Canadian Heritage Committee on April 27th, 2022

[Roderick Brereton, Executive Director, Urban Rez Solutions Social Enterprise]

Good afternoon, Chair and members of the committee.

My name is Roderick Brereton. With me is my business partner, Farley Flex.

Traditionally when we think of hate, we think of the swastikas, the Confederate flags and the N-word scrawled on lockers. Although these are definite, vile symbols that represent hatred, there are also contemporary symbols, and even though they're not in your face as they were in past days, they're now on different platforms—for instance, on the Zoom platform.

Ironically enough, we're on this very high-security Zoom platform right now, but a lot of times when Black organizations are conducting Zooms, we've been bombed by white supremacists who are able to manipulate the technology and flood our Zoom chats with visuals to give grand gestures of extreme oppression and racism. We want to acknowledge that the hatred and the symbols have evolved, just like everything else in society.

I'll pass this on to Farley and then I'll come back on and speak again.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Mr. Flex, please unmute yourself. Thank you.

[Farley Flex, Executive Director, Urban Rez Solutions Social Enterprise]

I thought I was. I'm sorry about that.

I want to thank the chair and the committee for giving us this opportunity.

Further to what Roderick shared, we want to include the reality of the nooses, for instance, that were found on construction sites in the GTA last year, and of blackface, which seems to resurface from time to time in the news. They're both synonymous with the egregious practice of lynching and of racism itself and they also represent horrid and indisputable reflections of the past.

It's a past that Canada still has not yet fully accounted for with respect to the reality that slavery as we knew it did exist on this side of the border and is still in denial in many people's minds, and it still, to a greater extent, does exist in the criminal justice system and the education sectors, so much so that as we identify symbols of hate, we have to give consideration to symbols that are supposed to represent positivity, such as police cars, which for many African Canadians represent a threat that's not too different from what their ancestors experienced when members of the KKK appeared in uniform.

Symbols of hate are also a matter of interpretation, based on the adverse experiences of the beholder of the symbols, whether direct, indirect or inherited.

We are currently in what I refer to as the “George Floyd window” in North America, which, as we know, has brought to light awarenesses that we hope will move us forward with respect to race relations. Canada has the opportunity to lead in this area globally, but it will take a cohesive effort to do so, one that includes measurable strategies, programs and outcomes.

The work we do is intentionally disruptive and takes into account all that I have mentioned.

The reason we recognize the swastika as a hate symbol in the eyes of our Jewish brothers, sisters and others, is that we associate it with the experiences that are associated with the symbol itself. Blackface, nooses and many other symbols are rightly associated as hate symbols and images, but what of police symbols? If we were to ask survivors of the civil rights movement what police symbols mean to them, would they not recognize the similarity to and sentiments with those of our Jewish brothers and sisters?

Thank you.

[Roderick Brereton]

If I can just add this, day to day we'll be at a hockey game and either seeing bananas thrown onto the ice or pictures of monkeys on placards. In bathrooms that you go into, you may see drawings of hooded Ku Klux Klan members.

As Farley was mentioning, it's in the eye of the beholder, of those people who have been oppressed or subjected to hate. To many, it could be a holy cross, but to many of our indigenous and African brothers and sisters, that cross represents colonialism and years of being subjected to cruel and undue treatment in terms of the realities we face.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have 35 seconds.

[Roderick Brereton]

As Farley ended off with, education from a broad spectrum of teaching our young people how to recognize hate from an empathetic perspective and also from our own historical perspective as Canadians is essential for us to get over this and to be well informed.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, witnesses. You were very efficient and effective in using your time.

Now we're going to go to the question-and-answer component. Members of Parliament from all parties in the House will ask you questions.

The first segment is going to be a six-minute segment and begins with, for the Conservatives, John Nater.

John, you have six minutes.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Again, thank you to our witnesses for joining us today and for the insight and the commentary. I think it's been an exceptionally important message for each of us on this committee to hear, so I do appreciate that.

I want to start online first and then come into the room. I want to start with Mr. Flex and Mr. Brereton.

Both of you provided some exceptionally important commentary, but I want to know a little bit more about your organization itself and about what both of you do in terms of community and the work you undertake. Especially you had mentioned the interpretation and the understanding of symbols and of examples such as that. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little about what you do in the community to help.

