I want to begin by thanking you for inviting me to address the committee today. I'm sorry I can't be there in person, but I'm here virtually, in the capacity of director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto where I am also professor of law and history.
At the Institute of Islamic Studies, I oversee a collaborative research project that we call the study of Islam and Muslims in Canada, or SIMiC for short. SIMiC is a collaborative project that partners with six Canadian universities and six community partner organizations. SIMiC blends research with a public responsibility for recalibrating the conversation on Islam and Muslims today.
I do not need to tell you that the existence of Islamophobia in our country is real and extremely concerning; you know this. I'm here because there are things we can do. Drawing on the work of SIMiC, I can identify three specific things you may want to consider as part of a whole-of-government approach, particularly as they relate to Canada's Muslim community as a target of online hate.
The first concerns a reliable data architecture that provides disaggregated data on those communities most targeted. One core feature of SIMiC is to identify gaps in Canadian data architecture to chart the demography of Canada's Muslim communities. Comprising a team of academic researchers, settlement agencies and community organizations, the big data group at the institute is interested in determining what sorts of measures might be put in place to gain a better understanding of who Canada's Muslim communities are as well as their values, their hopes and their aspirations in Canada for themselves and their families.
This summer, one of our research fellows will examine the extent to which existing datasets across the country, including raw datasets from StatsCan research data centres, can tell us something about Canadian Muslims in terms of gender, ethnic or racial category, educational achievement, employment status, income levels and so on. We plan to launch the report in September 2019, and I will share that report with this committee if it so desires.
One key issue concerns the fact that StatsCan asks about religious identity only decennially rather than quinquennially. This approach is fundamentally counterproductive given that the current state of online hate quite often targets groups based on their religious identity. If we are to combat hate that targets people because of their religion—and let's be clear that's exactly what is happening with regard to Muslim Canadians—then we cannot continue to embrace an outdated data architecture that leaves us blind to the terrain in which we much now do our work.
The big data group at SIMiC exists in part to illustrate exactly why we need to rethink data architecture policies at a national scale, starting with a religious identity question in StatsCan's quinquennial census.
My second suggestion for something you may want to consider comes from the work we are doing on global anti-terrorism programs. The institute is part of a consortium of universities around the world examining the extent to which government programs on countering violent extremism have a disproportionate effect on certain communities and, in doing so, ignore others that need to be part of any inquiry.
While we're at the beginning stages of this work, our research has turned up a glaring issue in Canada that may fall within the ambit of this committee. In 1989, Canada was a founding member of the Financial Action Task Force, or FATF, which at the time was charged with combatting money laundering as part of the war on drugs.
After 9/11, the FATF issued a new set of special recommendations to track and combat terrorism financing. FATF guidelines recommend that each state party adopt what it calls a risk-based assessment model, or RBA, to prioritize its targets and allocate its limited resources.
In 2015 Finance Canada issued a self-assessment to FATF. In that self-assessment, Finance Canada outlined Canada's RBA in relation to anti-terrorism financing. It identified 10 groups that posed the greatest threat of terrorism financing in Canada. Eight of them are Muslim-identified groups; one is Tamil and the other is Sikh. In other words, as far as the Government of Canada is concerned, 100% of terrorism financing risk comes from racialized groups and 80% comes from Muslim-identified groups. Nowhere in the 2015 document is there reference to white supremacist groups, white extremist groups and so on, despite the fact that such groups are no less prone to violence, as we have sadly seen.
What does this have to do with online hate? While you will no doubt hear many arguments about freedom of expression as you attempt to regulate online hate, you already have a mechanism in place to track the financial funding of such hate, namely, FATF special recommendation number 8, which identifies charities and other not-for-profit organizations as being vulnerable to terrorist financing.
The aim here in my suggestion is to go after those philanthropic organizations that fund the cacophony of hate. The U.S. is already ahead of the game on this. Think tanks and sociologists have issued reports identifying the principal funders of hate.
While any given instance of online hate is relatively cheap, my suggestion is that you revisit Canada's RBA to use existing financial monitoring regimes to turn off the spigot of funding across the board.
My third and final suggestion concerns not so much combatting online hate as promoting new storytelling opportunities to enhance and improve on gaps in Canada's cultural heritage. Alongside our big data group is a second group that is working to create an archive that documents the history of Muslims in Canada. lt is an archive that will be created through collaboration among researchers at the university, community organizations and those individuals who hold records that capture this history.
Our environmental scan of Canada' s major archival institutions shows that there is little if any representation of the various communities, in particular racialized minorities and Muslims, that constitute the fabric of our national mosaic. Whereas other jurisdictions, such as the U.K. and the U.S., have a growing culture of community archiving projects, this phenomenon is mostly unsupported by the government in Canada.
We are beginning to see some movement in this regard with respect to Canada's indigenous communities, thanks in part to the work of the TRC and new funding schemes allocated to preserving indigenous knowledge. The archive project we are creating is a joint project in which the University of Toronto will serve as a core institutional partner. We have the digitization technology to create an open-access digital archive. Robarts Library has a storage facility for any and all analog copies that we obtain. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library will provide future researchers with a venue to access those hard copies.
By the end of the summer, the institute will publicly launch its acquisition policy in consultation with our community partners. Moreover, colleagues have expressed an interest in tying their course work to the archive whereby students can help us identify records while they also achieve course credit. Such archives not only foster education and community but also create opportunities for people to tell new stories about themselves and their communities in an academically rigorous way, with thick description. In short, our archive not only promises more speech, but it will deliver better speech.
While we have the infrastructure and overhead to make this possible, our greatest challenge, and the challenge to any such archival project, is to identify funding sources to support archival review processes which involve human capital. The Department of Canadian Heritage certainly offers some funding for such projects, but the envelopes are limited. Its mandate is not narrowly focused on groups targeted by hate. Moreover, many of its grants expressly disqualify university-affiliated projects like ours, despite the fact that universities are well positioned with infrastructure to carry out such projects.
It has been our experience that the Social Science and Humanities Research Council does not fund such projects, in part because they do not fall within prevailing views of what counts as formal research.
While we remain committed to this project, our environmental scan suggests that supporting digital archival projects in participation with targeted communities can create a counterbalance to the online hate that we see proliferating. Consequently, this committee may wish to recommend jump-starting the creation of participatory digital archives, with a specific focus on those minority groups subjected to online hate.
Thank you very much, and I welcome your questions.