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Results: 1 - 15 of 27
Mustafa Farooq
View Mustafa Farooq Profile
Mustafa Farooq
2021-06-16 16:18
Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for providing us the opportunity to offer our thoughts on your study of ideologically motivated violent extremism in the aftermath of the London terror attack.
My name is Mustafa Farooq. I am a lawyer and the CEO of the National Council of Canadian Muslims. I'm joined today by my colleague Sameha Omer, the director of legal affairs for the council.
By way of background, NCCM was founded as an independent, non-partisan and non-profit grassroots organization dedicated to defending the human rights and civil liberties of Muslim communities living in Canada. For almost two decades, we have been a leading voice in the promotion of human rights in Canada, working tirelessly in the areas of community education and outreach, media engagement and public advocacy, and challenging discrimination and Islamophobia.
With the independently documented rise in hate, racism and Islamophobia faced by our communities, we are here today because we are greatly concerned about public safety. I think this came to a clear head for me personally when over the weekend I introduced members of the Quebec City mosque to members of the London Muslim community at the funeral of the Afzaal family, and then drove back to Toronto to try to attend a vigil at the IMO mosque in Etobicoke.
The reality is that something has gone terribly wrong in this country. The reality is that while I was preparing for this committee last night, I was also at the IIT, the Islamic Institute of Toronto, after two individuals yesterday threatened to bomb the centre after attempting to break in. We were also reaching out to a Black Muslim woman allegedly assaulted in Edmonton. We were also in conversation with the Baitul Hadi centre in Edmonton, which had a swastika drawn on it.
On the evening of January 29, an armed male entered the CCIQ in Quebec. He gunned down six Muslim worshippers and injured several more in a terrorist attack targeting a masjid and the Muslims inside it. The victims were Ibrahima Barry, Azzedine Soufiane, Aboubaker Thabti, Khaled Belkacemi, Mamadou Tanou Barry and Abdelkarim Hassane. In an instance of hate and violence, their earthly presence was taken from us in what remains the worst attack on a house of worship on Canadian soil in modern history.
On the evening of September 12, 2020, a man with alleged links to a white supremacist group, the O9A, walked onto the parking lot of the IMO mosque in Etobicoke and slit the throat of Mohamed-Aslim Zafis. I saw his body that night in the parking lot—even as I had met him that year handing out food to the poor in the worst of the COVID-19 epidemic.
On June 7 a family was run down in London by an accused with alleged hate-based motivations. Terrorism charges have now been brought against the accused. I will read the names of the deceased into the record: Salman Afzaal and his mother, his wife Madiha Salman, and their daughter Yumna. Before leaving London, I met the young child, the sole survivor of the attack. I don't really have words to fully describe what that meant.
We are here today because white supremacist, violent Islamophobic, neo-Nazi and alt-right groups are growing precipitously. They're becoming bolder, whether it's groups like the Soldiers of Odin surveilling a mosque in B.C., a group calling itself “The Clann” intimidating worshippers at Canada's oldest mosque in Edmonton, groups like La Meute in Quebec, or the groups that are now planning celebrations of the London terror attack in Ontario. This list excludes all the other things I was dealing with yesterday. Amongst others, in Calgary a woman wearing a burka was allegedly accosted. As my colleague Sameha can tell you, this is pretty much a consistent occurrence for us. We get these calls 365 days a year.
My submissions before you today are squarely around how we can dismantle white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups that first act as a major source of incitement and enabling of hate, xenophobia and violence against certain segments of the public, including members of the Muslim community. I will also note that our colleagues who join us today from CIJA, in tandem with dozens of leading Canadian organizations, joined with us last year in our call for more action on white supremacist groups,
In the interest of time, I'll dive right into the recommendations that we want to highlight before this committee. These key recommendations and approaches are ones that we will further discuss at the National Action Summit on Islamophobia, which I appreciate also had important bipartisan support. From our perspective, these need to be undertaken in order to dismantle the immediate challenges around white supremacist groups in Canada.
First of all, we believe that existing Criminal Code provisions, especially the terror-listing provisions of the ATA and section 70 of the Criminal Code, should be used to dismantle groups like the Three Percenters. Even as this government utilized current legislative options in dismantling white supremacist groups, such as Blood & Honour, Combat 18, the Proud Boys, we believe that the tools already exist in the Criminal Code to list terrorist groups and to disband militias. These provisions need to be used to deal with the other 250-plus white supremacist organizations in Canada.
