they talk about the Muslims as if we are aliens?” It’s about the history of Islam depicted in bloody violent forms. Who are the inspiring Muslims? Where are they? Where are they represented? Examine the curriculum and teacher professional development for the million Muslims in Canada, the fastest growing religion. My Muslim friends, during the Eid, have to take that day without pay because they are not allowed to have their religious celebrations as a holiday. And the list goes on and on.
As an academic personally and as an educator, I believe that with education, Canada can change a lot of the status quo. This depends on your willingness, it depends on the resources you’re going to allocate, and it also depends on the expertise you are going to resort to.
Thank you.
Mr. Alam: Dr. Miled spoke very eloquently and touched off on many of the points that are important to make here with respect to changing in the curriculum itself and allocating adequate resources to it.
The only thing I’ll add is I think it’s incredibly important to have this education instituted within the K to 12 system, but it needs to be ongoing too. Right? It needs to continue as you proceed to university, as you are in the workplace and in different sorts of agencies within government. And it’s not just that. It should be people in positions of leadership that are taking this education. Right? Because as many of the people have said today, including myself, people take tacit approval from those above them. Right? If they see Islamophobic behaviour being engaged in by their manager, by their supervisor, by people in government, then they see that as tacit approval to engage in that behaviour too. I think that education needs to be targeted to those that hold privilege and power as well, and it should be mandatory.
Ms. Ali: I would definitely echo what’s already been said. Education is key, but we just have to be careful and focused. Education is such a big umbrella. How do we implement it? When you think about education, automatically you think about schools, but it’s not just schools. Then you think about citizens as they’re going through their citizenship. It’s multifaceted. This is a very important topic that needs to have a more targeted and focused approach in terms of where it is needed. Yes, there is adding to a curriculum, but the behaviour of the teachers, of the leaders and of those that influence others is key as well. So it is very important, and God willing it’s something that can be worked on.
Mr. Sajoo: I completely agree with your foundational approach from K to 12 because that will be a new generation, and particularly as a parent of an 11-year-old girl, I think the scope of their understanding needs to be formed sooner rather than later, but I am shocked at how even good teachers at that level don’t seem to frame Indigenous reconciliation or anti-racism against Black Canadians in terms of citizenship. It’s simply an issue. There isn’t even on the part of the school and the teachers a programatic understanding that this is part of pluralist citizenship.
Even more embarrassing, as my fellow panellist Tahzi has just mentioned, at Simon Fraser we’ve got textbooks and we’ve got colleagues — I hesitate to say for generational reasons — who don’t quite get that their teaching citizenship is a crucial aspect in the humanities, social sciences, and even more in the physical sciences where that kind of social science background is lacking.
Then when it comes to Islamophobia, even when it comes to Middle Eastern studies and Canadian relations with the Muslim world and matters like that, we freely vocalize about human rights and violations about press freedom and against women and so on, but again we fail entirely to see that this is part of an idea of citizenship that needs to evolve.
Earlier, I heard an exchange about multiculturalism in Canada, which I think is profoundly important, but that has evolved. I think we tend to use the word “pluralism” more than “multiculturalism” now because ideas of multiculturalism in the ‘80s and ‘90s have shifted now. People are still, I think, wedded to that earlier idea to which they feel some kind of antagonism because they think that it involves favouring minorities or giving too much space to women or whatever. I think that needs to evolve, and the way to evolve that, in my view, is through reframing citizenship as a pluralist idea with ethical content. We too often think it’s a legal matter. If I’ve got my passport and I’ve got my piece of paper saying I’m a Canadian citizen, that’s the end of it. We need to understand that that’s just the beginning.
Senator Arnot: Mr. Alam, you have had a lot of inquiries. You take a lot of complaints in your process. I’m wondering what you can say about how successful it is in addressing these issues and how to measure that success. Are you making a difference? Are these remedies in this current model effective?
Mr. Alam: That’s an excellent question.
In summary, I don’t think we are successful because the legal test for proving discrimination, for example, is a very high threshold, and we don’t often have all the checkboxes to successfully prove a complaint before a human rights tribunal or before the employment standards tribunal, for example.
