Canada's hate crime statistics only tell part of the story, the Ottawa Citizen
The most recent hate-crime figures only confirm what many of us know: Canada is failing to adequately confront racism in this country.
For the past several years, the numbers have been steadily on the rise – and whether this is due to greater reporting, or an actual increase, is irrelevant. The reality is that many of our communities are impacted by harmful attitudes that are making themselves known in a variety of criminal ways.
The latest figures from Statistics Canada show close to a 50-per-cent increase in hate crimes in 2017. The rise in hate crimes specifically targeting Muslims rose by 151 per cent, those targeting Jews by 63 per cent, and those targeting Black people by 50 per cent. Those are “staggering” numbers, commented Barbara Perry, an expert on hate crimes and professor of criminology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. She’s right: This trend is a clear warning that it’s time to turn all that government talk about diversity and inclusion into concrete strategy.
While rising hate crimes tend to garner the headlines, we don’t tend to hear as much about the more subtle impacts of racism on the day-to-day lives of people. Fears about not getting hired because a person’s name is Mohammed or Phuong, or the lack of consistent medical treatment due to a person’s race or ethnicity, aren’t discussed nearly as much.
We also don’t hear much about hate incidents, which include indignities such as being yelled at while waiting for the bus, or being made fun of by a group of loitering teens, and which also erode our sense of safety and well-being. Our governments must do more to get at the heart of these issues.
Even the United Nations has called Canada out repeatedly, criticizing us for failing to renew and implement Canada’s Action Plan Against Racism after the last one expired in 2010. The federal government’s own evaluation of that plan provides key insights on how it must do better the next time around. The evaluation found that the action plan against racism ultimately fell short because it wasn’t embraced by all of government, and instead became siloed throughout specific departments.
Even the United Nations has called Canada out repeatedly, criticizing us for failing to renew and implement Canada’s Action Plan Against Racism after the last one expired.
That’s often been the problem with anti-racism initiatives: They are not embedded within institutional structures. It isn’t sufficient to claim that diversity and inclusion are priorities, pointed out Debbie Douglas of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants during the most recent hearings by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). “This isn’t good enough. We are looking forward to a robust anti-racism plan from the government of Canada modelled on Ontario’s strategy and implementation plan.”
Ontario was also held up as an example by the UN Committee itself. Initially housed within provincial cabinet, its work was informed through regular consultations with community experts. Though the model has been significantly altered since the Progressive Conservatives took power, it was hailed for integrating anti-racism efforts throughout all of government.
A glance at StatsCan’s latest data on reported hate crimes. Ontario and Quebec saw a big increase in a one-year period. OTTWP
Now, as the federal government wraps up its own online and offline consultations on how to confront racism, it must also take seriously the findings of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. Earlier this year, the committee produced a report titled “Taking Action Against Systemic Racism and Religion Discrimination including Islamophobia” based on a series of parliamentary hearings on the issue. The committee made 30 recommendations, including the establishment of a federal anti-racism directorate to oversee the implementation of a new action plan.
However, while the Heritage committee heard from a range of experts lamenting the dismal policing of online hate in Canada, it failed to offer any meaningful solutions. That’s problematic considering the clear connection between those who commit violence against minority communities and their consumption of far-right, anti-immigrant, and violent extremist content online.
In fact, since 1985, even before the advent of the Internet, the UN has called on Canada to improve its efforts in combating racist hate speech. A revitalized action plan against racism would necessarily include guidance on this. Surely, it’s time has come.
Hate crimes stats a warning to those who pander to fear and loathing, the Toronto Star
In February of 2017, Iqra Khalid rose in the House of Commons to read a sampling of the death threats and hate mail she had received in previous weeks.
“We will burn down your mosques, draper head Muslim.” “Kill her and be done with it. I agree she is here to kill us. She is sick and she needs to be deported,” read a couple of the over 50,000 emails sent to the Ontario MP’s office.
What had rankled people so? Khalid’s presumingly audacious efforts to get the government to study Islamophobia and other forms of racism and religious discrimination with the tabling of the motion known as M-103.
No one would have anticipated the ugly wave of hatred and anger that would rise up against Muslims and other minority communities just as the nation sought to grapple with the aftermath of the horrific massacre of six worshippers at a Quebec City mosque.
But new statistics show that hate crimes in 2017 year rose by nearly 50 per cent since the previous year. Crimes targeting Muslims increased by a staggering 151 per cent; those targeting Jews, by 63 per cent, and those targeting Black people, by 50 per cent, among other increases.
