Thank you so much, MP Mathyssen, for supporting that motion for a summit on Islamophobia. It is certainly welcome. As MP Wong mentioned, hate cuts across many communities, and we also stand in solidarity with our Asian Canadians, Black Canadians, indigenous Canadians and Jewish Canadians. Sadly, the gamut runs long, and we know that many communities are targeted.
In terms of the summit on Islamophobia, I would like to say that solutions that I would put forward would help address hate across communities, so to essentially address the poison that is impacting on many communities. To begin with, there are a few things.
The number one thing that I'd start with is that in order to fully address a problem, we need to know the full scope of it. At the moment, as mentioned in my intervention, we actually don't know the full scope of hate crimes and hate incidents in Canada. As I mentioned, two-thirds are not reported.
Every five years Statistics Canada releases what's called a victimization portion of their general social survey. In fact, the most recent one for 2021 came out in May, and we still don't have the numbers. In that victimization survey, Canadians who have experienced any type of crime self-report, and for 2014, we actually saw that 5% of all crimes people reported were hate crimes. That basically translates to 300,000 people in Canada who said they were a victim of a hate crime. One solution to help us really grapple with this issue is to have that victimization survey released annually to help us have a better understanding.
Next, what I would say is, again, along with that idea of reporting, we need to remove barriers to reporting. I talked a little bit about that. That includes, for instance, allowing for online reporting, being able to report hate online. We've seen that here in Ottawa. The Ottawa Police Service has allowed for an online portal, and we could look for other ways, or at third party reporting. We could be bolstering community organizations, providing them the support to take reports of hate crimes and hate incidents and funnel that information back to law enforcement locally, and also to our national law enforcement agencies in order to track white supremacist groups and hate groups in this country and their activities.
There are many things, but I would say one thing is really to bolster our anti-racism directorates. There's a federal anti-racism directorate. It needs to be bolstered in order to not only review barriers and discrimination internally within and across government departments, but also to be front-facing, public-facing, and promoting national campaigns against hate. As well, we need to convene summits that look more broadly at the issue of hate, so that we can bring communities together and examine the different ways that people are impacted.
Finally, I have one more point. I am a board member of the Silk Road Institute, and one of the things that we do is hold cultural arts programming. We are the only Muslim theatre company in North America. With supports from government we're able to showcase cultural arts to help win hearts and minds. There's a lot of misrepresentation of Muslim communities, just like there is of Asians and other minority communities. Their representation is often very negative, which helps to feed that “authorisation” and dehumanization of various minority communities. Bolstering the funding for cultural arts and the ability to reach across communities would be also very helpful.
Thank you.