Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 30th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Mr. Virani, I think your time is up.

Thank you.

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

I have a point of order, Madam Chair. Mr. Virani has done this before. It's too bad he wasn't a witness for us, but we'd like to welcome, or ask the gentleman if he would be willing to respond with a written response so that we can use it in our report.

I'm a little concerned about the fact that.... I don't know if Mr. Virani is deliberately doing this or not, but it almost amounts to bullying witnesses, using his time to lecture them, when they've come here at their time and effort. We've seen this before.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

If you would like to have a response from the witness, then we have about a minute. If we use it up debating with each other, we won't have that time.

Please go ahead, Dr. Jasser.

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

We have also let other witnesses know that they can send recommendations in. I would appreciate it if you let them know that, as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Yes, you have a minute. I will give you a minute. Then if you have any recommendations that you want to send along in writing, please send them to the clerk of the committee.

Thank you.

[Dr. Zuhdi Jasser]

Thank you for this opportunity. I'll try to respond as well as I can.

First of all, while I appreciate the fact that the resolution is trying to approach all faiths, the bottom line is that it was authored by MP Iqra Khalid under the premise of e-411. There is nothing offensive about a Muslim telling you that in other countries that are not as free a democracy as Canada and the United States are, this same language is used to suppress any dissent from citizens in their country. They aren't being put in prison for criticizing the president or the king. They're being put in prison for criticizing Islam. That is why it's called Islamophobia.

By your impugning Raheel Raza's work by saying that she appeared on this and that media, rather than addressing the substance of what I've said, what she has said, I think proves the weakness of your argument. You simply want to do the guilt by association, which you as a Muslim claim is bigotry, when in fact you want to do guilt by association in our work, which actually, I think, any focus on these things avoids.

I think the test of democracy and your—

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Sir, I think your time is up.

Thank you very much.

[Dr. Zuhdi Jasser]

I'll just finish this sentence.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Finish it quickly, please, if you don't mind, sir.

[Dr. Zuhdi Jasser]

The test of democracy is not the centre of what offends those who are kind and moderate. It's the periphery that is the most offensive that test true free speech and democracy.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

I want to thank the witnesses for being present here today.

We have now ended our first hour. We have another group of witnesses coming in, so before I call this session to a close, I would like to suggest that we all need to think about the way we address witnesses. I would ask members to please consider that witnesses are indeed our guests. I know this is a contentious issue, but we need to be very careful of our language, both with each other and to the witnesses. Thank you very much.

I now will suspend for the next hour's panel to arrive.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

We shall begin the second hour.

We have in our second hour Mr. Ahmed and Mr. Dahya from the Muslim Food Bank and Community Services Society. Then we have Mr. Singh from the World Sikh Organization of Canada.

Mr. Singh, I hope everything is fine with you. We hear you had a car accident last week.

[Balpreet Singh, Legal Counsel, World Sikh Organization of Canada]

Indeed. I was waylaid on my way to the hearing, but this time I'm here and we should be good.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have no disabilities from or harm done to you in the accident. You're fine...?

[Balpreet Singh]

Everything is fine.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Good. Thank you.

Here are the protocols. You have 10 minutes as the Muslim Food Bank and Community Services Society. You can divide your time, or one person alone can use the 10 minutes. The World Sikh Organization has 10 minutes as well. I'll give you an eight-minute notice so that you know when you have two minutes left and you can wrap up. Thank you.

We should begin with the Muslim Food Bank and Community Services Society.

Mr. Ahmed.

[Muainudin Ahmed, Director, Muslim Food Bank and Community Services Society]

Madam Chair and honourable members, we're greatly privileged to appear before the committee to make a submission on behalf of our organization, the Muslim Food Bank and Community Services Society. We trust that this will assist the committee in its important study on the issue of systemic racism and religious discrimination.

Our presentation today will be in four parts. First, we will build some context around our organization to make the committee understand the perspective from which we submit the submission. Second, we will share our view on systemic causes of racism based on experiences working as a grassroots community organization. Third, we will recommend the one area we feel will have the biggest impact on addressing this challenge. We will then finally wrap up with some additional observations and practical insights that we've gathered through our work with the community.

[Azim Dahya, Chief Executive Officer, Muslim Food Bank and Community Services Society]

Food bank operation is but one part of our operating model, which has evolved over a period of almost eight years. The Muslim food bank grew out of the Surrey food bank to serve the needs of food bank clients who had special dietary needs, like halal, kosher, vegetarian, vegan, etc. While our client-base demographic is predominantly Muslim from all ethnicities, we are non-denominational from a Muslim perspective and also try to serve families from other faiths and cultural communities.

