Status of Women Committee on June 22nd, 2021

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 44 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

Today's meeting is in a hybrid format and the proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website.

Witnesses, when it's your turn to speak, I'll recognize you by name, and you can click on your microphone icon to activate your mike. Comments should be addressed through the chair, and interpretation in this video conference is available. If you look at the bottom of your screen, you can pick English, French or the floor, which will give you whatever's being spoken. When you're speaking, speak slowly and clearly for the translators. When you're not speaking, your mike should be on mute.

You will see that, when your time is drawing to a close, I will gently remind you with this little card [Technical difficulty—Editor]. Obviously, we wish we had more time, but in the time that we have, we try to make sure that we give everybody the chance to speak, and then we'll move along.

Let me just welcome our witnesses today. As an individual, we have Nafisah Chowdhury, who is a lawyer, and from Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at, Calgary, we have Faakhra Choudhry and a host of supportive friends as well. We're glad to have you here today participating in our study on eliminating hate crimes and violence against women in marginalized groups.

We'll begin with Nafisah Chowdhury for five minutes.

[Nafisah Chowdhury, Lawyer, As an Individual]

Good morning, honourable members of Parliament, standing committee members and other guests.

In preparing for today, I gave some thought as to what I could cover in the five minutes that have been allotted to me on this most important topic. If I could leave behind one message that the standing committee might remember when it prepares its report to the House, what would that message be?

Islamophobia is a disease that kills. For too many Canadians, it has resulted in serious injury or death, and unless we do something to address it, this disease will continue to spread.

I will tell you a little bit about myself. I graduated from the faculty of law at the University of Toronto in 2007. To my knowledge, I was the first visibly Muslim woman to graduate from U of T law. After graduating, I joined Miller Thomson LLP, one of Canada's leading national law firms, first as an articling student, then as an associate and finally as a partner, a position that I continue to hold. In my 14 years on Bay Street, being among a very small minority of visibly Muslim women, I've had the opportunity to work with numerous Muslim community organizations on initiatives to help our community. I've also been called upon in an advisory capacity to provide support to community members at critical times.

One such time that will forever stay with me was a summer evening in 2018. I was asked to attend at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, to speak to the family of Mohammed Abu Marzouk. Earlier that day, the young father and husband had attended a picnic with his family in a Mississauga park, where he was beaten within an inch of his life by two white men yelling racist and Islamophobic slurs. At the time of the attack, Mohammed was with his hijab-clad wife, who wondered whether it was the sight of her hijab that almost cost her husband his life.

That's the reality for Muslims in Canada, especially identifiably Muslim women. It doesn't matter how accomplished we are, how many degrees we've accumulated or how much we pay in taxes. Almost every single one of us has had an encounter with an Islamophobe—harassed, belittled and sometimes assaulted for simply being ourselves. How many of us try to mentally train ourselves to respond calmly if verbally assaulted on a subway or in some other public place? How many of us instinctively make mental notes of the exits in a mosque so that we know where to go if we have to flee? How many friends have I heard from—strong, professional women, leaders in their own right—about the burnout and exhaustion they face from the rampant Islamophobia? It shouldn't be happening, and yet, it continues. In fact, with the wild west that is the Internet, it seems to be getting worse. The more public-facing you are, the more nonsense you have to put up with. I know that many of our Muslim women MPs have had to deal with this, as have countless others.

I'd like to share a small extract from an article written by my good friend, Noor Javed, a journalist with the Toronto Star.Just a few short days ago, she wrote the following:

When I got my first barrage of hate mail as an intern at the Star 15 years ago, and turned to a colleague for support, he looked at my hijab and said: if you want to survive, you will need to have Teflon-like skin. Let the hate bounce off you. Don’t let it stick. But the truth is, even when you tell yourself it doesn’t impact you, it still does. Every email in your inbox with someone telling you they hate you because of your hijab. Every letter calling you a “dirty raghead.” Every tweet telling you to go back to where you came from. Every person who walks by and whispers “You’re disgusting.” Every smear campaign calling you a terrorist. Every time someone doubts your news judgment because you are a “lying Muslim.” Every time someone asks if you were a token hire.