I echo what Dr. Sajoo has said here, that we also need to look at remedies that exist outside of the legal realm where we’re stopping those acts of Islamophobia from happening in the first place through education, but also interventions within the workplace where I see a lot of these incidents happening. Bystander training. People intervening. Managers having appropriate training to have the vocabulary to deal with issues of Islamophobia and also witness it when it happens. What shocks me is that often in these cases, some of the most senior people in these workplaces or in these settings don’t recognize it happening, even though it’s so clear that it’s happening.
I don’t think our legal avenues are addressing appropriately because the law is a very blunt tool and requires a very high threshold. That is why I think we need to find alternative ways to deal with it.
Senator Arnot: Chair, I could ask further questions, but I’m going to defer to my colleagues. If there’s chance in a second round, I’ll ask then.
Senator Busson: I had a question around education, but it was so eloquently answered.
I have a question for specifically Mr. Alam, but I think anybody else could enlarge on it if they would like. You talked about your hotline, the legal assistance hotline, and I’m assuming or I’m surmising that when people phone you, they’re not always phoning about legal issues. There might be issues around being traumatized or generally being just in a situation where they’re needing psychological help or whatever. I’m wondering if your hotline has connections to other sources of assistance and if you might talk a little bit about funding generally for the kind of assistance that you offer. Although you have a list of pro bono lawyers, there are issues of funding and economics and financial support attached to that. Could you expound on that for me, please?
Mr. Alam: You’re absolutely correct. More often than not, when people do call, it’s not with respect to reporting an incident of Islamophobia as much it is needing help with their, for example, mental health or navigating an issue in relation to settlement. You’re a new immigrant. How do you access X, Y and Z? You need help to do that. Unfortunately, our lawyers are not well suited to that. We do often forward them to an organization here in B.C. called ASPIRE. It is a Muslim-run organization that has a host of volunteers that range from social workers, settlement workers, psychologists to counsellors. But that is a growing area of concern for the Muslim community, and, of course, it’s a pandemic that stretches all of Canadian society, which is people’s mental health. In particular, people who experience Islamophobia don’t want to so much just take forward a complaint as they want someone to speak to and simply vent to. That is a reoccurring theme that happens within the hotline.
With respect to funding, I think that is key. We are lacking in funding as a hotline. One of the ways that that shows up for us is that we lack the adequate resources to do the community outreach that is necessary to make the hotline known within our communities, whether that’s through advertising on buses, within transit where often these instances happen, or just hiring someone to go out there and speak to mosques and do presentations and educate people about their legal rights and that this hotline exists.
I am happy to say we’re in the process of getting a major grant where we will be able to hire someone to do that, but I think that issue of funding is fundamental to not just the hotline but to all community organizations that are dealing with this issue of Islamophobia. Many of them are doing it off the side of their desks as volunteers, and that shouldn’t be the case. There should be dedicated resources put into this so people can actually make it a job, because dealing with Islamophobia, unfortunately, is a job currently.
Ms. Miled: I just wanted to add something personal, because this touches people. We are talking about people who call seeking help. Thousands and thousands of people don’t call to seek help, so the impact is even worse. I wish that I wear this PhD on my forehead because all my privileges disappear when I’m on the street or on the transit and I’m the Muslim oppressed woman. I remember I was once on a bus, and a nice woman looked at me, and she said, “Aren’t you suffocated with that? I am suffocated.” At that time, all the privileges I have acquired and worked hard for have disappeared. I developed a thick skin. I was with my daughter, and I said, “Oh, no. Don’t worry,” because I wanted them to love this country, I wanted them to feel that they belong because they are Canadians, and they need to live with the sense that they belong here.
These stories are millions, and I hear them every day from well-educated, highly positioned women. The question is, are people outside educated? Do you see a lot of people like me in positions of power? We don’t even give the representation of Muslim women that deserve to be seen. It’s always the narrative of oppressed, mistreated, victim of the domestic violence. You know, a terrible religion that has imprisoned her, not educated. This is the danger on the next generations, particularly for Muslim women and Muslim young girls.
Thank you for asking that question.
Senator Jaffer: I have so many questions for each of you, but while listening to Senator Arnot, one theme kept coming up, and all of you are very qualified to talk about the multiculturalism theme. I know my father and mother chose to come here because they thought they were equal, and there were many shocks, and this is not the place to talk about it, except I think the biggest shock when you come to a multicultural country is to find out that you’re not equal. You’ve chosen to come here because you thought everybody was being treated equally. You said you didn’t want to let your daughter know there were issues. Even if you are born here, if you are a Muslim or a black person, you are not treated equally. Is multiculturalism dead? I want to ask Professor Sajoo first.
