Evidence of meeting #75 for Canadian Heritage in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was indigenous.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:20 p.m.
President, Canadian Muslim Forum
We have for many years now, 10 or 15 years so far.... Recently we created a 1-800 number for all Canadians, not limited to our Muslim community, but really for those people who have to face issues that are discriminatory and who are being attacked for who they are. What we have realized through our experience on this is—although it is not a federal issue, it is more of a local issue—that there are two elements to this.
First of all, there are people who come from countries where they are hesitant to come and present themselves, especially to security departments.
Second, and this is most important, from our experience so far, security departments all over do not really take seriously the complaints they have received. I'll give you an example. If a woman is being targeted because of her hijab, and she goes to the police to make this complaint, they start asking questions: “Do you have a witness? Who was there? Are you fine? What kind of violence was there? Did you go to the hospital?” When the woman doesn't have all the answers, there's a sort of discouragement. Since there were no other witnesses who were ready to present themselves at this certain incident, there is no need for you to really.... CMF, Canadian Muslim Forum, has approached authorities and city authorities to tackle this issue.
They face another problem. Even if the police take it into consideration, there is no serious follow-up. This is also another discouragement where we call on authorities, whether at the city level or the provincial level, to have this sort of orientation for all police departments to take such instances very seriously and to be followed up seriously when they are reported.
5:20 p.m.
NDP
Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC
Thank you.
I want to focus on recommendations because part of the work is about what we should do about the current situation. We know that there is a real effect of some leaders outside of this country that is really fanning, I think, fear and hate and normalizing discrimination of a whole variety of different types. I won't go further into that.
In light of that, part of the work here is to ask what we do about it. What can we do as a whole-of-government approach to this? We used to have, for example, a national strategy on anti-racism that's now sort of in abeyance. In our last panel, some people suggested that perhaps we should separate out work that needs to be done on racism and on religious discrimination, that there should be two separate streams around that.
I wonder if you can shed some light on what action should be taken. Most particularly, I'm interested in a strategy that focuses on a national perspective so that it's not a single stream, but across the country.
5:20 p.m.
Prof. Faisal Bhabha
I'll just say something on this racism versus religious discrimination piece, because I think that we can't generalize for all religions.
For Muslims, and when talking about Islamophobia, it really is the intersection of religious discrimination and racism, whereas that might not be the issue for other cases of religious discrimination, for example. I know many Christian groups are concerned about incursions on the various churches' freedoms. That's, I think, a different issue from the specific nature of Islamophobia, which is more akin to homophobia and anti-Semitism because it's an intersectional form of discrimination. For Muslims, it's on the basis of religion, but it's also on the basis of a perceived otherness, a foreignness and a colour, but not always colour because we're a diverse community of many races, and that causes many people to say, “What do you mean?”
Let me give you an example. My own mother, for example, is white in colour. She's an old-stock Quebecker who became a Muslim 40 years ago and has been wearing the hijab for about 25 years. Over the last 10 years, she has, at various points in time, been told to go back to where she comes from, which is a small village in rural Quebec where she probably wouldn't be welcome looking the way she looks. That, I think, illustrates what race is and how it's not about colour and hair texture.
5:25 p.m.
Barrister & Solicitor, Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association
I have a couple of recommendations. One is, I'm not speaking to the national strategy but certainly taking that information and bringing it back to policies that exist. I would flag Bill C-59, things that were not touched under Bill C-51, so using that information to inform existing state policy.
Number two is to create a repository of complaints. If complaint mechanisms already exist within departments, I think perhaps there should be an overarching way to collect that information, to gather that information, so we have a sense of the kinds of discrimination that Muslims are facing across the board, so coalescing that in some way.
The last one I would say is to improve oversight. There's a lot of discussion. We can get into this as well. Oversight we know post-Arar is deficient. We need to enhance those methods, but the only way we can do that is to understand the problem.
5:25 p.m.
Liberal
The Acting Chair Liberal Dan Vandal
Thank you, Mr. Hameed.
We have a few minutes left before 5:30.
Pierre Breton.
October 2nd, 2017 / 5:25 p.m.
Liberal
Pierre Breton Liberal Shefford, QC
Very well, Mr. Chair.
I would like to continue along the same lines as Ms. Kwan in terms of the recommendations that you might make to the government to reduce racism in general. Mr. Majzoub and Mr. Alsaieq, please use the few minutes we have left to tell us about that.
5:25 p.m.
President, Canadian Muslim Forum
Thank you very much for the question.
If you don't mind, I will just conclude by saying that when we come here, we don't come here as foreign objects coming from another planet. We come to the House of Commons as Canadians. My four children were born in Canada. This is what we're looking for, for the future of all Canadians, because always when we're looked at, it's “He's an immigrant coming from I don't know where.” This is how we are being dealt with. We have to be dealt with equally. We are not looking for favouritism.
I will conclude in one word when we say we need equality in the way we are being asked to have equality existing in obligations. We pay our taxes. We face the law. We are all the same. We would like to have our equality and rights too and freedom.
Thank you so much.
5:25 p.m.
Liberal
The Acting Chair Liberal Dan Vandal
Thank you.
It's close to 5:30. I think we're done for the afternoon.
May I get a motion to adjourn?
It is moved by David Anderson.
The meeting is adjourned.