Noor's words have resonated with Canadian Muslims far and wide. When the pandemic hit Canada, millions of Canadians understood first-hand what it felt like to be in danger of something that you cannot see but that continuously lurks. As a society, we've come together—and rightfully so—to tackle this danger and to minimize its effects. We need to do the same when it comes to Islamophobia.

I will conclude by repeating the same message that I started with: Islamophobia is a disease that kills. I call upon this committee to prepare a report with concrete strategies to stamp out this disease so that Canadian Muslims can just live our lives peacefully, free of harassment, injury and, most importantly, from the threat of death.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much.

We now go to Ms. Faakhra Choudhry.

[Faakhra Choudhry, Teacher, Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Calgary]

Good morning respected parliamentarians and staff.

Assalam alaikum. Peace be upon you all.

Thank you for having me present today to the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

Thank you, Madam Chair, for convening today's meeting. I'm very grateful for this opportunity to speak today on such an important topic. I'm saddened that it comes in light of the horrific tragedy against the Muslim family in London, Ontario.

May their souls find peace, and may their families and friends left behind find strength and fortitude.

My name is Faakhra Choudhry, and I belong to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at. We are a revivalist movement within Islam.

I was born and raised in Canada. I have grown up in Canada's educational system, and now teach at Canadian [Technical difficulty—Editor]. My parents emigrated here to escape religious persecution they were facing in Pakistan for being Ahmadiyya Muslims, and for the inclusive and cohesive society that Canada is.

I am extremely grateful for all of the blessings that Canada has given to my family and me, and so many other families that share a story just like my own. It is, of course, important to highlight the positive things Canada has done when mentioning this topic. Some examples of the progress include Motion No. 103, a motion condemning Islamophobia in Canada.

Although not perfect in execution, it was a step in the right direction. The current caliph of our community, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, was invited to Parliament. He was also invited to speak to major broadcasters. Both are monumental steps, seeing a major leader of a Muslim community welcomed by the government and media, a Muslim leader on the front cover, and not as an attack.

We are grateful for these positives, but there are still so many steps that we have to take to become a truly tolerant and accepting society. Systemic racism exists and flourishes in the media, TV shows and movies, in the rhetoric politicians chose to adopt, and in schools and universities.

With regard to Muslim women, we are heavily targeted for looking and dressing differently. The hijab, niqab, burka, or other clothes Muslims garner as a form of modesty, are flashing arrows for anyone who may have prejudices against Muslims, such as Bill 21 in Quebec.

I can recount personal experiences facing discrimination in Canada, unfortunately. My own mother has been honked at numerous times for wearing a niqab, and yelled at to take it off. We have been shouted at to go home while wearing hijabs while walking around downtown. My friend was denied entry to a basketball court by the referee for wearing leggings under her basketball uniform in an attempt to comply with her Islamic beliefs. Cars have been keyed, windows have been smashed, and the list goes on.

Policies need to be created to ensure that racism does not have a place to show [Technical difficulty—Editor] in Canada. Online forums, videos, and articles are a big contributor to the radicalization of youth. Those who get Islamophobic ideas and misconceptions often get it online. There is a great need to monitor the cyber world. Greater task forces and resources need to be allocated here, so that tragedies are stopped at the root.

The legislation on hate crimes in Canada also needs to be revisited. The hate crime law does not go far enough to prosecute people who spread hatred, whether online or offline. The RCMP shared, during a meeting, that oftentimes there is not enough evidence to prosecute people who have committed hate crimes, so their actions go unpunished. Systems need to be in place to verify and provide consequences, for those who commit hate crimes, in a more efficient manner.

The education system is another place that needs major reform. We need to remember that the terrorist who murdered the family in London was only 20 years old. Curricula are changed and politicized due to whichever party is in power, which is very problematic. For example, in Alberta right now there is a lot of controversy about the new curriculum, which many criticize for missing the mark on indigenous and religious issues. When that curriculum is taught in classrooms in the future, those students will be misguided and begin to have a train of thought that leads towards possible discriminatory ideologies, sometimes with tragic consequences.