[Farley Flex]

Please go ahead, Rod, and I'll chime in.

[Roderick Brereton]

Okay.

Urban Rez Solutions Social Enterprise prides itself, I would say, on imparting social education where the traditional school systems have not, whether it be on anti-Black racism or anti-Semitism or in terms of under-represented groups having a voice, and empowering community to have a voice when they often have not been seen or heard. We look through a lens or we work through a lens of empowerment, of giving people that voice to be able to be at the tables as opposed to being on the menus.

Often we find ourselves working in very challenged communities or situations just based on the oppression and the self-fulfilling prophecies that have often accompanied hatred and oppression and how people view themselves. We try to reverse-engineer some of that narrative but also give a sense of a new social conditioning or an opportunity to rewrite a narrative that has often been written by somebody else, somebody who hasn't had our best interests at heart.

[Farley Flex]

I would just say briefly that the other aspect of what we do is that when we recognize a gap, we try to close it. We work not only with the folks who are socially, economically and racially marginalized but also with the incumbent society—the dominant caste and the privileged—to ensure they understand the historical context and the ways in which folks are reaching out, and can then say, “What is allyship? What can I do for the community? How can I support it?”

We know the old adage, “There folks who are of your kind who are not of your colour, and there are folks of your colour who are not of your kind.” We keep an open-door policy in terms of those who want to be educated. We don't accept one-and-a-half-hour consultations on DEI. We encourage organizations to take a full dose of what we have to offer, which usually involves anywhere up to a year of training and follow-ups and subcommittee development and so forth, to ensure the practices are normalized in institutions and organizations.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

That's great. Thank you very much for that commentary.

I want to move into the room now for a couple of questions.

I may start with Mr. Marceau and then ask the same question to Ms. Kirzner-Roberts.

Both of you mentioned the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Canada, of hatred towards the Jewish people. Mr. Marceau, you especially talked a little bit about the society and the culture that allow that to happen. I want to touch a little bit on the BDS movement, which we see, unfortunately, often on university campuses, and whether we, as parliamentarians at the federal level, should be taking stronger action on the BDS movement and what we ought to be doing to counteract that, especially on university campuses but more generally as well. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[Richard Marceau]

Thank you, Mr. Nater.

The BDS movement has a very clear goal of delegitimizing and demonizing the only Jewish state on the planet. It is an attack not on Israeli policy but on the very right of the Jewish people to self-determination. That is why we believe it's anti-Semitic.

I'll go further. You would have seen in the last six to eight weeks a flurry of diplomatic action in the Middle East, where you saw the President of Israel going to Turkey. You would have seen a summit in Egypt, at which the Prime Minister of Israel, along with the President of Egypt and the Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates, met in Egypt. You would have seen the Negev Summit, at which the foreign ministers of four Arab countries met with the foreign minister of Israel.

The impact of BDS is meaningless and minuscule on Israel. The actual impact is in Canada, where the BDS movement and the anti-Israel movement are—

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have one minute.

[Richard Marceau]

—bullying and threatening Jewish people. On campus, as you mentioned, it's a very big deal.

The goal here in Canada is to create unsafe spaces where Jews are not allowed to do things as Jews. You would have seen—and I'll close on that, Madam Chair—for example, mundane events like a Hanukkah party being targeted by BDS activists, whereas it was just a party. That is the climate that this movement and the anti-Israel movement is condoning and in fact inflaming.

Thank you for the question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

There are 15 seconds left, Mr. Nater, if you wish to use them.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Mr. Levitt and Mr. Kirzner-Roberts, you have a couple of seconds.

[Michael Levitt, President and Chief Executive Officer, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies]

Yes, I think Mr. Marceau has correctly positioned it as an anti-Semitic movement, but I think one of the tools we have in the tool kit, which has been adopted by Parliament of Canada as part of the anti-racism strategy and has been adopted by provinces, is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of anti-Semitism. It is one of those tools, whether on campus or in municipal governments, that allows anti-Semitism to be identified, and when we can identify it, we can seek strategies for dealing with it.

