Thank you.
First of all, even if English is your mother tongue, this motion is both inelegant and confusing. It's just a problem with the motion. I would challenge the definition because it begins with “racism”. Islam is not a race; it's a religion. You have to treat it as a religion if there's a problem of religious bigotry. That's my initial comment.
I would say more broadly to your comments that sometimes when government gets into a delicate matter it actually makes things worse when it stirs things up. Mr. Bhatti was referring to his own work. I was the chairman of that commission that Mr. Sweet referred to, the advisory panel. There's a lot of very good work going on in Canada among members of different religious traditions. It doesn't necessarily need a government charter or plan or program to promote it. It's already going on. I do think that sometimes when you insert a delicate matter like this into a partisan environment, which the House of Commons is, you actually can risk making things worse rather than supporting the work already going on.