It’s clearly time for some deep reflection — particularly amongst our elected officials. What should have been a straightforward effort to examine the ongoing harassment and discrimination against minority communities that year became a highly contentious wedge issue. The steep price of pandering to populist tendencies couldn’t be more clear.
Coming as it did during the Conservative leadership campaign, many of us recall how the entire debate on M-103 was hijacked by those who wanted to scapegoat Muslims as attempting to shut down free speech and all criticism of Islam.
When the right-wing Rebel Media further used the issue as a lightning rod to foment anti-Muslim sentiment, there seemed to be no turning back. Rallies erupted around the country with people waving signs against a so-called Muslim takeover. Conservative MPs rose in the House of Commons to cast all sorts of aspersions on the very term “Islamophobia.”
While the negative political rhetoric clearly spoke to a certain base, the facts themselves spoke volumes. Through a series of parliamentary hearings, experts and community advocates laid out the reasoning for significant concerns. They talked about the growing far-right movement, the emergence of toxic online communities of anti-immigrant, white supremacist groups, as well as the existing gaps in confronting these phenomena. The “Trump Effect” was a chilling backdrop to this national conversation.
Over a year later, all we have is a harmless report chock full of recommendations and a promise from the federal government to craft an anti-racism strategy. Consultations on that strategy have taken place online and behind closed doors. Makes sense; no one wants to go through 2017 all over again.
In England, an All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims was coincidentally also launched in 2017 to examine how Islamophobia was impacting people there. The commission issued a report this past November that recommends a new definition of Islamophobia as “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” Why couldn’t our elected officials come together in a similar spirit here in Canada?
While many Canadians pride themselves for supporting multiculturalism, the very notion is under attack. There are far too many forces emerging online and in our halls of power that are seeking to undermine that cohesion. These forces often stoke populist fears through divisive debates about secularism or immigration.
Yet a recent American study during this fall’s U.S. midterm elections suggests that if we continue to call out racist politics, we may be able to convince enough people to reject it.
“People’s own biases are less likely to be activated when they are told that the message violates societal norms,” writes Maneesh Arora, a PhD candidate at the University of California at Irvine, in a recent article for the Washington Post. “This is particularly true when condemnation of the message comes from leaders of one’s own party.”
In these fraught times, we must remain unapologetically opposed to all forms of racism and hatred. And we must hold our elected officials to that same standard.
Those who serve our country should not face discrimination of any kind, the Ottawa Citizen
Almost every public institution in our country claims it wants to better reflect the populations it serves. The same is true of our military. Parliament’s defence committee has even begun a study to determine which groups need better representation.
As the nation marks Remembrance Day, it’s important to reflect not only on those who have sacrificed their lives and well-being serving our nation, but those who have had to face racism and harassment in doing so. If such barriers continue to exist, efforts to recruit people of colour and people of various faiths and backgrounds will ultimately fail.
One needs only look to the very top to understand the challenge at hand.
Canada’s defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, has acknowledged facing significant racism throughout his long career in the Canadian Armed Forces. This has been his reality since joining the Forces in 1989 and even more recently. The first Sikh-Canadian to command a Canadian Army regiment has faced racist and vulgar comments on his personal Facebook page, as well as on the Forces’ official page. “I still can’t take this guy seriously as head of the armed forces!” posted one person. “Man, it’s not us! Sikh?”
Consider the case of Bashir Abdi, a Canadian of Somali descent who served for 10 years in the Forces. In 2013, Abdi says he obtained permission to attend Eid celebrations for the day. Yet, when he returned, he was fined and eventually convicted at a military summary trial for being “Absent Without Leave.” He was fired from his post and took his case to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. “As Canadian society and workplaces continue to grow and diversify,” reads his GoFundMe page, “it is imperative that we bring more attention to the issue of fair religious accommodation so that no one else has to experience Bashir’s humiliation.”
Canada’s defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, has acknowledged facing significant racism throughout his long career in the Canadian Armed Forces.
Or take the disturbing episode this past spring, when a group of officer cadets were expelled from the Royal Military College in Saint-Jean, Que., after video emerged of them desecrating a Qur’an with bacon and semen during a cottage party.
The head of Canada’s military, Gen. Jonathan Vance, has admitted that the Forces are struggling to identify those within the ranks who not only hold racist views, but who are actively engaged in white supremacist and right-wing activities. “Clearly it’s in here,” Vance said earlier this fall in an interview.
