Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for appearing before the committee today.
The last few days have been very difficult. Both of us witnessed the funeral of the four innocent lives lost to hatred and Islamophobia. This incident of the attack on the London family hits very close to me. It hit close to my home because, as a hijab-wearing woman, as a Muslim woman, as an immigrant woman named Salma, who came to Canada in 1999, who loves to walk in her neighbourhood, my first comment to myself was that it could have been us four.
I know that in the last five and a half years we have done a lot of work as a government to combat Islamophobia. There is a lot of work ahead to break the walls of hatred that we have erected around us and to combat Islamophobia so that no mother feels scared dropping her hijab-wearing young girl at school, nor is a young woman wearing a hijab scared to travel on public transit.
Since this tragic incident, I have been talking to many families in Scarborough. We organized a community walk where people from all walks of life and people from different faiths came together.
Can you please expand on the work that you have done and what work needs to be done going forward to make sure that we can combat Islamophobia and hate?