That's something that our special envoy on anti-Semitism, Irwin Cotler, is certainly working on across the country. We've seen it implemented on campuses in the U.S., Europe and the U.K., and its use is something that we continue to advocate. The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism being adopted is a key part in being able to combat anti-Semitism like BDS.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Mr. Levitt.

I will now go to the Liberal party. For six minutes, we have Mr. Anthony Housefather.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much to all the witnesses who came today. Your testimony was incredibly compelling.

I think it's important to note something about the groups that are here today: The Jewish community has been in this country for over 260 years, and the Black community has been here for hundreds of years. There's a proud legacy of contributions that all of these different communities have made to Canada, and nobody deserves to face hate in their own country. No.

There are a lot of things that I can say, and one is that Canada has a very low rate of anti-Semitism overall. If you look at Pew studies, you see that compared to other countries, the rate of anti-Semitism overall in Canada is low. In fact, in the Angus Reid poll that was done last week, you saw that the Jewish community had the highest favourability of any religious community in Canada. At the same time, as a Jewish Canadian in the last federal election, I was shocked to see that every day of my campaign, new Nazi swastikas appeared on my posters. Never had I had that in my life in this country.

Last May, during the conflict between Israel and Hamas, for the very first time I had constituents who asked me if it was safe for their children to play in parks wearing a kippah. Holocaust survivors would come to me and ask, “Should I take the mezuzah off my door so that nobody can know I'm Jewish?” Every group in this country should be able to be visible and proud in Canada, and we should not be ashamed of our religions; they should be allowed.

Coming to that, I want to get to the questions that I had, because it's really important to understand what hate is and to make sure that we're not going overboard in terms of free speech.

Daniel, it was really interesting to hear what you said about hundreds of symbols and how they change all the time. There are a few core ones, whether it's the Confederate flag or the Nazi swastika—and I'll be careful saying the “Nazi” swastika—or some others.

I'd like to hear from the witnesses. Do you believe, based on sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code, that it would already be covered, or would the explicit mention of, for example, the use of the Confederate flag or the Nazi swastika be subject to the religious exceptions and other exceptions that have to be made? Would it be a useful addition to the Criminal Code as it was proposed in my friend Mr. Julian's bill? Maybe you can just go one after the other.

Go ahead, Mr. Marceau.

[Richard Marceau]

Is it already covered? I believe so. Would it be useful to be more precise? I believe so.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

That was a fantastic answer, and very fast.

[Daniel Panneton]

I'd like to reiterate the points that were just made. I believe it would be effective; however, due to the remixing nature of culture right now, even if we ban the swastika, we're going to see the swastika appearing in new forms and shrouded in different ways, so it's important that we basically keep on it in addition to criminalizing.

[Jaime Kirzner-Roberts]

Yes, I believe that it is already illegal. It's a way of promoting hate or advocating genocide.

However, as someone who's working on the front lines with law enforcement every day on individual hate crimes that take place, I will tell you that police are very reluctant to consider it a hate crime. Just seeing the symbol, they're very reluctant to investigate; they're reluctant to lay charges. They don't know whether charges will stand up in court. For that reason, I do believe that it would be an advancement to make the law more explicit so that there was less ambiguity in the eyes of law enforcement.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you.

I want to also say that I was so moved in terms of what Mr. Farber said about being a descendant of a Holocaust survivor and not having any family on his father's side. It reminds me that this week—tonight—is the beginning of Yom HaShoah, when we remember all the six million Jews who were victims in the Holocaust, murdered by the Nazis. How appropriate it is that we're having this discussion in the Canadian Parliament on the very anniversary of that date. This week as well, B'nai Brith's audit showed that even though Jews make up about 1.25% of the Canadian population, Jews are the victims of 61% of religious hate crimes in Canada. There's something weird, and awesomely bad, about that.

Mr. Panneton, I want to ask a question about social media. When it comes to social media, we see that wherever it goes, whether it was right before the insurrection last year, QAnon, George Soros, or whatever else seems to be happening, Jews are always at the centre of the narrative. We see that with the Russians right now and the disinformation campaign about Ukraine.

Can you explain to me why historically all of these groups for some reason seem to want to go after Jews as part of their disinformation campaigns?