While food bank operation is our core program, this has been supplemented over time with five other programs, i.e., the ASPIRE caseworker program, prison outreach, youth support, refugee support, and community capacity building. At the outset, it is important to stress that we make our submission from a grassroots perspective. It emerges, not from analysis of large amounts of statistical, national data, but rather from real-world, localized experiences, playing out in the lives of the thousands of Canadians our team has interacted with since our inception.

Throughout the development of our programs, we've always applied the principle of leveraging existing social services rather than creating new ones. We recognize that the capacity of social services is not always optimally employed. An accessibility gap often exists between service delivery centres and the communities in need. This gap is not so much one of physical space, but manifests itself more often in cultural, language, and other barriers. In addition to the plethora of trauma-induced mental health challenges, we've seen additional mental and emotional health challenges stemming from the racial and religious discrimination experienced by our clients.

[Muainudin Ahmed]

The sad necessity of our work is that it connects us with many people who are victims of discrimination based on ethnicity and religious affiliations. Our teams in the caseworker and youth support programs regularly encounter stories spanning the spectrum of naked racist abuse to insidious silent discrimination. Allow us to share a couple of examples.

ASPIRE is our caseworker program, which is conceived as a mechanism to break the clients out of the cycle of ongoing dependency on food bank services. The goal is to move them to a point of being self-sufficient, dignified members of the Canadian society. Our food bank-trained caseworkers engage the client one on one, supporting and connecting them to available community and government resources. The focus is education, employment, and community integration. Our caseworkers often act as mentors and as the first level of social support when clients are experiencing incidents of racial discrimination. Our caseworkers are supported by a group of formally trained social workers.

Feedback from this group recounts many incidents of racial discrimination and harassment, especially with Muslim women in public spaces. Muslim women also experience employment discrimination, i.e., hijab-wearing women being told to “take that off” at interviews. Our case files include stories of discrimination, even in the process of seeking accommodation, where landlords appear overly interested in where the person is from, before even allowing them to view the advertised properties.

In our youth support programs, participants report an increased level of physical bullying, exclusion, and cyber-bullying of Muslim youth. It occurs mostly in the school setting. The stories tell us, not only about discrimination suffered at the hands of students, but even at the hands of teachers who put students on the spot and make unfair generalizations.

The Muslim youth we deal with contend both with Islamophobia and anti-immigrant discourse on a regular basis. This is indisputable data confirming that religious discrimination does indeed exist in our society.

The Muslim Food Bank Services serves the socially marginalized who are already burdened with the trauma of war, poverty, illness, incarceration, and so on. Our view is that this marginalization in fact primes our clients for discrimination. We reach this conclusion because the consistent theme in their stories is that the perpetrators invariably view them as “the other”. We deduce from this that racism thrives in settings where social barriers exist and where there is a lack of mutual knowing. Any attempt to systemically root out racism and discrimination, then, is inherently a project about connecting and reconnecting people.

A further insight derived from our work in the context of newcomers is that connecting people is a bilateral responsibility. While we are not advocating forced integration, the connecting process cannot work unless newcomers make some effort to appreciate the nuances of their new environment and acknowledge a need for some adaptation. This is not to say there's an unwillingness on the part of newcomers, but rather, that there exists an opportunity to better align the available support services to facilitate adaptation to the needs of a wide variety of newcomer communities, and indeed, to develop new services where there might be a need to do so.

A good example of that is the importance of offering refugee integration services in mother tongues, rather than the official Canadian languages. Canadian culture workshop curricula need constant review to include topics that might not have been previously deemed important, topics such as parenting norms, western social etiquette, gender interaction, and so on.

The food bank's community capacity-building program recognizes the mental health component caused by racism within the marginalized communities and has intervened by facilitating various training symposiums on mental health in the Muslim community, bringing together health care, the community, and professional service providers.

In the interest of time, we've identified the one top priority item that we feel would make the biggest impact. Stated plainly, we believe government should direct funding flows more effectively towards community organizations. This would remove one of the key hurdles that prevent community organizations from scaling up the impact of their already worthy efforts. We have argued in the submission that community organizations occupy a uniquely advantageous position, as compared with government agencies or government-funded NGOs, to engage with victims and perpetrators of racial discrimination. This is because the discrimination invariably plays out at the inter-community or intra-community level.