None of this makes joining the military a particularly endearing proposition, nor will it help improve the numbers. As of 2018, 15.4 per cent of the military were female, 2.7 per cent were Indigenous, and 8.1 per cent were visible minorities. The Department of National Defence has said that by 2026, it wants the military to comprise 25 per cent women, 3.5 per cent Indigenous peoples, and 11.8 per cent visible minorities.
“I used to wonder how Indigenous soldiers who went to residential school felt about serving for a country whose government discriminated against their people,” wrote Indigenous journalist Wawmeesh Hamilton in a recent online post.
At the very least, their contributions must be acknowledged, and existing challenges addressed. That begins with education as well as clear consequences for racist and anti-immigrant behaviours and attitudes.
Success looks like Capt. Barbara Helms, who joined the Forces as its first Muslim female chaplain this past April. And we can look as far back as 1996, when the late Wafa Dabbagh became the first Canadian Muslim woman to wear the headscarf in the Forces. In a 2008 media interview, Lt.-Commander Dabbagh described her experience as“95-per-cent positive.”
As defence committee chair Stephen Fuhr put it recently, “having a diverse, healthy, happy military personnel will have a direct impact on combat effectiveness. So we need to determine that we’re moving in the right direction.”
Among those we memorialize are those who defeated the very worst fascist and white supremacist forces of our time. Lest we forget.
Déjà vu in Quebec: Politics and religion are at odds once again, the Globe and Mail
It was a moment of utmost irony.
Just as people began to react to premier-designate François Legault’s musings that he’d essentially run roughshod over Charter rights by invoking the notwithstanding clause, the Quebec Court of Appeal weighed in on a related issue.
If only Mr. Legault and his supporters would heed the Court’s conclusions.
The very attitudes that continue to inform the political class in Quebec – that somehow a headscarf or a kippa, or a turban are a blight on the landscape of its public institutions – were unequivocally dismissed by the decision in the case of Rania El-Alloul.
Ms. El-Alloul’s experience in a Quebec courtroom back in 2015 justifiably garnered headlines. During a court appearance, the presiding judge made untenable comments about her headscarf. “In my opinion, you are not suitably dressed,” Quebec Court Justice Eliana Marengo told Ms. El-Alloul. “Decorum is important. Hats and sunglasses, for example, are not allowed. And I don’t see why scarves on the head would be either.”
Ms. El-Alloul refused to remove it and eventually challenged the judge’s treatment, an action that culminated in Wednesday’s decision.
The Court of Appeal made it clear that it was indeed wrong for Justice Marengo to discriminate against Ms. El-Alloul and prevent her from accessing the courts; that anyone with a sincerely held religious belief was within their rights to freely express their faith.
“Freedom of conscience and religion - which entails both the right to hold religious beliefs and the right to act upon these beliefs - does not disappear or change when the concerned individual is dealing with courts,” reads the ruling. Echoing a 2015 Supreme Court decision tackling similar tensions, the judgement goes on to point out that “freedom of religious expression does not stop at the door of a courtroom.” Or, presumably, at the door of any institution.
Yet, here we are again. Religious minority communities in Quebec are bracing for the harmful discourse around whether or not they can fully participate in society as equal citizens. Mr. Legault says he will invoke the notwithstanding clause to override the Charter so that his government can ban civil servants in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols. Never mind that preventing people from contributing positively as teachers, judges, police officers, or in other public capacities, is completely antithetical to the whole notion of integration. Such a notion encourages everyone, whether newly arrived immigrants, or long-time residents, to fully embrace the society they live in. What better sign of “integration” than seeking to serve the public good?
A recent academic study titled Belonging: Feelings Of Attachment And Acceptance Among Immigrants In Canada demonstrates that when first and second generation immigrants feel accepted by society, they are that much more likely to become civically engaged. Instead of encouraging that, why give more weight to closed-minded people who seem to want to bully others into invisibility?
"Clearly, a person in a position of authority can’t serve God and the state at the same time,” opined Nathalie Roy, a former journalist, lawyer and current Member of the National Assembly in Mr. Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec. Yet the CAQ blocked a motion last year to remove the crucifix that continues to hang in the province’s National Assembly.
This divisive and hypocritical rhetoric continues to negatively impact people in a variety of ways. Several Muslims running in this past provincial election faced blatant racism and Islamophobia. One candidate in Quebec City had to limit his campaigning after a poster of him was shot at and after receiving death threats. Two women were filmed as they vandalized the campaign poster of another candidate who wears a headscarf.
