Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm here with my colleague, Yavar Hameed, and we represent the Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association. The CMLA is an organization made up of self-identified Muslim Canadian lawyers coming from a diversity of backgrounds and a variety of professional expertise.
Although we are lawyers, the approach that we advocate underscores the urgency here for Parliament to research, study, and understand Islamophobia. It is not to create a legal term of art or a set of prohibited practices that need to be specifically identified and legislated. Rather, it is to recognize the social problem that needs to be understood and documented in order to better inform on government policy and legal decision-making. That's our general position.
Why does Parliament need to study Islamophobia? The police already investigate crimes of hate-motivated assault, vandalism, anti-Muslim terror, and hate speech. We have civil courts that redress wrongs of battery, libel, and slander. There are ombuds, labour boards, police complaints procedures, and a variety of other administrative avenues to complain about discriminatory treatment. Many of these processes operate as quasi-judicial bodies, which means they have the power to apply human rights norms and the charter. They have a mandate to consider evidence of systemic discrimination in order to better understand the specific facts that are before them. Systemic discrimination doesn't produce on its own findings of individual liability. It allows us to better understand specific facts in context.
The challenge, though, is that those various bodies are not human rights experts. They don't have social context at their fingertips. They are equipped to ascertain facts before them, but they need evidence about the underlying social conditions that is usually admitted only through expert evidence. The problem is that the law can't protect against Islamophobia. Rather, it is policy-makers, administrators, police, judicial and administrative decision-makers that need to be sensitive to the depth of the problem and its social manifestations, so that they can better consider that as the context in which individual disputes arise.
The best experts on Islamophobia are social scientists, and that's because they observe society. They write about what they see. Social scientists have observed that the war on terror and the divisive public discourse that has focused heavily on Islam as the problem have had trickle-down effects. Our society is obsessed with the way a handful of women dress, with how and where people pray, and whom they associate with. We've heard calls to screen immigrants for values, testing for loyalty.
All experts tell us at the same time that white extremism is a real threat. We see attacks by white people against Muslim women, perceived foreigners, racial minorities on buses and in malls around the country, the murder of six worshippers in Quebec City in a mosque, daily physical and verbal assaults on innocent ordinary Canadians for no reason other than how they look or what they are perceived or assumed to be. All the while Muslims are still painted as the terrorists and continue to be subjected to hate because of that.
What we know about is just the tip of the iceberg. We know, as Muslim Canadian lawyers who hear from members of our community, that under-reporting is a big obstacle. There's a chill on reporting. But we do know enough to know there's a problem, and we know enough to know what we don't know. That's why we support this government taking a closer look at the problem, to better understand it.
Islamophobia is not a legally defined concept. It's a term developed by social scientists to describe the social problem. Defining it is not impossible, but expecting a perfect definition is unrealistic, so don't do it. Too much time has been wasted arguing about finding the perfect definition, and not enough is being done to understand the problem that everybody of reasonable mind accepts and should acknowledge exists. Having said that, we do offer a simple working definition that is not any different from the definitions you have heard, but as lawyers we boil it down to a very simple analogy. Islamophobia is simply anti-Muslim discrimination or hate.
We all know that anti-Semitism means something like anti-Jewish discrimination or hate. We also know that homophobia means something like anti-gay or anti-LGBTQ discrimination or hate. It's not that hard to extend that thinking, using logic, to Islamophobia.
There are two important dimensions: the individual and the systemic. Systemic Islamophobia involves a pattern, practice, or policy that is rooted in discriminatory criteria or assumptions and which has a broad impact on members of that group. Islamophobia gives a name to the system of structural obstacles that coalesced and deepened after 9/11 to produce exclusions, burdens, and barriers on people in various aspects of public and personal life just because they fit a particular profile. Once these exclusions, burdens, and barriers become embedded in our institutions, they can be difficult to identify and remove. This is why it's important to study systemic discrimination.
At the individual level, Islamophobia can be considered a subset within the category of discrimination. We hear from members of the Canadian Muslim community all the time and sometimes ourselves even experience the casual forms of ordinary daily discrimination that people face in various social areas or as a result of state surveillance and over-scrutiny. It consists of contempt, prejudice, aversion, and distrust. It may be rooted in irrational fear, beliefs or even in claims of expertise. It may even be couched in neutral language, and it's often connected to particular movements such as the backlash against multiculturalism, the backlash against political correctness, or the backlash against reasonable accommodation.
It can be observable in critical and hostile behaviour on the basis of religion or on the basis of perceived religion, and it can manifest in the denial of benefits or of opportunities based on unstated assumptions. It's difficult to unearth and to identify. It can lead to outcomes that people cannot see and therefore cannot address, and for this reason it is even more important to study the systemic patterns that cause those things to be embedded in our society.