Mr. Speaker, I appreciate having this opportunity to speak to Motion No. 103, a motion I am really pleased to support.
Let us back up and go to first principles and understand what the motion is about. The motion calls for Parliament to express itself on three issues. Let me remind the House what these issues are.
The first one is to recognize the need to quell the increasing public climate of hate and fear. Second, the motion requests that the heritage committee study how the government can develop a government-wide approach to reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination, including Islamophobia. Third, the motion calls for us to collect data and contextualize hate crime reports, to conduct needs assessments for impacted communities, and to present these findings within 240 calendar days. It is very simple and easy to understand, and probably very easy to support.
I would like to talk about the first issue the motion asks us to do, and that is to recognize the need to quell the increasing public climate of hate and fear. I have been involved in politics since the age of 14, coming up on 44 years. I have been actively involved in federal politics since I came to Ottawa in 1988, and there is something that has developed over the last almost 30 years that has really concerned me. It is something that became so clear to me when we had those terrible, awful, tragic shootings in Quebec City at the beginning of the year. It is the way we speak to each other. It is the way we engage in conversation. It is the way we refer to each other and how we disagree sometimes.
I am not saying that we all have to hold hands and sing together and get along all the time. I am talking about the way we disagree. I have seen a real deterioration in the way we engage in conversation and the way we tend to disagree. I see this in coffee shops. I see this in conversations. I see that when people disagree about a small item, they tend to demonize the other. That would be fine if that just happened in personal conversations, but that has extended into the public realm of debate, even sometimes in our Parliament. We have certainly seen this in newspapers or heard it on radio or TV. The current route of demonizing, for the last 15 years or so, certainly the Muslim community, I find very distasteful, and I will tell members why.
It is clear that I am a member of a visible minority. When I grew up in Montreal, I was one of two black families in our neighbourhood. It was a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in Montreal. It was an anglophone Jewish neighbourhood, and we were one of two black families. I felt that I grew up in a minority within a minority within a minority within the larger minority of Quebec in North America. That afforded me an interesting perspective. I was able to see what the majority was like and understand the point of view of the majority, yet not be part of it. I was able to step back and have a different perspective and hear a different point of view. To me, that has always been a source of strength.
It is curious to me when I hear people make discriminatory statements against another group I am not a part of, such as anti-Semitic remarks. I have heard a lot of that in my lifetime. I always thought it was funny, because I wondered who people thought they were telling this to. All they would have to do is remove the word “Jew” and replace it with “black” and I would feel terrible.
I know the sting of that, and no one should ever feel that. Over the last 15 years, I have been hearing a lot of hateful words towards the Muslim community, and that hurts me as much as it hurts anybody else. I am a Roman Catholic, but how can people not see that the minority is not us? All of us should feel that. Although women might be demographically a majority in this country, socio-economically it is clear that women are in the minority in terms of the power structures we have.
When we hear these comments and this kind of discrimination, it worries me. I have been hearing more and more of it. It seems that people try to pick on a group that is probably the least powerful group of our times, and they keep on doing that. Over the last 30 years, I have noticed how this has progressed along.
This is one of the reasons why I have no problem supporting the motion or saying that we should take a step back and look at the way we speak to each other. We should ask ourselves if we are engaging in conversation or in actions which speak to a climate of fear and hate towards a particular group.
To me, the most important thing we could do with this motion is to have the study. I know there are people who might disagree in good faith on some aspects of it. Perhaps it is not as well defined as they would like it to be, or perhaps they want to include in the motion a whole bunch of other groups that have been discriminated against. That may be fine. However, we have done this before. As a Parliament, as a body, in the short time that I have been here, we have spoken out and taken a unanimous stance against Islamophobia. There was no argument at that time for us to change the motion or define it another way. We know what we meant. We understood what it was trying to convey, and that was a motion we could support.
We are doing nothing more than that in Motion No. 103. I have said in this House before that words and symbols matter. We have seen that in a climate of hate, in a climate of anger, of a phobia of the Muslim community that we have heard on trash radio or that we have seen on disreputable news sources. We have seen this language happen.
I hate to say it, and I know a number of people are going to disagree with me on this, but those statements have consequences. It is not that the person hearing them for the first time will go out and commit a heinous crime like what happened in Quebec City two short months ago, but it is the fact that we have legitimized that kind of debate when we brought it into the public realm.
We need to bring it back. We need to study this. We need to find some way to try to combat this, to change the way that we talk to each other. Words and symbols do matter, and we do need to have a new way of speaking.