Thank you, Ms. Zahid. I appreciate the question. It's a very big one, which is tough to address in a short period of time.

I think maybe I'll start there. It's such a big issue that I think sometimes we're caught as deer in the headlights. We see the impacts, right? We saw the Quebec mosque shooting. We've heard the stories. The Mohammed Abu Marzouk story was widely reported. We heard about the security guard at IMO who had his throat slit, and now the London...I don't want to call it a “tragedy”. It is tragic, but it shouldn't have happened, and calling it a “tragedy” makes it seems like it was out of our control. These kinds of things shouldn't be happening. I think, as a society, if we're acting together and if we're actually putting things in place, we can avoid these kinds of things from happening.

What happens when you're dealing with an issue as big as that, which has so many sources and so many institutional reasons that create them? There are also individuals and their upbringing, and things that fall outside of the public sphere. We sometimes get a little frozen in trying to figure out how we even begin to tackle this issue.

When I talk about a multi-faceted approach, I think it can't just be a legal approach. You can't legislate away hate. We know that. We can't just set a law and expect that people are going to abide by it, that it's a panacea and we're living in a post-racial society. We know that's never going to happen.

If we know that the laws are not sufficient, does that mean that we do nothing from a legal perspective? Absolutely not. There's still a place for government and legislation when it comes to trying to minimize and deter those who are inclined to engage in hateful acts and hateful speech and to proliferate hate. There's a place for a legislative response.

There's also a place for a policy response. It's [Technical difficulty--Editor] that policing, the RCMP. We have CSIS, our spy agency. We've got the CRA. There's been a report recently about the unfair targeting of Muslim charitable organizations. These kinds of things set a tone in society. When our government agencies are seen as targeting Muslim community institutions or being unfair to Muslim community institutions, there's a psychological impact of that, as a society, which sort of underscores or reinforces this messaging that Muslims are scary, Muslims are suspicious, Muslims are bad. We have to be conscious of that.

From a government policy perspective, multi-faceted means setting aside the legislation. That needs to be addressed. Also, looking from a policy perspective, it's addressing these systemic issues that exist in our government agencies and addressing institutions and the unfair targeting of Muslim community organizations. That's one issue.

Then there's the [Technical difficulty--Editor]. We have the media. Of course, the government doesn't regulate the media, nor should it, but perhaps, from a government perspective, what can we do to help change the narrative? There are programs. Help young Muslims come up through the pipelines. Create opportunities for folks who want to get in and who have a different perspective on these kinds of issues. If you're not at the table, then you'll never be able to tell the story, right?

I will say that it's not all gloom and doom. We've seen a number of young Muslim journalists, for example, who have been rising through the ranks, who have done well for themselves, but we need more of it. There's a place for the government to step in and to encourage people.

The education component is another sort of multi-faceted approach—which Faakhra referred to—from a curriculum perspective, teaching young people from a young age that these kinds of issues matter.

Going back to the cultural piece, at the Institute of Islamic Studies at University of Toronto, for example, Professor Anver Emon there is hoping to put together an archive. They're in the planning stages of that for a Muslim community archive. We can get our stories together and gather them and preserve our history, which will be of benefit, hopefully, to Canada, so that Canadians and journalists and media and cultural institutions can draw upon our narratives to hopefully recast the stories and the images of Muslims in Canada.

There are many pieces to this. In my view, we should be pursuing them concurrently; we can't just focus on one at any given time. At the same time, it's important for the government to know that there is a role for it to play in those pieces that it can assist with.

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