Mr. Sajoo: A lot of people wish it dead, and some people are convinced that it’s already dead and just needs to be buried. In our populist global and Canadian climate — I think Senator Arnot made reference to that earlier — it’s certainly a hot potato. I think it has evolved. I spent a lot of my academic life in Britain, and they had the same challenge as we do when it comes to multiculturalism, which is public perceptions are very different from what government thinks it’s doing with multiculturalism. There’s a very large gap.
The popular perception is not helped by the way the media conveys it. It’s a bashing word. Anytime there are racial issues, it’s because of that multicultural mafia or whatever. That gap in understanding what it’s about can perhaps be addressed by rebranding it, both at the practical, down-to-earth level and at the conceptual level.
Even those people that want to push multicultural policy are running out of ammo because more and more it is citizenship and pluralism and how we understand equality today post 9/11 and post what has happened with the disinterring of Indigenous residential school children. We need to reconceive what we mean by inclusion. As you know, when multiculturalism was first articulated, it was about French-English relations. It was not really about minorities. Can we now walk away from that by including something else? Indigenous people were not part of that, and Islamophobia was not part of that.
Given that we have a Global Centre for Pluralism in Canada, that we are talking about pluralist citizenship and that we are high on the rank globally of a country that’s committed to pluralism. I think perhaps it’s time to rebrand multiculturalism and to rethink it and rearticulate it.
Senator Jaffer: Chair, how much time do I have?
The Chair: You have a bit of time.
Senator Jaffer: How much?
The Chair: We will take the session till 11:45. As chair, I go last, so I would like a couple of minutes for questions.
Senator Jaffer: Okay. I’m sorry I can’t ask all of you that same question because I’ve got limited time.
Mr. Alam, I’m very much intrigued by your bystander concept. I hadn’t thought of bystanders when it came to Islamophobia, and that’s something I think many of us now have to talk about. I’m on the Defence Committee, and on the Defence Committee, only now are the armed forces taking up the issue of when there’s harassment or sexual assaults in the armed forces, that there is responsibility on the bystander, especially a superior bystander, to do something rather than just observe. What you’ve said is very interesting, but the challenge is how to get the word out. You mentioned that a bit, and I think our committee should also look at how we recommend that and what we do with it. If you have any further thoughts on it, I’d really appreciate it.
Mr. Alam: I think bystander training is incredibly important and a central part of dealing with Islamophobia. In terms of operationalizing it, I think it would be powerful to see either the Senate or the government come out with recommendations for what a bystander can do and what is necessary in situations when Islamophobia comes up and providing perhaps funding for training around that. I work as an employment and labour lawyer. That training is now taking place in workplaces. Managers and employees are being training with respect to what you can do as a bystander or when you see those incidents. I think a framework and funding and just raising awareness about what it means to be a bystander.
Canadians need to know that Islamophobia is not just about the victim; it’s also about the person who witnesses it. It’s about them too. It’s not always just about the victim. It’s not just about Muslims. It’s not just about the Muslim community. It’s about the broader society being bystanders to this because, let’s face it, it wouldn’t be an issue to the scale that it is right now if more people spoke up and did something about it apart from the Muslim community. That’s part of the problem.
Senator Jaffer: May I impose on you? You’ve thought about this, and I’m very intrigued about what you said, so I wanted to ask if you could put a recommendation together as to what you see and send it to the clerk. We are also looking at Islamophobia in the federal service, so maybe we can look at a recommendation to the federal service as a pilot project. Thank you.
The same with you Professor Sajoo. You’re right. There’s been an evolution from multiculturalism to a pluralistic society, at least in some of our minds, maybe not all Canadians. Maybe you could also reflect on a recommendation to our committee, because that’s your lifetime work now. I would appreciate that from you both. Sorry, I’m giving you homework. I don’t know if I can.
Ms. Miled: I just wanted to add something. I just want to take the opportunity to talk about the example that we have implemented in the faculty of medicine at UBC. I feel privileged to work in a space where we are trying very hard to engage that. From the multiculturalism, which has overshadowed, it is at the heart of the issue that we have in Canada now, because it make us really not see the real problem.
