Thank you, Madam Chair.
I appreciate the witnesses for being here and for their contributions to this conversation. I certainly think that we are due for an important conversation on religious freedom in our country, and this has been an important part of that discussion.
I want to start off by maybe trying to give a bit of my perspective as a person from the suburbs of Toronto. Since 2021, we've had over 100 Christian churches burned, vandalized or desecrated in Canada, and sometimes, when I see that, and I see the lack of media coverage of those attacks on religious freedom, and when I see that we cannot, even in the House of Commons, get every party to agree on condemning those attacks on religious freedom, I think to myself, like, “Yo, dawg, are we like in The Truman Show or something right now?”
It just seems so frustrating and puzzling as to how you get to this point. Often, I will hear from constituents who are concerned about it, and they'll express a sense of hopelessness, like, well, how do you get people to care about this?
Then I see other communities go through their own ordeals when it comes to attacks on their religious freedom. We have seen schools and synagogues get shot at in Montreal just over the weekend. We have seen the hate-motivated attack on a Muslim family in London. I think to myself, well, maybe there's an opportunity for us all to work together and draw attention to the various ways that faith communities in this country may experience discrimination or persecution.
Maybe there's an opportunity for us to build some bridges across different religious communities in hopes that the experiences that are happening throughout this country right now, where, in many ways, people feel afraid that they will lose their jobs by showing that they are a person of faith, or that they will lose something—their standing, perhaps, in their workplace or their school—for showing that they are a person of faith.... Perhaps by working together we actually wind up being able to protect believers of all different types.
Maybe I will pose my question on that to you, Mr. Panju. As you think about charting a path forward, where do you see the possibility of different faith communities being able to work together and support each other better?