The Ontario Human Rights Commission appeared before this committee last week. I listened to the hearings, and the strategies they're offering seem really interesting to me.
I can't think of particular things that I would like to see done, but I am really excited to see M-103 has been passed and that this committee has been struck to address these issues.
I want to go back for a second to the issue of Islamophobia and the ideological underpinnings of it. I think it's useful to think about Islamophobia, building on what I was saying earlier. There are people who believe there is a civilizational war between Islam and the west, and even though that is a categoric error, because Islam is a religion; it's 1.6 million people who live everywhere right now, including in what we would call the west, and the west is a geographic region, nevertheless it is an entrenched way of thinking.
I think that education, for example, is a really important measure for us to take when we're thinking about combatting Islamophobia and systemic racism, but it's really important to not just stop at education. If we only think of education as a solution, then we think that the problem is ignorance. That is one of the problems we have to think about.
Islamophobia also comes from a sense of self-interest and self-preservation for people who believe they're engaged in this cosmological epic war between Islam and the west. That would require a counter-narrative to the rising sense of a beleaguered civilization. That's an example of having to be multipronged and also for us to rely on the robust laws that we have around hate speech to curtail speech that is expressly racist or discriminates against any religious group or is Islamophobic.