In the Faculty of Medicine, for example, in my position, we are engaging with training, for example, around what we call upstander engagement, so to get people from being a silent bystander and how we can become an upstander. An upstander is a person who assumes full responsibility to be on the side of protecting the human rights, to act against micro-aggression and support victims when things happen. It’s a whole strategy at the faculty. We are engaging with moving from multiculturalism to anti-racism. How can we become critical allies and how can we engage people in anti-racism actions? Anti-racism is about doing things; it’s not about a vision. We are trying to support our community in the faculty of medicine and beyond to engage with anti-racism as an action-oriented decision. I think it’s worked a lot. We have a lot on our plates, but I am really privileged to work in such a space, and we are doing all this training towards engaging with Indigenous communities, with all the communities, and we address it also to Islamophobia.
Senator Jaffer: Thank you very much.
The Chair: My question is to all of you. The one issue that I would like to raise is the role that the media plays in the rise of Islamophobia. I’m talking about print media, I’m talking about TV and I’m talking about movies.
Dr. Miled, I have a daughter who has done her PhD and who is now at Western, but with them, there’s this anger sometimes when they see the portrayal of Muslims. In our home, I’m finding we’re not watching certain movies. If we put it on and see, oh, this is how they’re portraying Muslim, we switch. It is the same with the news, because even where you can put a very positive image if you’re doing a story on Muslims, sometimes I find even the news channels will use a very negative image. It’s happened to me. There’s a particular newspaper that runs a picture of a very angry me every time they’re quoting me for something. I know we’ve reached out to them and said, “Can you please run a better picture. I’m not angry all the time. Sometimes I am.”
I would like to ask all of you your opinion on the role of the media.
Mr. Alam: I mean, yes, I 100% agree, senator. The media’s portrayal of Muslims has played a huge role in perpetuating Islamophobia, especially post 9/11, and many scholars talk about how there is an Islamophobia industry when it comes to the media with respect to profiting off of portraying Muslims as angry, violent, extremist, terrorist. People buy and like to consume that sort of media.
Countering that is a complicated strategy. With respect to journalists, it is providing education, and we keep going back to this word, around just how they’re writing and their portrayals of Muslims and what the impact of that can be. I think it’s also about putting funding and allocating resources and empowering Muslims to tell their own stories and to be represented within the media, because I do think that representation matters. It really matters to have Muslims in positions where they produce TV shows, produce movies and write news articles where they are appropriately representing the Muslim community.
I’ll give you an example. Disney recently came out with this series called “Ms. Marvel,” and the key protagonist in this series is a young Muslim Pakistani woman. The portrayal is amazing. It’s beautiful. It captures all of the nuances of our community and of our faith in a very non-tokenistic, non-stereotypical manner. I have three nieces, and I’ve seen the impact that it’s had on them to be able to sit in front of a TV and see themselves beautifully portrayed by a young Pakistani Muslim woman. I think those sorts of acts go a long way, and they cannot be understated.
I’ll let the rest of my panellists chime in too.
Ms. Ali: I just wanted to add that that’s all it takes, a “Ms. Marvel,” for there to be conversation, happiness and connections. Oh, my gosh. They actually talked about jinn. That was just an uplifting moment for the community. All it takes is representation. Media and marketing and the portrayal of Muslims is so powerful, and it’s so lacking as well.
It’s also up to us Muslims to change the narrative. I’ve had conversations with our team internally about approaching the media with stories. We need to take more action ourselves as well to change the narrative, because if we sit back and wait for the other way around, it may not happen. You’ve got multiple levels of that, what Muslims can do to influence that narrative, and then you have your mainstream, your movies, your news, your print media, marketing and corporations. There’s just so much out there.
It’s something that is a bit of a passion of mine, to try to change the narrative. I fully agree with everything that’s been said about the impact of that. Even sports personalities who are Muslim are celebrated. Actors or people of influence and power are celebrated when they’re visible because you see them. You see them as Muslims who are doing something that is making the community happy.
Mr. Sajoo: I teach a lot of this stuff, so I have a lot to say, but I’ll keep it to four points.
Footnote 7 in my submission has an essay by Haroon Siddiqui on mainstream Canadian media — The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun — and what they have done to promote Islamophobia, and he says this as a veteran journalist, but what’s been missing in the media discussion is social media, which is less controlled and is a completely ambiguous platform. On one hand, it’s rife with hate comments and so on, and we’re now in active discussions about the roles platforms have to play.
