I'd like to thank the standing committee, and you, Madam Chair, for this opportunity to present on such a critical issue.
Pursuant to motion M-103, we understand that this standing committee is studying a whole-of-government approach to reducing and eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination, including Islamophobia, in Canada. We also understand that the study will look at issues of disaggregated data collection and hate crimes reporting. I will be making my comments and recommendations specifically related to those goals.
The South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario is a not-for-profit legal clinic serving low-income South Asians in Ontario from a wide variety of home countries, as well as North America.
South Asians make up one of the largest racialized communities in Canada. Statistics, unfortunately, also show that many South Asian communities continue to fall below the poverty line at disproportionate rates for a number of reasons that include racism and other forms of discrimination.
SALCO's mandate includes the provision of direct legal services in areas of law including human rights, immigration, income maintenance, employment law, tenants law, family and intimate partner violence, and forced marriage. Our mandate also includes a large-scale advocacy on issues of racism, religious discrimination and gender discrimination.
Our own advocacy always starts from the premise that people have intersecting identities and that to improve their lives our decisions must recognize that intersectionality and how it impacts a person's agency or ability to make choices. For example, we know from evidence that racialized women face a larger gender wage gap than white women.
I would like to start by saying that any approach this committee takes to the study of racism and religious discrimination must have an intersectional framework to ensure the best possible outcomes for marginalized communities.
In direct legal service our clinic serves approximately 4,000 to 5,000 clients per year through legal advice, brief service, and casework. The information that I will be providing today is truly grounded in the work that we do within our communities and what we see and hear directly from our clients, as well as our own analysis of the systemic impact of the policies, laws, and regulations that impact them.
SALCO is also a founding member and steering committee member of the Colour of Poverty-Colour of Change campaign. As mentioned in our previous session, the Colour of Poverty campaign has focused on issues of racial equity and racial justice and concerns around the racialization of poverty.
Over the years we have seen many instances of racism and discrimination against the South Asian community in Canada both at the individual and systemic level. Systemically our own work has challenged immigration policy that targets South Asian communities like the conditional permanent residence. We have challenged issues of freedom of religion, in particular, the ability to wear the niqab in areas like a courtroom. We have challenged religious discrimination and accommodation in education, and we have looked at the issue of racial and religious discrimination in employment, including a call for employment equity.
We have also worked hard to discuss repealing legislation that we believe targets our communities, like the so-called Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act.
We have seen a rise in overt and direct racism in the form of violent acts against members of the Muslim community, and by extension, the South Asian community. The point must be made that we do not see a distinction there, and that many members of our community who do not identify as Muslim also bear the brunt of Islamophobia. In our own work we have seen a rise in targeted racism against all of those communities.
According to the 2016 hate crime report of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, the incidence of Islamophobia hate crimes or incidents reported to the NCCM and the police or in the media has been steadily increasing with the most recent frequently targeted hate-motivated attacks having been on Muslim women and institutions such as mosques.
What is not captured here are those people who face racism and discrimination on a daily basis and do not report it. We speak to clients daily who express incidents of hate, incidents of violence, incidents of Islamophobia, and who repeatedly tell us that they will not come out and report it, that they do not feel safe to do so, they do not feel they would be supported if they did so, and they do not feel that anything would happen if they did so.
In preparing for today I decided to look back at our own casework in 2016 and look at some of the incidents that were reported to us so that I could get a sense of what we have been seeing. It was a troubling review. These are some of the things we found.
We had many clients report frequent comments against Muslim women wearing the niqab in shopping centres and on the street, saying that they are not Canadian, that they should go home, or that they are terrorists. We had frequent comments against Muslim women wearing the niqab that they are anti-woman and anti-feminists. We had comments to Sikh clients wearing turbans that they were Muslim terrorists. We had comments that wearing religious attire meant that a person supported sharia law. We had comments that all South Asians practise forced marriage.
We had one client reporting an incident of being pushed on the subway and told, “Get out of my way. This is not your country.” Most recently, for myself personally, two weeks ago I was at a coffee shop, and a man butted in front of me. I made a comment to which he turned around and said, “Get out of this country, you Paki terrorist.” The environment in Canada is not great for those who are facing Islamophobia.
At a grassroots level, SALCO has seen a steady increase in the number of racist Islamophobic incidents reported over the past several years that mirrors the statistics that this committee has heard from other people in front of it.
This summer I had the opportunity to present to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination which was reviewing Canada's progress on addressing racism. At the committee, Canada was inconsistent in its messaging around systemic racism. In fact, it went so far as to say that Canadian police do not racially profile. I would urge this committee to ground its approach in addressing systemic racism in Canada as a critical piece of its work.
I would like to move on now to some of the more practical recommendations that I would make, and I would echo some of the comments you've heard today.
The first recommendation is a call for a national action plan. I myself had the privilege of sitting on the provincial ministers advisory group for the Ontario anti-racism directorate. I would strongly recommend that this committee review the work of that directorate and consider the implementation of a national action plan that improves upon, not just reintroduces, our old CAPAR, the Canadian action plan against racism.
We need a robust plan that targets issues that the committee has identified and addresses them. In its closing recommendations, the United Nations CERD committee also made the same recommendation, and they urged the committee to review that report.
In recognizing gender equality, Canada has instituted a gender plus framework to be applied to all government decision-making. For me, this is a positive and much-needed step forward. By extension, I would also urge the committee to consider specifically applying a racial equity framework to government decision-making. It is estimated that 25% of our population is now or will soon be racialized. We must approach with the same vigour and importance the issue of race as we do with gender.
Had such a lens been placed on policies like the conditional permanent residence, which is now thankfully repealed, it would have shown that there was a disproportionate impact on racialized women from that policy.
I would also urge the committee, as other speakers have done, to review the United Nations CERD closing recommendations for Canada, as they echo many of the things that we are talking about here today. I would urge the committee to review the CERD recommendations on improvements to our immigration system and the embedded systemic racism within it. I would urge the committee to review the comments made about racial profiling within the criminal justice system and the child welfare system. I would urge the committee to also review the call for employment equity, the call for disaggregated data, and the call for a national action plan.
I would like briefly to talk about the federal poverty reduction strategy that goes on currently through the federal government. Discrimination based on race and religion plays a critical role in keeping racialized Canadians in poverty. Discrimination in employment continues to impact racialized Canadians' ability to have fair and equitable labour market outcomes. A very simple example is that those with Asian-sounding last names are less likely to be called for job interviews. In fact, I was at a legal education session recently, where the number one question was, “How can I change my name legally?”
I would also quickly echo the sentiment that the collection of disaggregated data would be critical to the work of any national action plan. Specifically, collecting data in a disaggregated manner will allow us to measure our progress.
I will leave it at that. Thank you.