I won't be long, Mr. Champoux.
It's never a pleasure to speak to a motion like this, but it is important to support a motion like this one from my colleague. Thank God for her and her willingness to hold this government to account, because it's promise made, promise broken every single time.
This is the latest piece of information, after months and months of seeing people taking to the streets, vandalized synagogues, shots at schools and temples, particularly in the Jewish communities, in every large city across the country and even in some smaller communities.
It's important that we get to the root of this, because leadership comes from the top. Never have I seen a government break the long-standing consensus in this country about its position between principle and popularity and choosing to side with barbarism and terror, frankly, and choosing to fund those who espouse those kinds of views.
I want to read this into the record, because I think Canadians need to hear it. It's $25,000. This is, of course, after this committee sat here questioning the former failed minister responsible for diversity in this country under the minister of heritage. Both now have moved on.
I would expect that the committee would like to give an opportunity to this minister to clean up the mess of the last minister and actually hold this department to account to make sure that funding doesn't go to things that are called “Mediations of Racial Capitalism” conferences. It's a three-part series aimed at the—I'm going to quote—“racial character of capitalism in its complex intersections with structures of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, heteropatriarchy, and empire”. This is according to a website that was promoting the event on February 9.
If that doesn't sound insane to the folks at home, it's deeply concerning that the government would fund a conference with the speakers who were there. One of the speakers is a professor of digital media studies in the United Kingdom named Francesca Sobande, who on her own social media was retweeting things from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. This is a designated terrorist group.
We've sat at this committee talking about how this country speaks about terrorist groups that have in some cases been designated since 2002. These resources were crafted by an organization called Samidoun, and by the way, they have the same leadership. One is a designated terrorist organization, and the other should be designated a terrorist organization, but I guess that could be a conversation for the public safety committee. These two organizations share these leaders. It is the government's money that is going to fund this conference, where people who speak at this conference are sharing that kind of material.
That's just one of them. I can go through many, but I want to talk about the importance of this at this very time.
Before coming to this meeting, I sat in a room with a number of people particularly from the Jewish community across the country—in Vancouver, in Ottawa, in Montreal, in large cities—listening to stories about how they have been targeted in the streets because of what they believe, where they pray, where they go to school and how they look. Then we see their own government, the Government of Canada, perpetuating this through the funding of people like Laith Marouf, who, again, was here to teach anti-racism, not espouse it.
Just for the record, he was given $133,000. We're still waiting to get $122,000 of our Canadian tax dollars back from him. I suspect the members of this committee would want to see every single dollar of that returned. We even had two failed ministers say that. They brought themselves to say that they're going to retrieve the funds after pretending not to know about the situation for a number of weeks.
This is why I think this motion is important. This is why I think that the committee ought to get to the bottom of this and give the new minister an opportunity to correct the mistakes of her failed predecessors, who have done nothing to ensure that this stuff doesn't happen at Canadian Heritage. It's not just Canadian Heritage, by the way: This is happening across departments.
I'm going to say one more thing. There is money that comes from all kinds of departments for all kinds of programs during the course of any year. I'll bring up one case, because it is a case that was funded by the Government of Canada. It is an organization called Inspire. They've been on the receiving end of grants from FedDev Ontario during the pandemic and after the pandemic, and organizations like that have taken away a platform from speakers. This one took away a platform from a speaker who served in the Israeli military 30 years ago, who is a Canadian, who is a champion of feminism and women's rights and is a celebrated athlete.
You have one organization de-platforming views that they don't agree with, and you have the Government of Canada platforming these vile anti-Semitic voices with Canadian tax dollars. I would expect that the committee would want to get to the bottom of this.
I am very grateful that the vice-chair of this committee continues to bring these issues forward. I hope that we don't have to come back to this committee every time a grant is given to fund the prevalent anti-Semitism that this government is frankly behind.