I think Canada is an excellent example of multiculturalism and the ability of different cultures, different religions, different people to come together and live together. We probably have every ethnic group under the sun right here in Canada, represented one way or the other.
The challenge we're currently facing is the lack of motivation for someone to speak out when it's time to speak out. It took the event in Quebec City on January 29 to get the Prime Minister of Canada, the Premier of Quebec, and the Mayor of Quebec City to finally come out and say that we have to be careful what we say. I use the example of Quebec because we had a very dramatic event that took place there. The lives of six families over there have been changed for the rest of their lives. This area is partly targeted by what we call trash radio. There is a lot of trash-talk taking place by people who feel empowered on air to say whatever they want. This has been going on since the mid-1990s.
We have institutions in Canada like the CRTC that issue licences for those radio stations. There have been a multitude of complaints and many times the radio hosts and stations have been seen as guilty, if I may use that word, of bigotry, racism, Islamophobia, sexism, and even encouraging violence against certain groups. Why are we waiting to take the licences away from these guys? It's one action that could be done. Coming back to the responsibilities that political leaders and individual Canadians have, we have to speak out when somebody around the dinner table says something inappropriate. We have to tell them that they ought to rethink what they said, that if they really believe this, they have a problem and we need to talk about it. The lack of debate and discussion gives an opportunity for the right wing to fill up a discourse that wasn't there before. We have to explain better why we should receive refugees. We do need to receive the refugees, and this brings us back to a bigger problem: how come the situation in the Middle East got so bad that we are now forced to take these refugees?
When I was with CSIS in the early 1990s, I tried to warn people about exactly what we are living through today, and unfortunately that report was shelved. There is a lack of action and a lack of political backbone. We need to make decisions that are sometimes difficult, but we definitely need to state what Canadian values are about. To come back to what I was just saying, I believe we have the necessary laws and regulations in place. We just need to enforce them when people are going too far in their discourses.