School curricula need to be created keeping in mind the diversity of students in our country. They especially need to involve experts from various groups during the creation process. Textbooks need to be reviewed by diverse voices to check for instances of unconscious bias and harmful language. Teachers and professors need to be held accountable for the personal biases they spread in classrooms. Many of us have experiences of teachers speaking out against Islam in the classroom or spreading what the media has falsely written.

I have had personal experiences while sitting in classes in university with 200 to 300 other students as a heated debate is led by the professor in class as to whether the niqab ban in Quebec was right and feeling like a spotlight is directly on me since I am the only person wearing a hijab. It feels as though my rights are being debated. Teachers need to be taught to include voices in an organic manner, and curricula need to have those voices integrated right from the start.

One way to combat this issue is to increase diversity training in education programs in university. From my personal experience, in the five years I spent at university gaining my education degree, we had only one diversity-in-classrooms topic, which is definitely not enough.

I would like to end my talk today with a quote from the fifth Caliph of our community, Hazrat Mirza Masroor:

If we truly want peace in our time then we must act with justice. We must value equality and fairness. As the Prophet of Islam (peace be upon him) so beautifully stated, we must love for others, what we love for ourselves. We must pursue the rights of others with the same zeal and determination that we pursue our own rights. We should broaden our horizons and look at what is right for the world, rather than what is only right for us. These are the means for peace in our age.

Thank you so much for having me here today and for listening to my remarks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much.

Now we're going to go into our first round of questioning, beginning with Ms. Sahota for six minutes.

[Jag Sahota, Conservative, Calgary Skyview, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for being here. We appreciate your presentations. I'm sorry to hear some of the personal stories that basically tell us that this is not the Canada that we want to be living in. We want improvements. We want to change how we look at each other so that visible differences—or other differences, for that matter—shouldn't be the basis of how we treat each other.

Ms. Choudhry, you spoke about your personal experience and how the teaching of equality needs to start at a young age. I want to tell you a bit about my experience with the Ahmadiyya community. My father ran a taxi company. We basically had people from all over the world who moved to Canada and drove taxis with him. To me, as a person, I don't look at people and their differences as the basis for how I treat them. In fact, it's the exact opposite. I've grown up with a lot of Muslim friends. Some of my best friends were Muslim friends. The way I see them is just as human beings—that's it. I'm hoping that eventually our younger generation doesn't focus on the physical differences or the differences in religious beliefs—all of that.

I've grown up like that. I see the name “Naeem Chaudhry” here, under “Witnesses”. I call him “Uncle Chaudhry”. I remember staying at my dad's best friend's house, staying there overnight, and his children being our best friends. I'm saddened to hear these stories when this happens in the Canada that I grew up in, where we weren't necessarily taught these differences, and I appreciate the fact that we need to start very young in targeting our younger generation to teach them to treat everyone equally.

My question is going to be on the hate crimes. Can you speak to the meaning of the term “hate crime”? You alluded to that in your presentation, Ms. Choudhry.

I guess we have two Ms. Choudhrys, so the question is for both of them, please.

Our focus in this study is on how we move forward so that what happened in London, Ontario, doesn't happen again. Can you briefly speak about the meaning of the term “hate crime”? Then we'll go to how our government and we parliamentarians can make things better or how we can address and support Muslim women.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good.

We'll begin with the lawyer—

[Faakhra Choudhry]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Oh, okay. We'll begin with you, Faakhra.

[Faakhra Choudhry]

Thank you so much for your question and your kind remarks and sentiments.

I would say that a hate crime is any act that makes another group feel persecuted or hated. This includes big things like keying someone's car or smashing a window; however, it can also include things that isolate people or leave people out of something they have the right to fully....

For example, I brought the example of my friend who was on a sports team in high school, and the only reason she was not allowed to go and sub on at the last second was that she was wearing leggings under her shorts. I would also include that as a definition of a hate crime, or at least a hate act. Even when people are shouting out racial slurs or screaming them on the street when they're driving past you, or things like this, that's where hate crimes start.