Muslim, Jewish, Sikh and other minority communities in Quebec will once again be counting on each other, and on their allies, to unite against this latest effort to minimize, even erase, their presence. And one shouldn’t assume that such populist tendencies won’t emerge elsewhere in this country.
Ms. El-Alloul’s case therefore should remind all of us – not just Quebeckers - that even a little resistance can go a long way in asserting our human rights in the face of nonsensical discrimination.
Quebec mosque killer epitomizes Islamophobia in its deadliest form, the Globe and Mail
The man who pleaded guilty to murdering six Quebec Muslim men in a place of worship said he wasn’t Islamophobic, nor was he a terrorist.
His own words now strongly suggest otherwise. We must confront the implications.
On Friday, the court heard several hours of video evidence showing Alexandre Bissonnette eventually opening up to a police officer about why he committed the deadly attack.
“I was watching TV and I learned that the Canadian government was going to take more refugees, you know, who couldn’t go to the United States, and they were coming here,” Mr. Bissonnette explained. “I saw that and I, like, lost my mind. It was then that I decided it was time to go.”
Citing violent attacks in Europe, he said he wanted to protect people, especially his own parents, from being killed.
These are classic — and devastating — examples of both Islamophobia and terrorism. Mr. Bissonnette’s anti-immigrant views are clearly political and his conflation of Muslims and terrorism is based on irrational fear and hatred.
The puzzling fact that he wasn’t charged with terrorism doesn’t negate the need to better understand how he could justify his actions.
And Mr. Bissonnette’s dangerous premise is entirely unsurprising in the current climate.
If you collectively blame an entire group for the actions of individuals, it makes it totally reasonable to exact your revenge from any person from that group.
— Emile Bruneau
Muslims are constantly under scrutiny, the subject of persistent divisive political rhetoric and the subject of fearmongering. “We have said from the first day that Mr. Bissonnette was a victim — there were bullets put into his head and his thoughts to come to this tragedy, due largely to anti-Muslim rhetoric seen in some media,” says Mohamed Yangui, former president of the Quebec City mosque.
He’s right. Mainstream media perpetuates some of the worst stereotypes of Muslims simply in how it chooses to cover or ignore certain violent acts.
A study released this month by the Washington-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that between 2002 and 2015, the New York Times and the Washington Post gave, on average, 770-per-cent more coverage to foiled cases of ideologically motivated violence involving Muslim perpetrators than non-Muslim perpetrators.
Between 2008–2012, 81 per cent of stories about terrorism on U.S. news programs were about Muslims, while only six per cent of domestic terrorism suspects were actually Muslim, found another study.
And over a 25-year span, Muslims garnered more negative headlines in the New York Times than cocaine, cancer, and alcohol, according to Canadian researchers.
Quebec media is no different. “There’s the fear of Islamic terrorism and the generalization that the Muslims’ Islamic faith in general is the problem,” Laval University professor Colette Brin said in an interview following the massacre last year.
This doesn’t even begin to address the fake news that pollutes our online space.
Last fall, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May berated U.S. President Donald Trump for retweeting fake anti-Muslim videos posted by the leader of Britain First, a far-right group. Even Facebook — frequently criticized for being too slow in removing hateful content took the rare move of banning the group from its platform.
Despite growing efforts to curb online hate, far too many clips still go viral, often featuring prominent hatemongers of the Islamophobia industry. A variety of American foundations fund these anti-Muslim figures and causes in the tens of millions of dollars, as documented by the Center for American Progress in Islamophobia Inc.
Canadians are exposed to all of this, day and night. With our own politicians occasionally fuelling fear and suspicion of Muslims, sometimes simply for what they choose to wear, it is no wonder we are sometimes perceived as part of a threatening monolith.
“If you collectively blame an entire group for the actions of individuals, it makes it totally reasonable to exact your revenge from any person from that group,” said Emile Bruneau, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania studying this phenomenon.
This constant barrage of negative attention certainly creates the conditions in which we see an increase in hate activity, as well as everyday discrimination and racial profiling, like instances described in the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s recent report, Under Suspicion.
The federal government explored all of this in its recent study of systemic racism, religious discrimination and Islamophobia. The recommendations offer a promising way forward; every municipality and provincial government should similarly follow suit.
Mr. Bissonnette pleaded guilty to his crimes and yet insisted he wasn’t a monster. Addressing that disconnect is a moral imperative for our country.