Thank you very much.
Good afternoon. I'd like to thank the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage for the invitation to speak today and for all the important work you do.
My name is Nusaiba Al-Azem. I'm the director of legal affairs at the National Council of Canadian Muslims. I'm pleased to be here today during this important study in this committee on the protection of freedom of expression. The question of this committee in looking at the means for government to protect freedom of expression is a profound one, as it forms our major and main concern around what is, in our view, the most fundamental challenge to free expression in Canada today.
Our submission is quite simple. The most pressing challenge to free expression in Canada has become the wanton use of the notwithstanding clause—that is, section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms—by governments across Canada to derogate from our charter rights, including freedom of expression.
In our view, the overuse of section 33 has become nothing short of a constitutional crisis. We all learned in grade school civics—even I learned in law school—that the usage of the notwithstanding clause, if used improperly to attack fundamental freedoms like section 2 of the charter, would mean the end of that government. I recall my professor using the words “political suicide”. Unfortunately, our grade school civics lessons were wrong. That professor was wrong.
We at NCCM warned of this at what we viewed to be the beginning of this crisis, when we went to court some years ago to challenge Bill 21, for which we currently await leave to the Supreme Court of Canada. Bill 21, of course, to us, remains the enshrinement of stripping away the rights of minorities and the right to free expression and freedom of religion, backed by the notwithstanding clause, to make it so that Muslims, Jews and Sikhs cannot freely express their faith by wearing a turban, a hijab or a kippah and be, for example, a public school teacher. Multiple courts in Quebec have agreed that the ban is discriminatory but is saved by the notwithstanding clause.
While NCCM and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association previously successfully went to court to stop Bill 62, which in some ways was a predecessor and prohibited women wearing a niqab from riding a bus or getting a library card in Quebec, thus far, the notwithstanding clause has become a tool raised by governments in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Quebec as a constitutional get-out-of-jail-free card to evade judicial review. Its use has been threatened in many more provinces as well.
Our recommendation to this committee is the following: that this committee begin a specific study on the appropriate use of the notwithstanding clause. Make no mistake: the very future of our federation is at risk when quasi-emergency powers become normalized in this way.
Our second concern, which we view as a current fundamental risk to the freedom of expression in Canada, relates to the need to protect freedom of expression in this austere House. We support pieces of legislation that have been put forward to better protect freedom of expression, like the Conservative private member's bill, Bill C-257, which would protect against discrimination based on political belief.
We have seen too often attacks on freedom of speech against those who would speak for controversial causes, as somehow support of Palestinian human rights is regarded to be and has been over the last year. We have seen many cases, for example, of people losing their jobs for simply raising public concerns about the Israeli military invasion in Gaza. We have seen a concerted suppression of Palestinian expression and narratives, and we think that's wrong. We recommend that the government explore ways to make sure that the critique of any foreign government, whether that's Israel, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia or India, is always protected.
I look forward to the questions from committee members. Thank you.