Thank you so much, Madam Chair.
I just want to say that part of my directness today is because I'm hoping that this study will allow us to all do better as elected officials in this country.
I want to point to a blog post written for the London School of Economics by a woman named Emily Sams-Harris. She wrote:
...far-right protesters occupied Canada's capital city of Ottawa in February 2022, under the banner of the “Freedom Convoy” and the ways apathetic police responses encouraged anti-gender rhetoric. Originally claiming to be organized in protest to COVID-19 vaccine mandates established by federal and provincial governments, the convoy quickly evolved. It quickly became clear that this anti-vaccine, anti-masking protest had absorbed anti-gender movement discourses and dog whistles under the banner of [so-called] “freedom”. For more than three weeks, occupiers employed aggressive and threatening tactics such as confronting people on the streets whom they believed to be pro-mask, pro-vaccine, particularly women, Black communities, Indigenous communities, people of colour, as well as [the] queer and trans communities. Hearing transphobic slurs was not uncommon.
I want to say that also happened with “Every Child Matters”, where the Orange Shirt Society pushed back against the convoy, asking them to stop.
Lauren Pragg, I want to go back to you. With the rise of far-right extremism in the country, what can we do as elected officials to ensure that we are not contributing to far-right extremism? What should we also do as elected officials to call out far-right extremists who are currently elected and serving in the Conservative Party of Canada?