Section 70 of the Criminal Code, for instance, deals with prohibiting assemblies of persons for the purpose of “training or drilling themselves”, “being trained or drilled to the use of [firearms]” or “practising military exercises”. This could be used to prevent the actions of groups and the mobilization of groups like the Three Percenters. When we're talking about ideologically motivated violent extremism, we need to recognize that there are already existing provisions in the Criminal Code that can be used to dismantle some of these groups.
Secondly, we recommend the addition of new legislative listing provisions to the Criminal Code that specifically list white supremacist groups as white supremacist groups. Groups like the Soldiers of Odin may not meet the high threshold of being a listed terrorist entity and are not a militia, but these groups provide significant threats to Canadian Muslim communities. Like the organization that is planning on hosting a celebration of the London terror attack, there's no reason for these groups to be allowed to continue to exist, congregate, mobilize, plan their hate in Canada.
View Damien Kurek Profile
CPC (AB)
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the witnesses appearing before committee. It's certainly very interesting what you have presented, and I've had a chance to look at some of your work.
To Dr. Leuprecht, your research suggests that online bravado appears to be a bad predictor of whether or not somebody will be a violent extremist. I don't think you say no link, just that it's not a good metric to use to predict violence. I ask this question in the context of being an elected official and having an online presence. I certainly have been subject to and seen a lot of very extreme content, some of which was directed at me.
Could you expand on that and talk about whether that's an accurate summary of what your research has concluded?
Christian Leuprecht
View Christian Leuprecht Profile
Christian Leuprecht
2021-05-31 16:17
If you look at the amount of research that Dr. Perry has collected, if there was a connection, let alone a strong connection, between bravado and violence, we would expect to see a lot more violence in Canada than we do. What it suggests is that we need a much more nuanced approach to the issue.
There are four different levels at which we can engage in this. One is a matter of the criminal investigation side for people who engage in this type of conduct, but the other three are conversations we need to have more aggressively.
What are the economic and psychological barriers that as a society we have put in place to prevent people, who engage in bravado and so forth, from moving to action?
What can we do with certain elements of the community, where there are actual small groups and pockets that we can identify, to tell them counter-narratives, to tell them a better story? That's an opportunity, in particular with youth who we know are susceptible to influence.
We also need to turn this around: If there are so relatively few ones but there's this huge number of zeros, what are we actually doing right as a society to make our society resilient, to begin with, from people buying into this proliferation of hate online? This is something that, compared with, for instance, some of our partner countries, Canada has done very well, so we need to focus on the proactive measures that we as a society have in place.
View Tako Van Popta Profile
CPC (BC)
Thank you very much.
Three minutes is not a lot of time to talk about such important issues, but I have a question to Dr. Leuprecht.
Thank you for your testimony. You had talked about the pyramid. Maybe you could expand on that a little bit. What I've scribbled down is that at the bottom are activists, who are maybe engaged in objectionable behaviour, then radicals, who are engaged in illegal behaviour, and then terrorists.
In an earlier response to Mr. Kurek's question, you said that bravado is not a good predicator, so what is a good predicator of somebody moving from one level to the other in this pyramid?
Christian Leuprecht
View Christian Leuprecht Profile
Christian Leuprecht
2021-05-31 16:27
That is the million-dollar question, and I think we can show that this is really poorly established. The RCMP, when they testified two weeks ago, mentioned 273 cases in 2019 and 2020. How many of those did actually result in actionable charges? There was the Victoria legislature plot there.... I would say that, yes, this is a security intelligence problem, but it turns out that, on the criminal intelligence side, we're not doing that great perhaps a job. We can also infer that it's actually not as big a problem as the resources that we're actually devoting to this particular issue. It is easier for us to capture because we can see it and we have a visceral reaction, most human beings who live in a democracy have a visceral reaction against it, but it remains a phenomenon very much at the margins.
I think we need to remember here and circle back to the issue of the United States. The U.S. is a very polarized society and has always been, and its own political institutions reinforce that. I think we have political institutions that have always forced more of the views into a more moderate and reconciliatory institutional process, so, yes, there will always be some spillover in views from the United States, but by and large, our society has done a better job at moderating those and is helping to reconcile those within our political mainstream.
Martin Geoffroy
View Martin Geoffroy Profile
Martin Geoffroy
2021-05-31 16:53
All right.
Here is an overview. Over the last 10 years, a total of 113 events involving some type of violence occurred, given that we observed a number of categories of violence. Over the last 10 years in Quebec, 22% of right-wing extremist events were violent. Violence has been on the rise since the early 2010s, with the rate increasing sharply in the second half of the decade. The yearly average went from 2.6 violent events between 2010 and 2015 to 19.4 violent events between 2016 and 2020. Therefore, the increase in violence related to far-right groups in Quebec is problematic.
