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The state’s job isn’t to manage the public perception of any one religious group. At least, that’s what is generally believed in Canada. But on Monday, that’s what the government did with the publication of “The Canadian Guide to Understanding and Combatting Islamophobia.”The 60-page report, the latest creation of Amira Elghawaby, the federal appointee tasked with promoting Islam in Canada under the guise of “combatting Islamophobia,” is not just a guide to understanding a particular type of discrimination.
It covers history (specifically, poor treatment of Islam by the West), the state of Islam in Canada, anti-Muslim violence and negative public perceptions and concludes by asking that more religion-conscious policies — tailored to Islam — be integrated into Canadian civil society.
Altogether, it’s the kind of document a secular government has no business producing, going far beyond promoting long-held traditions of pluralism and religious freedom.
It starts from the premise, commonly held by activists on the left, that the West is a fundamentally immoral faction in history: its record is marred by legacies of colonialism; of historic treatment of Muslims as barbaric outsiders; and so on. Though, historically, Islamic societies are guilty of the same sins, sometimes to a greater degree, as the West: imperialism, conquest, slave trading, as well as the belief that outsiders are bizarre, backwards and wrong.
The modern age gets a similar unbalanced treatment. The report scrutinizes negative perceptions in society of Islam: treatment of women (from clothing requirements to honour killings), extremism, political goals, and so on, framing harsher views of the faith as “myths” and presenting milder, more positive “facts” to dispel them.
Justifiably, the report notes the rise in hate crimes in recent decades against Muslims in the West and in Canada. The worst of these were the 2017 mass shooting by Alexandre Bissonnette of a Quebec City mosque and the 2021 vehicular murder by Nathaniel Veltman of the Afzaal family in London, Ont. There are non-fatal examples, as well.
But while it asks us to draw conclusions about western society from those horrible acts, it tells us that acts of Islamic terrorism are cases of individual wrongdoing. It leaves out the concerning prevalence of these attacks in the West: arrests for Islamic terrorism outnumber right-wing terrorism by a factor of 10. Canadian cases of Islamic terrorist plots omitted from the report include the gunmen who stormed both Parliament in 2014 and Edmonton City Hall in 2024, both of whom appeared to be radicalized Muslims, as were the 18 individuals who plotted to attack Parliament and the Toronto CBC building in 2006. Other attempts at jihadi mass murder have been fortunately thwarted, such as the Edmonton van attack of 2017 and the Ontario VIA Rail plot in 2013. While the loss of life from these attacks didn’t reach the tragic scale of the Quebec and London mass-murders, they remain significant because they specifically targeted Canadian democracy and infrastructure.
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As is the fashion, the report complains of “systemic Islamophobia,” or, “practices in policing and security screening, the justice system, negative portrayals in the media, widespread discriminatory actions within government institutions and harmful rhetoric from political leaders.”
But it fails to give convincing examples: it claims that “Canadian Muslim women experience discrimination in healthcare,” but references a literature review that largely examined non-Canadian studies as well as self-reported experiences of perceived discrimination. Overall, the review was inconclusive, but it did note that Muslim women interviewed for one Ontario study on maternal health-care experiences were mostly “pleased with how healthcare practitioners respected their religious and cultural beliefs, values, and practices.”
It also claims that Muslim women face systemic discrimination because they are “underemployed at higher rates than the general population and less likely to hold full-time or senior management positions.” Which, alone, is just a numerical statement that doesn’t prove actual discrimination at all. And the study it cites doesn’t actually settle on a reason for the group’s under-employment: young children in the home, unsupportive spouses, lack of education (often a factor of the first two, as well as recent immigration) were identified as some barriers, along with discrimination, which, without further inquiry, is merely suspicion.