The Europeans are way ahead of us. They’ve got this digital legislation coming up. It requires navigation between freedom of expression and the limits of it. We haven’t even started that conversation. We seem to be waiting for everybody else to do something before we have some model legislation. The other side of social media, of course, is mobilization of anti-Islamophobia responses, creative work by people on social media and so on.
The second part of media is cinema. I mentioned the National Film Board. One of the films I show my students in my cinema and politics course is Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s extraordinary three-part documentary called Reconstruction. Now, I have American students in my class, and they’ve come to me and said, “Nobody ever taught us that reconstruction was not nice to Black Americans. We thought this was the formation of modern American identity.” Gates is Black, perhaps the world’s leading American studies scholar at this stage, and he completely challenges the accepted narrative of what happened after the American Civil War. In one week, my students are radically rethinking everything they thought they knew about the constitution and its role in citizenship and so on.
I’m thinking that if we had a three-part documentary funded by the National Film Board on the history of Islamophobia way back, orientalism, what happened in the 19th century, colonialism and now, the impact of that would be staggering. It’s often the reverse. The National Film Board has funded films that promote Islamophobia, I’m sure not deliberately, but that would be the flip side of it.
The final comment I want to make on this is how much ethical illiteracy there is on the part of journalists. I don’t mean at all to be offensive about this. I don’t think it’s necessarily prejudice. But even with young journalists, in the middle of an interview, a question is asked, “So what comes first — your Muslim identity or your Canadian identity?” What kind of a question is that? I mean, would you ask an Irish Canadian or a Scottish Canadian which one you are first, as if you can’t chew gum and walk? We have multiple identities, and we’re a pluralist state and so on.
I think that the media does no favours to itself by the quality. Even watching “The National,” the flagship CBC News broadcast, you see language coming out when you have an Islamophobic offence, a killing, or an incident and so on. There is no consciousness that there is a history and baggage behind language and how you articulate something and which images you show.
This needs to be part of the training of journalists. Communications schools need to do this. With cinema and social media, that literacy is completely crucial, because otherwise, even with Disney’s amazing work that my fellow panellists have been talking about, this could be episodic and in a few months it could just vanish into ether. To make it enduring, we need to dig much, much deeper.
Ms. Miled: If I ask the audience when was the last time they heard about Muslims in the news, when was the last time they heard something about Muslims, I am sure that they will all go back to the horrible accident of the family that was run over in Toronto, or when we have a terrorist attack and a headline about a Muslim. We are within this binary. We are trapped within a binary of victimhood and terrorism. Sometimes it also has implications on how we are portrayed and how people are portrayed. It doesn’t mean that Muslims need to be beautifully depicted, but as a community that has its highs and lows, its drawback and its advantages, just like any other community, the religious factor is so magnified and amplified that it becomes connected to every single act, and particularly connected to negative acts.
What I suggest here comes from my academic background. I created for my students who were becoming teachers what we call critical media literacy. Sometimes I watch the news and am honestly shocked. The language used, the expressions and the references, are really outdated. This is not what we expect from our Canadian media facing the challenges of truth and reconciliation and facing anti-Black racism. Islamophobia is intersected with everything — with sexism, Blackness, ableism. It is part of all the oppression systems. Critical media literacy is how to look to these events and how things are portrayed and trying to understand how colonialism, white supremacy and orientalism have framed Muslims.
Unfortunately, a lot of academic work has just stayed on the level of academia. It hasn’t gone to the public, because it requires resources. I give an example from my own work. When I was doing this research, I was doing it for the youth, for people like my kids. I decided to go to the public. I did my dissertation. I wrote articles, and they are published in academic outlets, but on the side, I made an exhibition with photographs taken by refugee Muslim girls. I invited the media to attend. No one showed up. This exhibition was conducted in a church, at UBC, in a community centre. In the church, I remember we had 250 guests coming to see this exhibition.
It’s our responsibility as a Muslim community to have the capacity, the resources and the ways to bring our stories and our voices to the public. It is also part of our responsibility. We should have the initiative, but we need that these stories have ears to hear and have cameras to capture. This is how the public will be educated around who Muslims are, because we are completely different. We cannot be put in one box. We need to understand that Muslims come from diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic groups. We are not the same. We have common practices, but we shouldn’t all be put in one box of one size fits all.