In fact, events involving physical violence jumped dramatically during the second half of the decade. Until 2015, the average number of events involving physical violence was two, but the number rose to nine beginning in 2016. In 2017, we noted 23 violent events, and in 2020, a total of 35 violent events involving far-right groups were noted.
The most violent year of the decade was 2020.
View Jack Harris Profile
NDP (NL)
With regard to the idea of these individual groups being a danger to society, when I look at your research, the end result is about 20% over 10 years of involvement in some kind of violence, which would be either verbal, physical or online.
How serious is the danger that they pose? There are “threats and hate speech” listed in your categories of violence, also “vandalism”, “mischief”, “physical conflict”, “harassment and bullying”, “attacks and assault” at 6%, and “terrorism” is 1%.
Are they a serious threat and danger to life and limb, or are they at a lower level than that, for the most part?
Martin Geoffroy
View Martin Geoffroy Profile
Martin Geoffroy
2021-05-31 17:19
I'm often told that these groups aren't dangerous because they're small in number and marginal. We often estimate that the far right in Canada amounts to less than 1% of the population. Political parties that have a far-right ideology don't get many votes. The parties will get less than 1% of the vote. They won't succeed in getting members elected to Parliament, for example. Within the population, these groups are extremely marginal.
However, just because they're marginal doesn't mean that they aren't dangerous. For a terrorist attack to occur, all it takes is one person fuelled by extremist ideologies. We saw this in the attack on the Great Mosque of Quebec City. The small groups are dangerous given that it takes only a few individuals for these types of acts to occur. Moreover, an individual becomes dangerous when they're desperate, meaning when they see that their political option has no hope of being democratically recognized or of succeeding. At that point, they may think that violence is the only way to further their cause.
View Damien Kurek Profile
CPC (AB)
It's tough to ask a question after that, but if you could define “violent extremism”, what would that definition be?
Phil Gurski
View Phil Gurski Profile
Phil Gurski
2021-05-31 17:24
Most people will see violent extremism and terrorism as synonymous. I tend to lean in that direction and, to be perfectly honest, Mr. Kurek, I don't have the time to split hairs on whether there's a different between the two. They are virtually synonymous.
View Shannon Stubbs Profile
CPC (AB)
View Shannon Stubbs Profile
2021-05-12 17:06
Yes, it does. Thank you.
It's illuminating, and it makes sense, then, that the definition also has been adapted to move away from what could be perceived to be partisan or political definitions. Also, I think it's instructive that there probably is a thread of these actors through ideologically motivated violent extremism, as well as religious and politically motivated violent extremism, if I've got you right.
I wonder if you're able to give us a sense of what the attacks were that caused the deaths of the 21 individuals, as cited in the 2020 report. I'm not sure what can be discussed in terms of investigations or which agencies might be involved to some degree—probably all—but can you give Canadians a sense of exactly what caused those deaths and which attacks they were?
Timothy Hahlweg
View Timothy Hahlweg Profile
Timothy Hahlweg
2021-05-12 17:07
I absolutely can.
Starting in 2014, we have the Moncton shooting perpetrated by Justin Bourque. In that shooting, three were killed and two were wounded. In 2015, we have the Halifax mall plot. That plot was disrupted and there were no casualties. In 2016, we have the Edmonton stomping attack. One individual was killed. In 2017, we have the Alexandre Bissonnette attack on the Quebec City mosque. Six individuals were killed and 19 were wounded in that attack.
In 2018, we have the Toronto van attack by Alek Minassian. Ten people were killed and 16 were wounded in that attack. In 2019, we have the Sudbury knife attack, and two people were wounded in that attack. Finally, in 2020, we have the Toronto spa attack, where one person was killed and one person was wounded.
I think I've covered that. If I've missed anything in that depiction, I will defer to my colleagues in the RCMP.
View Shannon Stubbs Profile
CPC (AB)
View Shannon Stubbs Profile
2021-05-12 17:08
Thank you.
Can you give us a sense of how many plots were foiled last year that would have been planned ideologically motivated extremist acts?
Timothy Hahlweg
View Timothy Hahlweg Profile
Timothy Hahlweg
2021-05-12 17:08
Unfortunately, given the nature of this call, I won't be able to get into the specifics of those investigative activities, specifically on the foiled plots. Some of those investigations are still ongoing.
I can assure you that your colleagues in NSICOP and the service meet regularly to discuss those classified discussions.
View Shannon Stubbs Profile
CPC (AB)
View Shannon Stubbs Profile
2021-05-12 17:09
Can you give us a general sense in terms of scale or scope? Dozens or hundreds or thousands...?
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