If we don't nip them at the root right where they're beginning, oftentimes they can just become the climate of our society. There are many countries in the world where it has started with people going around and maybe insulting or shouting out hatred against minority groups. Then no one stopped that. The police didn't stop it or they felt like they didn't have the proper authority to do it and maybe the legislation wasn't there. It escalated and escalated to the point where it became systemic and part of the everyday world.

It would be just to nip it exactly when it's starting off. Anything that's spreading hatred should be stopped, especially online. It's very easy to find a lot of hate groups online. Some are hiding in the dark corners, as people have mentioned before, but there are many that are blatantly spreading their hatred, even on social media and things like that. It should definitely be monitored. Social media organizations should also be encouraged to stop this hatred.

There are lot of things about freedom of voice and freedom of speech and things like that, but of course it goes to an extent.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent.

Nafisah.

[Nafisah Chowdhury]

Thank you, Ms. Sahota.

I think the question was what is my definition of a hate crime. As a lawyer, obviously I know that it can be a technical term. There are laws surrounding hate that are enshrined in the Criminal Code.

I know there are certain criticisms of the laws and the bars that have been set with respect to those laws, for example, the need for attorney general consent and those kinds of things. It can set high bars.

However, I don't really want to focus on the technical aspects of what amounts to a hate crime and the technical drafting and the language surrounding that. It's an important question to look into, but I leave that to the experts, who really practice in this area and can speak in a more educated way than I can.

What I do want to focus on is hate speech and the fact that words really matter. Words kill. We don't often think about that. As kids we grew up hearing, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” However, words hurt. We know that if we're not actively making efforts to ensure that the words that result in injury and death are not being used and are not proliferating and we do nothing to stop that, then it's just going to get worse. We see this happening.

I understand—again, as a lawyer—that there's freedom of expression and that it's a balancing act between free speech and regulating what people are able to say. However, as a society we've already understood and accepted that when it comes to certain types of speech, it is unacceptable and there's no place for it in society, because real harm is associated with those kinds of hateful speech.

Also, it's proliferating online in particular, where people can come out with a cloak of anonymity and feel free to be able to radicalize people and send out these messages of hatred that others are consuming. The other witness, Ms. Choudhry, referred to social media platforms. There is a place for government in all of this in regulating what's being allowed, what's being permitted and what we're allowing other Canadians and other people to consume and then to act upon. If there's a message here of what to take a productive focus on, or something that's critical to focus on and that needs further attention, it's regulating hate speech online.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good.

Now we're going to go to Ms. Zahid for six minutes.

[Salma Zahid, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thanks to Ms. Nafisah Chowdhury and Ms. Faakhra Choudhry. We'll have to use the first names to distinguish you before the committee. I've known Nafisah Chowdhury for a long time and have been at different events where I have heard her views on important issues.

Thank you for your important testimony today.

My first question is for Ms. Nafisah Chowdhury. You have previously stated in one of your interviews that legal problems require a multi-faceted approach. Similarly, you've said that it's important and very much needed to bring multiple perspectives to address issues like hate crimes and violence against women.

Can you please explain how to bring forward these multi-faceted approaches to address issues like hate crimes and violence against women? How can we challenge ourselves to look at these issues from multiple perspectives? What do you feel acts as a barrier to bringing the [Technical difficulty—Editor] be broken?

[Nafisah Chowdhury]

Thank you, Ms. Zahid. I appreciate the question. It's a very big one, which is tough to address in a short period of time.

I think maybe I'll start there. It's such a big issue that I think sometimes we're caught as deer in the headlights. We see the impacts, right? We saw the Quebec mosque shooting. We've heard the stories. The Mohammed Abu Marzouk story was widely reported. We heard about the security guard at IMO who had his throat slit, and now the London...I don't want to call it a “tragedy”. It is tragic, but it shouldn't have happened, and calling it a “tragedy” makes it seems like it was out of our control. These kinds of things shouldn't be happening. I think, as a society, if we're acting together and if we're actually putting things in place, we can avoid these kinds of things from happening.

