Justice Committee on June 6th, 2024

[Dr. Anver M. Emon]

I'm mindful that last week you heard from specialists and scholars on this topic, so I would defer to them. Obviously, the Government of Canada should be tackling all forms of hate, not just one or the other, but I'm not a specialist in that area and I would defer to the experts you brought in last week.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Thank you very much.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Emon.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Go ahead, Mr. Garrison.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and of course, thanks once again to the witnesses for being with us today.

Madam Chair, given that one of our witnesses was not able to appear for technical reasons, I appreciate that you're going to make attempts to make sure that the witness will be able to be with us on Monday. Have I understood correctly what you were saying?

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

It depends on her availability, as well as the availability of the committee's resources and so on. I can't guarantee that for you, Mr. Garrison, just to put that on record, but we'll see what we can do.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

What I'm acknowledging is that you will attempt to do so. I was not expecting an ironclad guarantee.

Turning to the witnesses we do have before us, I want to talk with Dr. Zine.

In our last session this morning, which you may or may not have been able to hear, we heard from the Center for Countering Digital Hate about those who literally profit off the promotion of hatred, the promotion of Islamophobia in particular.

You mentioned a 250-page report that you did. I'd like you to say a bit more about whether your findings were that people were literally profiting in financial terms or more generally profiting in terms of advancing their objectives.

[Dr. Jasmin Zine]

Thank you for that question.

The answer is kind of both.

There are a lot of people who have become careerists when it comes to Islamophobia. They are folks that I refer to as Islamophobia influencers. They have large digital platforms on YouTube and other kinds of social media, where they get a lot of traction and are able to purvey their ideas with a great deal of impunity. That allows them to profit financially from that.

There's been a lot of research done in the United States—and I'd like to see more of that kind of work done in Canada—that follows that money trail. They found in the United States that, as I mentioned, about $1.5 billion flows through various philanthropic organizations through the use of donor-advised funds that get filtered into about 39 anti-Muslim organizations whose mandates, 24-7, are to promote anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and propaganda.

All of that, as we know, is a breeding ground for Islamophobic violence. Those ideas become part of various echo chambers. They become dog whistles. They get picked up by media, and sometimes by politicians. The ways in which those echo chambers work and the ways they filter into public opinion are very insidious and nefarious.

If you look at public opinion polls in Canada over the last two decades, which I did in my report, you will find very problematic statistics that show us that a lot of Canadians distrust Muslims. I think about a quarter of Canadians.... After Donald Trump instituted the Muslim ban in the United States, 24% of Canadians felt that Canada should do the same. There are a lot of statistics that we put together in the report that look at what Canadian polls tell us about the public sentiment about the Muslim presence in this country.

Going back to your question about who profits from this purveyance of anti-Muslim bigotry, certainly there are political agendas that are advanced because of this. There are independent careers. Folks like Rebel media and others in Canada are regularly putting out content that is promoting anti-Muslim animus. Many of their influencers.... Even the white nationalist Tommy Robinson in the U.K. was funded by the Schulman Foundation in the United States for $5,000 a month—I think that's the figure—to be an intern at Rebel media.

We see these kinds of flows coming into Canada, but we've not been able to do the forensic accounting to see exactly where that money comes from and where it is going in the way that they've been able to document it in the United States. Those figures there, I'm sure you'll agree, are quite staggering and a cause of concern.

I was able to see that some of those organizations co-sponsored events with Canadian organizations that are part of the Islamophobia industry. You see that support coming in through very tangible ways and through other ways whereby they amplify each other's work and create that wider echo chamber for those ideas to flourish and be part of what was discussed this morning as that illusory truth effect.

If you repeat a lie enough times, people start to perceive it as truth. In a post-truth world where you really don't need facts anymore—it's just appeals to sentiments, and facts become casualties of the post-truth context—those kinds of campaigns are very effective and troubling.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Either in your research or in your personal experience, have you found that attempts to bring the promotion of hatred by so-called influencers to the attention of the media platforms have ever been successful in bringing it to an end?

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

You have 30 seconds.

[Dr. Jasmin Zine]

When there have been prosecutions, I think that has helped. I think that fighting back against some of these people who have then been charged with anti-Muslim hate speech or hate crimes and so on has probably been most effective, rather than the media outlets themselves, which are problematic in doing anything about changing that.

That, again, is where the hate speech laws are very important.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Thank you very much.

Our final round will be five minutes with Mr. Van Popta, please.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for joining us today.

Professor Emon, I will start with you with this question.

There were two recent cases in Canada of attacks against Muslim people, solely because they were Muslim. The first is the Quebec City mosque shooting in 2017, where a young man murdered six Muslim men and injured many others. The shooter pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences with no eligibility for parole for 40 years. The Court of Appeal of Quebec declared unconstitutional the section of the Criminal Code giving judges discretion to give consecutive periods of parole ineligibility, as it was contrary to sections 7 and 12 of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

My question isn't about that. My colleague Mr. Moore had a good interchange with the previous panel on that topic, and I think that we have good testimony on the record for that, but this case is also notable for what it did not do, which is that the prosecution decided not to pursue terrorism charges but only murder charges.

The terrorism provision was added to the Criminal Code after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, and it defines terrorism as, among other things—it's a big, long definition—“an act or omission...that is committed in whole or in part for a political, religious, or ideological purpose, objective or cause, and...that intentionally causes death or serious bodily harm to a person by the use of violence”.

