Thank you. Good morning, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. It's my pleasure to be here today. I'd like to thank you for allowing me to participate in this very important discussion on Bill C-51, but no one can thank you more than my two sons, because this is parent-teacher conference time in Regina, Saskatchewan, and my boys got an unexpected reprieve. I'd like to reassure the committee that as soon as I get back home, I will be rescheduling that appointment with their teachers. I'm not here today to burden you with my domestic drama as a parent, but to talk to you about my feelings about Bill C-51.
I'm concerned about the negative rhetoric surrounding Bill C-51 and how this government sees the place of Muslims in Canada. Let me tell you a bit about my own experience, although you've probably all guessed by now that I'm not a lawyer or an academic. I'm primarily known in Canada as the creator of the TV series Little Mosque on the Prairie and now the author of Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, which is a memoir of my experiences growing up as a Muslim in Canada. I've spent a lot of time thinking, writing, and creating work about being a Canadian of Muslim faith.
A few weeks ago I was in France speaking to my French editor in a café in Paris. She asked me why I kept referring to myself as a Canadian. The question caught me off guard. I asked her what she meant. She said she's never met a Muslim who had such fierce loyalty to her country, and wanted to know how Canada had generated such passion in its citizens. The question caught me off guard. I didn't realize I was exuding so much Canadian fervour; it was almost un-Canadian. To be honest I had never considered why I loved Canada so much. I wasn't even born in Canada.
I was born in Liverpool, England, where my father was a civil engineer working on the Mersey Tunnels. I was five years old when the Canadian recruiters tried to convince my father to move his family to Canada and the promise of a better life there. He already had a good life and a good job in England, but there was something about their incredible zeal for wanting him to consider Canada as his country. My mother had enough of England's rainy weather, which was aggravating her asthma, so she voted “yes”. Excluding the first nations, who are the only indigenous people in this great land, our family like every other Canadian family that is here today left our home and moved to Canada. We joined the rich history of Muslim migration, which started at Canada's founding in 1867. Back then Muslims were farmers and fur traders who settled in western Canada, primarily Alberta, where the first mosque was built in 1938 and is now located at the museum of Fort Edmonton Park, where I had the honour of visiting a few months ago.
We settled in Brampton, Ontario. My father was employed as part of a team of engineers that built the CN Tower in Toronto in the 1980s. Growing up I was acutely aware that my family and I were part of the 250,000 immigrants that Canada needed to let in every year to maintain a healthy tax base if we were to survive as a nation. Even as a child I would find myself worrying about the Minister of Immigration and the Minister of Revenue. Did they stay up late at night wringing their hands in worry? Did they fantasize about adding fertility drugs to Canada's water supply to help grow our tax base? Like a lot of Canadians who took their kids to church, synagogue, or temple, my parents took us to the mosque to learn about Islam. We went to a mosque in Toronto that is a converted church, so in my mind mosques were basically churches with pews removed. To this day I'm never comfortable in a mosque unless it has a choir balcony and stained glass windows with crosses in them. It was Canadian culture and mosque culture that fused in my brain as a child.
Then in the 1990s I started to wear a hijab. I was one of the first waves of Muslim women in Canada to do so. The teachers at school were a little worried about my new-found religious zeal, but for the most part I was ignored and allowed to practise my faith as I chose. In those days no one cared what you wore as long as you weren't infringing on anyone's rights. You could stand in the citizenship ceremony wearing a papal hat or a niqab studded with diamonds, for all the Minister of Immigration cared at the time—although the Minister of Revenue would be very interested in where those diamonds had come from and if they had been taxed accordingly.
Human rights, pluralism, democracy, and feminism mixed into my cultural and religious upbringing. I watched the documentary Half the Kingdom, made by Canadian-Jewish feminists about sexism in the synagogue, and thought that if Jewish women could proudly champion their faith while still criticizing patriarchal practices within it, then so could I. I followed in their footsteps and made the documentary Me and the Mosque about similar practices in my community. Two years later I pitched a television series at the Banff Television Festival about a Toronto lawyer who gives up his lucrative Bay Street law career to become a penniless imam of an impoverished mosque that was renting space in an even more impoverished church. A mosque in a church has been the single most defining feature of my life growing up as a Canadian.
