Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 23rd, 2017

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

On the facilitating reporting piece again, within your organization and the work you do, do people tell you about any specific barriers that prevent them from making these reports? We just want to get an idea of what the barriers are.

[Serah Gazali]

What kind of reports do you mean?

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

I mean the hate crime reports. Sorry.

[Serah Gazali]

I think they talk about it among themselves. Perhaps it's normalized, so they don't think of it as something that really needs to be addressed. We're not doing anything about it, and so we do not have to have high expectations with regard to why people are not reporting.

If you take the example of laws that are to protect women's rights at the workplace, we do have those rights, but still, because of the power hierarchies, women sometimes cannot report about sexism at work.

[Narges Samimi]

Also, not everyone has the courage to do that. People need money or they are scared for their lives, so they don't have the courage to report those kinds of hate crimes.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you. That's helpful.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Now we're going to go into the second round. We have news that Mr. Singh may actually be able to come on for the second hour. He will be the first person up in the second hour on video because the place where he's doing it closes at 5:00, so we're accommodating him on that.

Now we go to the second round, beginning with Mr. Anderson for the Conservatives for three minutes.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you. Mr. Reid will take the round.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Mr. Reid, you have three minutes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Dabrusin made reference to a report. Could we request that the committee accept that—it's a United Nations report—into evidence, and if it's available in both official languages, that copies be circulated to all members? I think we ought to, as a group, be trying to familiarize ourselves with the relevant United Nations materials relating to Canada's current human rights performance.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Yes, I think that would be fine, because we need all the information we can get that's not necessarily given by a witness. That's part of our background information. Thank you.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you very much.

You made a number of recommendations. Some of them have been dealt with, and I appreciate those. There is one that I have to say I take issue with, and I'm going to explain why. I'm saying it not as a criticism of you; I'm saying it as a way of putting the issue before the members before this committee.

Your recommendation number 4 on page 18 proposes to:

Mandate the removal of symbols that celebrate violence, genocide, and colonialism. This recommendation may include changing the names of educational institutions (e.g. schools named in memory of Sir John A. Mcdonald) and streets (e.g. Colonization Road), as well as restoring Indigenous names for cities and regions.

I think on the whole there's lots of merit to that, but I just want to stop and pull Sir John A.'s name out of that.

He, of course, was our first prime minister. If we take the approach that Sir John A. Macdonald is someone who is unfit to be celebrated and that anything named after him should have its name changed, then we also, I think, have to—and this would be presumably over his record vis-à-vis aboriginal relations—take away anything named after Sir Wilfrid Laurier, our second major prime minister, who took away the vote from aboriginal people after Sir John A. had given it to them. We'd have to rename anything named after Sir Robert Borden, our third long-serving prime minister, who after all, during World War I, locked up Ukrainian civilians; Mackenzie King, our longest-serving prime minister, who locked up Japanese-Canadians during World War II; and Louis St. Laurent, who served in the forties and fifties and who kept aboriginals from voting until John Diefenbaker finally gave them that right in 1960. As well, presumably Mr. Diefenbaker and Mr. Pearson, who were our prime ministers in the sixties, are morally responsible for the sixties scoop of young aboriginal people from their parents.

The point I'm making here is that I think we need some kind of perspective when we're doing these things that distinguishes between these acts—which are not excusable—and the people who did them, who were simply not monsters and who were not unfit to be honoured in other aspects. I just wanted to get that on the record. You provided me with the opportunity. This issue has come up before.

That said, there may well be merit to doing other things, such as reviewing some of the other names that are problematic.

I don't know if I used up my time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You've just gone past your three minutes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I'm sorry. All right.

Having said that, I really appreciate your testimony. It was very informative. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Next is Arif Virani, for the Liberals. You have three minutes, Mr. Virani.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

I didn't hear the first part of your testimony, so I apologize if any of this is repetitive.

We've heard a bit about assisting communities where they are throughout the country. We've also heard some previous submissions from other people who have appeared before this committee to talk about how things had worked in the past.

I wanted to ask you about integration, which you touched on earlier, and how it would work. If we were to look at past examples of funding at Heritage Canada, it was not just for groups communicating with other groups—meaning an Italian group communicates with a Jamaican group, just as a hypothetical—but for assisting groups unto themselves, through community capacity grants or community development grants, so that communities can better understand how the Canadian system operates and better understand their own needs and then work to integrate within the Canadian polity or culture.

Is that something that makes sense to you, and if so, why? Could you explain that to us a little?

[Serah Gazali]

We mentioned examples of how that can be achieved in many points in the recommendations.

There are so many. Some of them are about funding for starting a conversation within the community, or funding for media, because this is a huge issue, particularly for the new Arab community. They would love to know what's going on in the English news, but they cannot access it because of the language. Also, the media do not really cover issues that are relevant to them. They can get subtitles, but it's not really relevant to them. They are not well covered by the media. They need forums where they can practise that.

That's what I can think of off the top of my head, but we add so many points in the recommendations.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Now we go to Mr. Reid, for the Conservatives, for three minutes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I'll actually ask a question this time. Thank you for putting up with my diatribe earlier.

Ms. Gazali, you made a reference to some people being discriminated against because they are women, some because they are members of a religious minority. Of course, we also have people who are members of racial minorities.

This is something I've been trying to figure out. I've been trying to figure out how one distinguishes how to deal with these things, both from a statistical point of view—because we want to gather statistics on both hate crimes and non-criminal forms of discrimination—and also in terms of redress. I'm genuinely uncertain how one approaches that from a practical point of view.

[Serah Gazali]

Statistics Canada distinguishes between discrimination based on gender and discrimination based on religion. However, they do not really see a connection between an act of racism based on race and one based on religion, because the perpetrators of hate crimes do not really distinguish between the two. They just look at the person and assume, because of their looks, that they belong to a certain religion.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I think that with an actual hate crime, it's sometimes easy to tell. In the case of the man who went into the mosque in Quebec City, his victims were all men, but had they been all women, it would have been obvious that he was attacking them because they were Muslims, not because they were women.

In the case of discrimination, I would think it's much harder to tell. If someone doesn't hire you for a job or finds some excuse not to rent to you—that kind of thing—it would be much harder to tell what the basis was. Am I wrong?

[Serah Gazali]

I'm not sure about statistics for the particular scenario you're describing, but Narges just mentioned that when she was trying to find a job, just because she was wearing a hijab she was not hired. The moment she took it off, she got a job.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

You're right. No, that case is very clear. That's a valid point. Do the statistics actually capture that information, to your knowledge?

[Serah Gazali]

I'm not sure that they do, but discrimination, hate speech, and violence in the recent statistics were rising even more for women who are Muslims. I think that's particularly because they're just visible.