What happens when you're dealing with an issue as big as that, which has so many sources and so many institutional reasons that create them? There are also individuals and their upbringing, and things that fall outside of the public sphere. We sometimes get a little frozen in trying to figure out how we even begin to tackle this issue.

When I talk about a multi-faceted approach, I think it can't just be a legal approach. You can't legislate away hate. We know that. We can't just set a law and expect that people are going to abide by it, that it's a panacea and we're living in a post-racial society. We know that's never going to happen.

If we know that the laws are not sufficient, does that mean that we do nothing from a legal perspective? Absolutely not. There's still a place for government and legislation when it comes to trying to minimize and deter those who are inclined to engage in hateful acts and hateful speech and to proliferate hate. There's a place for a legislative response.

There's also a place for a policy response. It's [Technical difficulty--Editor] that policing, the RCMP. We have CSIS, our spy agency. We've got the CRA. There's been a report recently about the unfair targeting of Muslim charitable organizations. These kinds of things set a tone in society. When our government agencies are seen as targeting Muslim community institutions or being unfair to Muslim community institutions, there's a psychological impact of that, as a society, which sort of underscores or reinforces this messaging that Muslims are scary, Muslims are suspicious, Muslims are bad. We have to be conscious of that.

From a government policy perspective, multi-faceted means setting aside the legislation. That needs to be addressed. Also, looking from a policy perspective, it's addressing these systemic issues that exist in our government agencies and addressing institutions and the unfair targeting of Muslim community organizations. That's one issue.

Then there's the [Technical difficulty--Editor]. We have the media. Of course, the government doesn't regulate the media, nor should it, but perhaps, from a government perspective, what can we do to help change the narrative? There are programs. Help young Muslims come up through the pipelines. Create opportunities for folks who want to get in and who have a different perspective on these kinds of issues. If you're not at the table, then you'll never be able to tell the story, right?

I will say that it's not all gloom and doom. We've seen a number of young Muslim journalists, for example, who have been rising through the ranks, who have done well for themselves, but we need more of it. There's a place for the government to step in and to encourage people.

The education component is another sort of multi-faceted approach—which Faakhra referred to—from a curriculum perspective, teaching young people from a young age that these kinds of issues matter.

Going back to the cultural piece, at the Institute of Islamic Studies at University of Toronto, for example, Professor Anver Emon there is hoping to put together an archive. They're in the planning stages of that for a Muslim community archive. We can get our stories together and gather them and preserve our history, which will be of benefit, hopefully, to Canada, so that Canadians and journalists and media and cultural institutions can draw upon our narratives to hopefully recast the stories and the images of Muslims in Canada.

There are many pieces to this. In my view, we should be pursuing them concurrently; we can't just focus on one at any given time. At the same time, it's important for the government to know that there is a role for it to play in those pieces that it can assist with.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We'll now go to Ms. Normandin for six minutes.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much.

I'd like to thank the witnesses, Nafisah Chowdhury and Faakhra Choudhry, for their testimony. I think that simply talking about it is already a step in the right direction. People need to be more alert when they see something unacceptable.

I'll draw a parallel with what I heard in a very good report yesterday on the CBC about elected officials and people being harassed online. What struck me was that we realized that people who commit these acts often don't have a criminal record. They're just ordinary people, and it takes us by surprise.

Do you feel that Islamophobic gestures come from the average person, or is there a typical profile of an attacker, harasser or hateful person?

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We'll start with Faakhra.

[Faakhra Choudhry]

Is the question on hateful behaviours? Sorry, I just wanted to clarify it.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Yes, I'm talking about hateful behaviours.

[Faakhra Choudhry]

There are definitely people who make good choices in society and people who make not so great choices in society. I definitely don't think it's everyone in society who's going around spreading hate and making hateful comments.