Little Mosque on the Prairie then became the most unlikely TV hit ever to hit Canadian airwaves. The entire world paid attention when the show aired. Little Mosque was forged from my experience growing up, seeing my faith through the lens of Canadian human rights and the struggle of Islamophobia outside my community and the struggles of patriarchy within it.
Little Mosque currently airs in over 60 markets around the world. Over the years I've had reporters from other countries watch the show with fascination. What I came to learn later was that this show was reflecting the essence of Canada and the success of multiculturalism. We are a country that has invited people from all races, ethnicities, and faith groups, and we have built a society that values each person's right to practise their way of life in the way they choose and still be a vibrant part of the Canadian fabric. In other words, the world was fascinated by what Canada got right and what so many other countries got wrong.
We are a country of immigrants, from the Chinese to the South Asians to the Ukrainians to the Italians, who literally built Canada from the ground up, with each wave of newcomers building upon the success of the last wave. Success for each group has meant success for everyone.
People ask me if being Muslim has held me back in Canada, but I always answer that I've always felt cherished and loved by my country. Even after 9/11, in Regina, Saskatchewan, an elderly woman grabbed my hand while I was shopping and said, “Don't blame yourself for what happened; you are not responsible”. Those feelings of affection and belonging got me through very difficult days when I felt the world would turn on my community for a crime committed by a group of violent extremists who claimed to represent my faith.
But in the last few months my husband and I have started to worry about what this government's negative rhetoric about Muslims in Canada is costing us. I worry that certain sentiments are starting to tear at the very fabric of our nation. I worry about what a child whose mother wears a niqab will be feeling as he listens to his Prime Minister talk about her in such disrespectful language.
Malala Yousafzai, who received a Nobel Peace Prize and honorary Canadian citizenship, also has a mother who wears a niqab. Would she be welcome here?
This isn't who we are as Canadians. It goes against our basic belief in Canadian values. It feeds straight into the rhetoric of international extremists who want Muslims to feel alienated from society, to feel as though we're not wanted and don't belong here.
To prevent feelings of alienation, mosques across the country are urging their members to ignore these Islamophobic sentiments and to continue to be engaged members of society, to participate, to contribute, to volunteer, to play our part in making Canada safe and secure. We, as citizens, will cooperate with the RCMP and our police forces, and with the laws currently in place. An engaged citizenry is and always has been the best defence against terrorism and radicalization to criminal violence.
As a community, we are doing everything in our power to combat the feelings that we have suddenly become a problem in Canada, but I am worried. I am a mother. I have four children, two daughters. One is studying in France and doesn't call home nearly enough. The other is a lifeguard and swimming instructor. She got a concussion the other week while playing rugby for the University of Regina team and won't listen to her parents about maybe taking a break so her brain will heal properly.
I have two boys in Campbell High School who play video games way too much, and who need to do a much better job of cleaning the bathrooms at home. One just turned 16, which means that I have to go through the rite of passage that every parent dreads—risk my life on Canadian highways as I teach him how to drive.
My husband works as a psychiatrist, specializing in children and adolescents, with the mental health services for the City of Regina. His father settled in Regina, Saskatchewan, over 40 years ago as an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. He founded the first mosque in Saskatchewan, where my kids learned their dreaded Arabic lessons every weekend.
My husband and I worry about the cost of sending four kids to university, two of which are already there. We worry about what will happen to the economy of our western provinces because of lower oil prices. We worry about the thousands of aboriginal women who have been murdered, and whose crimes have never been solved. I worry that domestic assault kills more women in Canada per year than all the police and firefighters combined. I worry about not recycling enough, and adding to the plastic island that's forming somewhere in the Pacific. And I worry about what Bill C-51 will do to our country.
A healthy, vibrant, and engaged Muslim community is the best defence against terrorism and radicalization towards criminal violence, and Bill C-51 undermines that. Increased marginalization and hysteria against Muslims are not the answer. What we really need is to work with each other at all different levels of society with mutual respect and cooperation. We need mosques to be more engaged with the social safety net of their communities so we can more easily bring help to the most vulnerable among us.
Muslims have contributed much to this great country and will continue to be a vital force in the coming elections, but the sense of belonging is also a vital ingredient for a civil society to succeed. It is what's missing in Europe. What I saw there was a broken Muslim population that knows it is not wanted or accepted. I grew up as an empowered Canadian citizen who loves her country and loves her faith, and has never been asked to choose between them—and that is what I told my French editor.
Thank you very much.