Community organizations such as these exist throughout Canada and represent a vast, untapped but struggling component of society that can be instrumental in shaping and giving expression to the true Canadian identity. Although our operating model represents a response to the specific needs of a particular community, we believe the programs are entirely replicable in all communities. There's no reason that organizations such as ours shouldn't exist in various communities from coast to coast.

Community organizations have, however, been frustrated by the challenges of accessing the vast public funding pools that are already available. Remove these barriers and similar programs could very well spring up around Canada in all communities. Community organizations have a role to play in this as well, and we believe that a buddy system will help them with this.

We have some other recommendations.

Our work with refugees has taught us that the trauma that feeds marginalization starts with and subsequently flows through the mother. Programs targeting systemic remediation should focus on the mother or the primary caregiver.

The English-language curriculum for newcomers can be strengthened by applying a human rights lens to include topics such as what is discrimination and how to recognize it, and how to cope with Islamophobia in situations such as interviews, and so on.

Expand the curricula of social workers, teachers, public servants, and health professionals, moving beyond simple awareness to cultural competency programs on how to work with immigrants and refugees. The indigenous cultural safety program is a good model of the success of this type of education.

Our prison outreach program has also highlighted the need to align equity and funding in the appointment of prison chaplains with the demographics of the actual prison population so that there's relevant support and social integration of these programs in the prison systems.

In closing, although we are discussing a government-oriented motion, the underlying truth is that it takes coordinated action from all sectors and layers of society to beat back this creeping darkness of racism in Canada. Looking around the chamber, we are humbled that we've been granted the attention of such an esteemed gathering and will be happy to engage with committee members who wish to understand our model and experiences better.

We hope that our submission will contribute to realizing a Canada that continues to be a world beacon of diversity.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Mr. Ahmed.

Mr. Singh, you have 10 minutes.

[Balpreet Singh]

Thank you. Good afternoon.

I'm legal counsel of the World Sikh Organization of Canada. We're a non-profit human rights organization established in 1984 with a mandate to promote and protect the interests of Canadian Sikhs as well as to promote and advocate for the protection of human rights of all individuals, irrespective of race, religion, gender, ethnicity, and social and economic status.

At the outset I'll say that our organization supports motion 103 and believes that it's important to condemn Islamophobia, racism, and discrimination in all forms. Given the sharp rise in violence and discrimination against Muslims, we feel that it's appropriate to identify Islamophobia by name as an issue of concern.

In 2015, motion number 630 condemning the rise in anti-Semitism was adopted unanimously. We believe that there should be no issue with condemning the current rise in Islamophobia.

We have noted the opposition to this motion with concern and believe that, while Islamophobia should be clearly defined, reluctance to name and condemn anti-Muslim behaviour is unacceptable. A refusal to address the rise in anti-Muslim sentiment may lead to the further marginalization and victimization of Muslims in Canada.

We believe that the definition of Islamophobia proposed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission is valuable, and we'd encourage its adoption. It reads, “Racism, stereotypes, prejudice, fear or acts of hostility directed towards individual Muslims or followers of Islam in general.”

Oddly enough, the Sikh community finds itself at the forefront when experiencing Islamophobia, as Sikhs are often the target of mistaken identity attacks. The vast majority of these encounters include name-calling and taunting, yet go unreported. Members of my organization and many others in the Sikh community, however, refuse to address these incidents by declaring they are not Muslims, because hatred and discrimination, whether viewed as mistaken identity or not, have no place in Canada.

The Sikh community in Canada has come a long way. Many have observed that the arc of history from the Komagata Maru incident in 1915, where we stood excluded as a community, to where we are today is nothing less than remarkable. Even a generation ago, it seemed like a distant dream to see a Canada where practising Sikhs, wearing their articles of faith, would be welcomed and accepted.

Despite the fact that Sikhs enjoy a higher profile in Canada than ever before in our history, incidents of discrimination continue to be reported on a regular basis. Every day a major part of my work is addressing incidents of discrimination and racism directed against members of the Sikh community. In the recent past, we've seen incidents of vandalism of Sikh gurdwaras and schools. We've seen attacks on Sikh men who wear the turban. We've also seen repeated incidents of anti-Sikh postering and pamphlets in universities and neighbourhoods.