For example, I can remember at university that there was a time when someone decided they were going to put Islamophobic posters all around the campus. They decided after school one day that they were going to print out hundreds of these posters and put them around the university. Of course, when we saw those posters, we were not surprised, because this is the narrative that we've been living in. We see it in the media and all these things, but we were silent, of course. What came out of that is that every time there's a tragedy— something comes out in the media or something negative happens—a lot of positive comes out afterwards as well. We've seen this with the London, Ontario tragedy as well, where we've had a chance to see the amazing things that happen, the amazing people in the world and the amazing acts they do.

A lot of times people are just holding their opinions in, even if they're positive. Many times when they're negative, they like to proclaim them and shout them out, but many times when they're positive, they don't feel the need to stand with people, hold vigils, give support or be an ally. When things like this happen, then you really see the beautiful fabric of Canada and the beautiful multiculturalism get together.

I definitely do not think that everyone has these hateful thoughts in their mind. Maybe they have prejudices that come from birth. Some people are trying to unlearn them; some people are accepting them, but there are many people in Canada who are, in fact, being allies, whether it's for Muslim groups, whether it's for Black communities or whether it's for indigenous groups. We saw that with the indigenous community when that horrible gravesite was found. I see so many people in my neighbourhood now who have orange shirts in their windows. That's amazing to see as well.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Go ahead, Nafisah.

[Nafisah Chowdhury]

Thank you, Ms. Normandin. Bonjour.

I agree very much with the comments of Faakhra. I think that the majority of Canadians are not hateful people or are not intending to cause harm, but we're all human. This goes for every single one of us on this call, myself included. We have our own prejudices and we have our own biases. They are informed by our surroundings, our environments and our upbringing, to the extent that if we're not examining what our biases are and if we're not having conversations about them, then unfortunately, we can act out on them.

Drawing it back to online again, what's happening is that people are finding their echo chambers. Where you already have a predisposition to a particular viewpoint—even if, in the past, you may have not been inclined to do anything about it—when you find your echo chamber that's encouraging you and goading you on, unfortunately, that's creating situations for people who might not otherwise have spoken out about their personal prejudices. They're finding that the Internet is a safe space for them and they're encouraged to put that out there. That, in turn, encourages other people, so it proliferates that way.

I like to think that people inherently are good and that, given a choice, most people wouldn't want to harm their neighbour, their friends or their colleagues. If you know someone and they've been humanized to you, it's much more difficult to hate them, dislike them or to see them as foreign, suspicious and scary. Some of overcoming these barriers requires us to know each other and get to know each other. That means we need more participation in every aspect of society.

I started on Bay Street 14 years ago and there was nobody who looked like me. It just didn't exist in the Bay Street firms. I saw this as an opportunity to speak to my colleagues. I was always very open and I encouraged people to ask me questions. I know if they don't ask me questions, then they're probably assuming and that's not good. I found the discussions to be really eye-opening. People just have questions. They don't know any better and assumptions are made, yet when they have an opportunity to have an honest conversation with someone, people are open to expanding their horizons. Once you become friends with someone, those things fall away and we're just two people having a chat. It would be good to have programs that encourage people to get to know each other.

I do think that as a society—as Canadians—we also have to be aware that just because we pride ourselves on being a multicultural and diverse society that lauds diversity, this somehow means that Canadians don't harbour these racist sentiments. Unfortunately, many Canadians, both in cities and in rural neighbourhoods, continue to harbour these unfortunate sentiments. I don't think they do so maliciously. I think a lot of it is in ignorance, but it exists. I think we would be silly to think that we're a post-racial society. We're not.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much.

Now we're going to Ms. Mathyssen for six minutes.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for coming before us today and sharing your thoughts.

I want to build from this past conversation. We've had a lot of conversations here at this committee on a variety of issues, but we just finished the study on sexual misconduct in the military. We were talking about women not being hired or brought into the military. The military has been trying to ensure that it has more women, not only as leaders but also just as service people, and ensure that there is a greater mix and that greater attention is drawn to this.

Mrs. Chowdhury, when you talk about getting to know the people within your workplace and ensuring that there is a multicultural workplace, at least at a federal level, there is—