The Chair: That brings me to my next question. Do you think that the media is not interested in good stories about Muslims?
Ms. Miled: I don’t say not interested. I say they become interested when something will raise the attention, like a terrorist attack. Like, victims. Media is around the buzz. Unfortunately, we don’t see the everyday stories. We don’t see the details. Something that is coming now is the opportunity to hear the Indigenous people. The more we hear their stories, the more we understand how we need to establish these connections. Unfortunately, Muslims didn’t have the chance. They were not offered the chance. They didn’t have the opportunities. They didn’t have the funding. They didn’t have the resource to bring their voices too.
When I say Muslims, I’m not speaking about same people. As I said, we have a completely wide range. It’s not that they are not interested, but it is not even in the scope of their awareness. They’re not even aware that these people are different because we are all put in the same framework. They look like oppressed, violent men. It is the oppressed Muslim women and the dangerous men. I quote here Sherene Razack, a famous scholar who wrote a lot about Muslims. That’s the frame. We need to change that. How? I think it is possible by critical media literacy.
Mr. Alam: I would echo Dr. Miled’s comments that we have been put into such a category that the media doesn’t even view us as an everyday news story. We can probably list off three categories when the media talks about us. It’s during Ramadan, it’s when a terrorist attack happens and it’s when we’re victims of something. Those are the only three times when we’re talked about in another media. Because there is that trope, that stereotype, of us being simply that, I hate to say it but I don’t think we are viewed the way that other Canadian citizens are viewed in that respect. The media isn’t even interested in just seeing what’s happening in our community on a daily basis, and those sorts of stories aren’t viewed as newsworthy. We have been othered so much by the media that those are really the only three times that that happens.
I do think that critical media literacy is important because, yes, the media’s portrayal of us needs to change, but I think that’s going to take a while, and that’s one project. I think the other project is making sure that citizens can actually critique the media when they do those stories. I think that pressure needs to come from other places as well, not just the Muslim community but everyday citizens pressuring the media to change their portrayal, the stereotypical way that Muslims are portrayed. That comes from being literate in critical media and being able to point out those shortcomings.
The Chair: Thank you.
I think Senator Jaffer would agree that, where we sit, we’re subjected to almost I shouldn’t say daily forms of Islamophobia. I’ve been asked if the Lord’s Prayer offended me, but I said it’s the same God we pray to. Whether my daughters are covered? Why doesn’t the Muslim community apologize every time there’s an incident? To which my reply is, does every other community apologize once a crazy does something crazy? I said that’s not the representation of Islam. There are many issues, and Senator Jaffer and myself do have these discussions quite often. Something will really touch us and get us mad. That’s why I thought it was so important that we do this study and that we get these stories out there. I’m just amazed with the witnesses that we’ve had and the stories that we’ve heard.
Senator Jaffer: Ms. Ali, yesterday when we were at the mosque, you or one of your colleagues brought up the issue of gendered Islamophobia. I was wondering if you wanted to add anything to that. That’s a concept that’s really got our interest, and we want to do more work on it. I know you were there, and I wondered if you wanted to add any more to what she said.
Ms. Ali: I think she articulated it very well, and it is good to call it gendered Islamophobia. Islamophobia has been talked about for quite a while, but there are so many additional layers to the struggles that the women go through. Sister Tazul touched upon it quite well. Whether it’s in your workplace or whether it’s through job interviews or even in your daily life, women definitely face an uphill battle, a time to be seen, to be taken seriously and to be valued. Diversity, equity and inclusion — that’s what Muslims are looking for. It’s to be seen as valuable members of society.
I wanted to just quickly make one more comment regarding media. I personally reached out to city mayors to ask them to acknowledge religious holidays. The response was, “Yes, we talked about it at our committee meeting.” It’s pushing the button, pushing the boundaries as well, to, “Hey, we’re here. Acknowledge us as you do Christmas and the other holidays.”
I just wanted to add that piece, and then back to the question, yes, definitely that’s an issue.