We also still see regular discrimination against Sikhs due to their articles of faith, particularly the turban and the kirpan. In the past couple of weeks, I've had to deal with a Sikh passenger being denied entry to a TTC bus because of his kirpan; Sikh truck drivers facing harassment and being told they won't be served unless they wear a helmet at ports, even though other employees are not wearing helmets; and even a young Sikh man being told by a drive test examiner that he wouldn't be given a driving test while wearing the kirpan. We're finding that young Sikhs, particularly international students, are disproportionately the victims of these kinds of incidents of discrimination. Steps are needed to ensure that international students know their rights and have the support to speak out when they face discrimination.

Sikhs in Quebec have faced some unique challenges when it comes to the Sikh physical identity. The French brand of secularism, laïcité, which would see the public sphere stripped of all religious identifiers, is not compatible with the wearing of Sikh articles of faith. Attempts to prohibit religious expression, including the wearing of religious symbols or clothing, such as the defunct charter of values or the recently passed Bill 62 in Quebec, cause insecurity and have resulted in increased bias against visible religious minorities, including Sikhs.

Secularism is absolutely important in that no religious group is favoured and the equality of persons is guaranteed, but while our public sphere must remain religiously neutral, secularism does not require that religious expression be excluded. We must ensure that this equitable and open model of secularism is protected in Canada.

With respect to solutions and suggestions to address discrimination, we believe that numbers and statistics are critical tools. We'd heard anecdotally that six students in the Peel region faced challenges as a result of their Sikh identity, so in 2011 we undertook our first survey of over 300 Peel students, and we found that over 40% reported being bullied because of their Sikh identity. This data resulted in our working more closely with the Peel District School Board in addressing these issues.

In our 2016 survey of about the same number of students, the number of students reporting bullying fell to 27%. That's a significant drop. Without the help of numbers and statistics, the scope of the problem could not have been identified, and the work required would not have been as clear.

While in Canada we have statistics with respect to hate crimes, we would echo the suggestion made by CIJA that the government should establish uniform national guidelines and standards for the collection and handling of hate crime and hate incident data. The government should also have human rights-based data collected with respect to government bodies and services.

The more discrete form of discrimination that we need to address is the lack of representation of minorities in boardrooms and institutions. We need to see how minorities are represented and have the numbers to properly address the underlying problems.

Finally, we recommend that one of the best ways to combat prejudice and stereotypes is engagement. When we can engage and ask questions of our neighbours, we create relationships and combat intolerance.

In September, 2016 when “F--k Your Turban” posters were put up at the University of Alberta, Turban Eh! was an event that we came up with, along with our community partners, to which individuals curious about the turban could come and have one tied. The event was a huge success, and on Canada Day 2017 we held the event across Canada in centres including Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary, and Abbotsford, with the support of the Community Foundations of Canada. These events were also very successful and generated incredible goodwill and positive relationships. They created a positive and safe space for us to engage with others and for conversations to take place.

Prejudice, discrimination, and racism thrive on ignorance. The solution is to remove ignorance through engagement. We would encourage the government to help create spaces and support events by means of which we can engage with our neighbours of various backgrounds, cultures, and faiths and ask questions in order to learn.

In conclusion, WSO supports all efforts aimed at combatting Islamophobia, discrimination, and racism. We believe that the tools suggested—namely statistics and data, as well as opportunities to engage with others—will make a significant difference.

Those are my submissions. I look forward to any questions you may have.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

Now we go to the second part of this exercise, a question-and-answer segment.

There will be seven minutes for the questions and answers. Because we would like to try to get in two rounds of questioning, I think I'm going to be very sharp with my pen.

We begin with a question and answer for Ms. Anju Dhillon, for the Liberals.

Take seven minutes, please, Anju.

[Anju Dhillon, Liberal, Dorval—Lachine—LaSalle, QC]

I'd like to welcome all the witnesses and thank everybody for coming today.

My first question will be for the WSO.

Since 9/11, how many documented cases of attacks against Sikhs have you seen?

[Balpreet Singh]

That's a good question. We haven't collected the data for each and every incident, but I can tell you that the recent ones that have come to light publicly were the April 2016 attack on a Sikh man in Quebec City, and then on October 20, 2016, an attack on a Sikh man at Yonge-Dundas Square.

The fact is, you'll see things even reported on Facebook. As an example, a month ago we saw an incident of a man who had his turban ripped off in a Brampton Walmart parking lot. These aren't reported on a broad basis, but they do come to our attention.

[Anju Dhillon, Liberal, Dorval—Lachine—LaSalle, QC]

You collected data in 2011 and 2016 through the surveys in the Peel region. Would you be able to submit those to the committee?