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.