My name is Marvin Rotrand. I'm a former Montreal city councillor, now national director of the League for Human Rights, B'nai Brith Canada.
Indeed, we do oppose all forms of discrimination while we concentrate on anti-Semitism as our main mission as an organization. We have existed since 1875.
We recently released our audit for 2021 of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada and discovered that we have reached the highest level ever recorded in the 40 years we have been tracking anti-Semitism in Canada. One of the areas where we note a large increase is online hate. During the pandemic, we've experienced less in-person harassment, but online hate has exploded. In fact, the number of incidents tracked in 2021 was 2,799. The bulk of them were online incidents. There has been an increase of almost 100% in online incidents in a mere five years. Clearly, ideologically motivated violence and hate is being advocated on Facebook, YouTube and on podcasts.
I take note of a statement that was made by the Liberal Party during the election:
A re-elected Liberal Government will:
Introduce legislation within its first 100 days to combat serious forms of harmful online content, specifically hate speech, terrorist content, content that incites violence, child sexual abuse material and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images. This would make sure that social media platforms and other online services are held accountable for the content that they host. Our legislation will recognize the importance of freedom of expression for all Canadians and will take a balanced and targeted approach to tackle extreme and harmful speech.
We support this statement, and we support Parliament acting upon it.
We urge the update of Canada's 2019-22 anti-racism strategy, which ends this year. The new strategy should make hate better defined; currently it aims at racism. I would point out that Jews are 1.25% of the Canadian population. According to Statistics Canada in 2020, 61% of all victims targeted for hate were members of religious minorities.
We laud the Government of Canada for its Malmo pledge made by the Prime Minister in October of 2021, and we would urge Parliament in October of 2022 to renew the hopeful promises made within the Malmo pledge.
One of the areas we see as necessary is increased education for Holocaust remembrance as a basis of countering Holocaust denial and distortion. We invite the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada to meet to examine best practices. Education is a provincial mandate, but we invite the federal members to follow this as well with the goal of having the provinces improve what is taught in high school, so that when students get out of school, they actually know what the Holocaust is.
Thank you. I'm finished for the moment, Mr. Carr.