Canadian Heritage committee  One of the problems we see with the police forces when dealing with hate-motivated crimes is sometimes—indeed, perhaps all too often—they will identify the crime without looking at the motivation. I mean, obviously if somebody paints a swastika, you can see the motivation, but if

Canadian Heritage committee  I hate to impose something mandatory on the police, because—

Canadian Heritage committee  Oh, mandatory training—I can tell you what I think the content of training would be, but whether training should be mandatory, I think you'd have to talk to the police about that. I assume they go through some training in any case, so it would just be a component of their trainin

Canadian Heritage committee  I wonder if I could just add a sentence here. I would encourage the committee to look at what used to be the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia and is now the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. It originated the definition of anti-Semitism that eventua

Canadian Heritage committee  I wanted to address one particular component of your question, which was how we get statistics about something that's racial but not a crime. Even with the best and most consistent statistics in the world, the police are presumably going to collect information that's relevant t

Canadian Heritage committee  I'd like to thank you and respond in kind and say it is an honour to be here, particularly having you in the chair. I realize that M-103 mentions only Islamophobia by name, but is not just about Islamophobia. All the same, I would suggest for the committee that Islamophobia cann

Public Safety committee  One thing that's going on in Winnipeg is something called the Jewish-Muslim dialogue. People from the two communities just get together and talk about current issues. That's the sort of experience that can be replicated across the country and across different communities, and the

Public Safety committee  Yes, I could add something here, because I've had some experience with this. It's very difficult to find out what's going on if you're stopped or queried. There are different regimes. Typically what happens is that if you want to question it, they might show it to a judge, but th

Public Safety committee  Yes. There's a back-and-forth on this issue, and we're definitely on the side of using the law to deal with these phenomena of incitement to hatred and incitement to terrorism. As I indicated in the preliminary remarks, there is an issue there, freedom of expression, and it requi

Public Safety committee  I wouldn't identify a use or abuse of the law that's been a flagrant concern to us, but I think it still could be improved, so we are making some suggestions. I take the point of my colleagues that a law can be discriminatorily enforced, and we have to guard against that, but s

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much. On behalf of B'nai Brith Canada, I would like to address only one question posed in the “Our Security, Our Rights” green paper. The question, found on page 46 of the background document, is this: “Should the part of the definition of terrorist propaganda ref

Public Safety committee  If I could just add to that, my own view is that we need an escalation of remedies. We go to the Criminal Code as a last resort, when everything else fails, because that is the most severe. That's where you bring in the most acute punishment, or you actually punish. That's one o

Public Safety committee  Our ultimate point was that it shouldn't be left to assumption. It should be defined.

Public Safety committee  We focused only on one particular clause, which was one about the promotion and advocacy of terrorism. What clause 16 does is set up an offence that wasn't there before, and it's a speech offence. What it's doing is re-equilibrating the balance between freedom of expression on th

Public Safety committee  In the bill it's in clause 16, and clause 16 basically has three components. One of them is adding in proposed section 83.221 to the Criminal Code, and that proposed section 83.221 sets out an offence. That offence does not require the consent of the Attorney General for the pros