Thank you, Mr. Chair.
There's one part of the motion that I think should be amended, and I move an amendment to the motion that we remove the two words “right wing” so that it would simply read “abuses by extremists”, and so on and so forth.
The reason I'm proposing that amendment is twofold. First, extremism can come from both the extreme right and the extreme left. In fact, Dr. Fry enumerated a number of countries in which we are seeing attacks against women, LGBTQ2+ individuals, ethnic minorities and the like. She enumerated countries like Belarus and Venezuela. Venezuela is an example of a country in which an extreme left government is in place. In fact, it's a socialist party that is in power there.
More importantly, I think we should follow the advice of CSIS, which has actually eschewed using the terms “right-wing extremism” and “left-wing extremism”. In fact, I'll quote from the 2019 CSIS public report of the Government of Canada. In the report, they have a paragraph titled “Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism (IMVE)”:
Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism (IMVE) is often driven by a range of grievances and ideas from across the traditional ideological spectrum. The resulting worldview consists of a personalized narrative which centres on an extremist's willingness to incite, enable and or mobilize to violence. Extremists draw inspiration from a variety of sources including books, images, lectures, music, online discussions, videos and conversations.
Given the diverse combination of motivations and personalized worldviews of recent mass-casualty attackers, the use of such terms as “right-wing”' and “left-wing” is not only subjective, but inaccurate in describing the complexity of motivations of IMVE attacks in Canada and abroad.
I just bring that to the attention of the committee as a constructive suggestion. In subsequent reports of the Government of Canada, they've actually not used the terms “right-wing extremism” or “left-wing extremism” because clearly the government has concluded that they are a subjective and inaccurate way of classifying these hate-filled ideologies.
I move the amendment for that reason.
Thank you.