The facts of the mosque shooting would seem to make it fall squarely within that definition, yet the prosecution decided not to pursue terrorism charges.

We'll fast-forward to three years ago today. As a matter of fact, we're marking the third anniversary of the attacks in London, and the person there was convicted of murders in the Afzaal family case. He was convicted of four counts of murder and one of attempted murder, for which he received a single life sentence, of course, after the Bissonnette case that we just talked about, but he was also found guilty of an act of terrorism. It made no difference to the sentence, yet the court and the prosecutor thought that it was important to also litigate that.

Of course, there was an extra hurdle to overcome for the prosecution in that they would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this man was motivated by hatred towards an identifiable group for religious or ideological purposes.

Professor Emon, what are your comments about that? What is the importance of deciding to pursue or not to pursue terrorism charges in cases like that? What's the message to the Muslim community, or more importantly, received by the Muslim community, about an important decision like that?

[Dr. Anver M. Emon]

It's a complicated question.

I don't presume to speak on behalf of the Muslim community. I can only speak in my role as a law professor who has written about terror trials, and I can tell you that in writing about terror trials and looking at how they're litigated, I have concerns that the terrorism provisions of the Criminal Code are problematic.

In an article I wrote in The Manitoba Law Journal looking at one of the Toronto 18 trials, I could not help but note that the litigation process, the prosecutorial style of litigating the special intent requirements of terrorism or terrorist intent, have a resemblance to medieval modes of inquisition.

I'm happy to provide that article to the committee clerk upon concluding my testimony here as an example of why I'm not confident that the terrorism provisions in the Criminal Code are doing what they say they're doing and are making Canadians safer.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

You have 20 seconds left.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Have there been any other cases in Canada since 2001 in which section 83 of the Criminal Code has been used?

[Dr. Anver M. Emon]

I'm not familiar with any. Other than the one case that I have examined in depth, I haven't followed that particular issue as much as I would like to enable me to answer, but thank you for the question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Thank you very much for the response.

We'll now go to Mr. Shafqat Ali, member of Parliament, for five minutes.

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for appearing before the committee.

My question is for Dr. Zine.

Dr. Zine, I want to expand on intersectional Islamophobia. My colleague Ali Ehsassi asked a question, and you were expanding on that.

Your article last October, “How Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism are manufactured through disinformation”, examines some dark manifestations of Islamophobia. Could you expand on this and and your thinking on how widespread Islamophobic sentiments lead to tragedy and bad public policy?

[Dr. Jasmin Zine]

Yes, I wrote an article last October about the disinformation campaigns that had been very rife historically, and especially so after October 7. Those campaigns already had the infrastructure to begin to continue to purvey a lot of disinformation about Muslims and Palestinians.

That, of course, has material consequences. I have already talked about some of the attacks in the United States in which students were shot and a six-year-old boy was killed. We already know what happened in London, Ontario, on this day three years ago.

We were hearing about sentencing, and so on, of the assailant in that attack. However, you also have to realize what motivated him. He talked about the great replacement theory, which was also discussed earlier today—the ideas of white genocide. He talked about white nationalism and “we have to get them before they get us”. There's a lot there in terms of looking at some of the drivers and some of the kinds of ideologies that support acts of terror.

Whether we look at Christchurch in New Zealand, Anders Breivik in Norway or Nathaniel Veltman, there's a lot of commonality, in that they rely upon a lot of conspiracy theories that are quite prevalent about Muslims. For example, there's the idea that Muslims are going to be like a Trojan horse or a fifth column and take over the west, and there's this Islamist bogeyman.

At the core of a lot of the pursuit of Muslim charities is the idea that they are fronts for Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood. We've seen all of these kinds of discourses and ideologies and we've heard that Muslims are wolves in sheep's clothing. There's this idea of taqiyyah, that they will be nice but they're actually going to stab you in the back. I've documented about a dozen or more of those discourses in Canada in particular.

The consequences are very clear in terms of the violence we've all talked about and are commemorating today, and we're seeing it in tangible ways.

Also, because we're not hearing enough about what's going on right now with students and campuses, I want to point out that in London, Ontario, where the terror attack happened, a report came out at Western University in 2023 that documented campus hate incidents that included death threats; Muslim female students being accosted and told they should be raped and killed; others being warned that “all Muslims should die”; and a female student wearing a keffiyeh being pushed and physically assaulted, while another one was spat on during convocation. One student had her tires slashed on campus because she had a Palestinian flag on her mirror.

I could go on and on about the hate crimes and manifestations, but we need to look at where those ideas that inspire, justify and rationalize those acts are circulating—

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

I'm sorry, Dr. Zine. I have limited time. I have a couple more questions.

I just read an article that was published in The New York Times that talks about the Israeli government's involvement in some social media platform to promote anti-Muslim or Islamophobic sentiments on social media. Have you read that article? Do you want to shed some light on that, please?

[Dr. Jasmin Zine]

I just read about that today, actually. In my report, I talk about a lot of other cases in which these kinds of disinformation campaigns come up.

The one you're talking about now is the one in which the Israeli government is being accused in published reports of involvement in an operation aimed at reducing support for Palestinians in Canada. It was flagged by artificial intelligence researchers. It would have been great if that question—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Dr. Zine, simply because we're out of time and the committee will have to wrap up shortly, if you have a response, would you mind sending it to us in writing through the clerk?

[Dr. Jasmin Zine]

Certainly.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Fabulous.