Thank you, and I would like to thank you for your presentation. It was interesting, and I appreciated hearing your thoughts.
Reflecting on what we heard with the first panel and then again now, however, had me asking what we are doing. What are we doing with this study? What's the purpose? It got me thinking of looking back at Motion 103 and at the wording, in a kind of flipping back and forth.
As everyone here knows, it started as a private member's motion. It was brought by MP Iqra Khalid, who's the MP for Mississauga—Erin Mills. It was read and was debated in the House of Commons, and then it was agreed to on March 23 this year.
In fact, then, that motion has already been agreed to in the House of Commons, and no law was created as a result of it. The reason I'm picking on that piece is that you mentioned concerns about laws and free speech, which came up in the last panel. I want it to be clear that this motion was adopted and there was no legislation created at that point, because it was a motion. The result was, I believe, if I look at the wording, a recognition of “the need to quell the increasing public climate of hate and fear”, a condemnation of “Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination”, and an admonition that the government “take note of House of Commons' petition e-411 and the issues raised by it”.
That's what happened there. Then there was a request for this committee to do a study, which wasn't a requirement; it was a request.
I wanted, however, to flag the part, just because I've heard these concerns, about free speech and the impact of a condemnation of Islamophobia. In fact, though, the House of Commons had already passed a motion doing that in October of 2016 as well, which again led to no legislation, no curbing of free speech.
That had me taking a bit of a closer look at what we're doing today. Today we're sitting here in an independent parliamentary committee. It's made up of members of all of the recognized parties. You have here Liberal members, Conservative members, members from the NDP. We've all come together to do this study. We came together to agree to terms for the study. We came to talk together about how we would go about it—the process, the witnesses who would be called. Now we're working together, all members from all three parties, to gather evidence for the study that we're doing.
When the study is complete, we're going to be drafting a report, and that report can have recommendations. What we cannot do, however—and I want to make it clear, because there seems to be a misunderstanding that has come out—is legislate. This is an area in which we're not going to create any laws out of this committee. What we can do is create recommendations in a report, and once a majority of the committee has agreed to a final version of the report, we're going to table it in the House of Commons through the chair.
The tabling of that report will still not create any legislation. It's just going to be the tabling of a report showing what the findings were from our study. At that point, there may be a response from the government.
That brings me to here, today. I was interested in what you talked about—about laws preventing racism against all groups. That was one of your recommendations, and I'm going to pick up on it. As we examine witnesses and gather evidence for this study, I'm thankful for it.
I want to make sure that it's clear that the terms are that we:
...undertake a study on how the government could...develop a whole-of-government approach to reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination including Islamophobia, in Canada, while ensuring a community-centered focus with a holistic response through evidence-based policy-making.
Then there's a second part about hate crimes data. That does involve eliminating systemic racism—there's no halt on that—and religious discrimination, including Islamophobia, but it isn't focused on one group.
This is just a preamble, to give a sense of what I came to when I was looking at this.
One of the really important pieces that we were presented with last week, and I thought it was really helpful to undergird where we're going to be going with the study, was the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination findings from the United Nations. They made a series of recommendations. I was going to put them to you as an idea of what we could adopt as as committee, because that's what we're looking for.