Mr. Sajoo: Do we have a minute? I want to add a comment to what you asked about gendered Islamophobia. My colleague,Catherine Dauvergne, former dean of the UBC law faculty, has shown that gendered Islamophobia is not just targeting women. When it comes to securitization, Canadian security certificates, it’s the opposite, which is young Muslim are the target. If you’re between the ages of 19 and 39 — thankfully I’m passed that — you are more likely to be stopped at the airport, you’re more likely to be searched and you’re more likely to be targeted in media reports. She’s shown that it’s overwhelmingly young Muslim men who are the targets of that. Gendered Islamophobia, yes, targets women in terms of harassment, abuse, Bill 21, and so on, and it’s interesting, Professor Dauvergne points out, that when it comes to women, the critique quickly moves to human rights and we talk about how this is discrimination and so on, but when it comes to targeting Muslim men, the human rights discourse disappears completely and is taken over by the terrorism discourse, which is when it comes to security, you don’t talk about human rights. That comes first. I want to point out the gendered part is an appropriate term, but it’s not only gendering women, it’s also about males.
Senator Jaffer: You and I are friends, so we can argue forever. This committee is talking about gendered Islamophobia because, for Canadians, when we talk about Islamophobia, we talk about practically the men. There is an issue of women as well. There’s a separate issue for women. You and I will argue on that forever. That’s where I was coming from.
Mr. Sajoo: If I may, I think that when we talk about Islamophobia now, whether it’s in the media or elsewhere, we do first think of women in head scarves or niqabs now. That’s the front of the mind issue. Professor Dauvergne, as a law professor who has argued before the Supreme Court, says, “I’ve been defending Muslim men, and nobody wants to hear my human rights defences of how we treat them and that this is gendering too.” As a woman, she says that both are important and both involve gendering, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Senator Jaffer: I think the analysts have heard you, so that will be in our report. Thank you.
Mr. Alam: If there’s a minute, I would like to add to that. I totally echo the comments around gendered Islamophobia and how it does affect the genders in different ways. Muslim women are more visible, so, obviously, from the hotline, what we see is more attacks happening on the street and verbal harassment. As Dr. Sajoo has spoken about, there are states of exception drawn out from Muslim men where they aren’t entitled the same rights under the law.
I would add that, since we’re talking about intersectionality, this is an important point of discussion. Islamophobia doesn’t affect everyone the same way. We’ve seen that, in particular, Black Muslim men and women are the most impacted by Islamophobia, the reason for that being that they have to face the intersectional racism of both being Black and Muslim. Unfortunately, they face racism not just within the public sphere but within the Muslim community itself too. That layered understanding of Islamophobia is incredibly important, and those nuances are important too.
Ms. Miled: That’s why I adopt personally and avoid using the word “Islamophobia.” I say “anti-Muslim racism” because it showed that it’s not a phobia. I wish it was a phobia. I wish it stayed at the level of fear of something and it didn’t get into something concrete and physical. That fear is not emotional. That fear is translated to action, to physical aggression, to unemployment, to not being promoted, to being kicked out and to be screened. I remember I was at Customs going to a very prestigious conference, and the Customs officer was googling my name. He didn’t believe that this woman could be presenting at Oxford University. We don’t even notice these incidents, but they impact people. They impact the way we feel about themselves.
This is anti-Muslim racism, and I agree with Mr. Alam that it intersects with race because we are a racialized community. When you think about a Muslim, you think about the brown and about the Black. When I did my research, a white girl, a Muslim from Albania, said, “My colour protects me.” That was a very powerful word. She said, “I’m white with blue eyes. No one even thinks that I am a Muslim.” It is intersected with the systems of oppression that have been marginalizing and oppressing Blacks, Indigenous people, immigrants and refugees, because these are the Muslims. It’s a combination of all these factors.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We’ve had almost two hours of questions and answers and presentations.
I recently was thinking of the incident here in Vancouver where there was an Indigenous man who was Muslim and the bank refused to honour his cheques. They said, “You can’t be Indigenous and a Muslim.” They don’t realize how the world has changed. We’re all aware that Muslims are not newcomers to this country. The first census of Canada has 13 Muslims of Scottish heritage living in Edmonton. There are a lot of facts that people don’t know. I’m asked, “Why the study?” I say the most Muslims have been killed in G7 country in Canada. I had someone say to me, “Oh, really? I have to check that,” as though my word was not good enough.
I want to thank each and every one of you for your presentations and for agreeing to participate in our study. Your assistance with our study is greatly appreciated. I wish you well. Have a good day.
(The committee adjourned.)