Ottawa will invest $85 million over four years to launch a new anti-racism strategy and a national anti-hate plan, including to promote the full participation of religious minorities in Canadian society, as well as $5.6 million over five years to support the new special representative in charge of the fight against Islamophobia.
These investments are complemented by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise to pass legislation to counter hate speech online.gene, including strengthening the Criminal Code. No indication, however, of an intention to repeal section 319 (3) b which currently offers protection to hate speech that harms an identifiable group if it is made in good faith and based on a religious text. . Remember that the texts of many of the major religions contain statements that denigrate or advocate hatred against apostates, atheists or agnostics, women, homosexuals, and even certain ethnic or racial groups. Thus, legally, if based on a religious text, believers, unlike all others, have and continue to have the right to express hate speech.
Are these few initiatives aimed at silencing legitimate criticism of religions in Canada, as happened in Dr Sheriff Emil? Remember that this pediatric surgeon at the Montreal Children’s Hospital was accused of Islamophobia for having denounced the use of a photo of a girl barely five or six years old wearing the hijab on the cover of the Canadian Medical Association Journal in November 2021. According to him, the use of this photo was misguided and perpetuated an often traumatic and harmful practice. He argued that “respect should not alter the fact that the hijab, niqab and burqa are also instruments of oppression for millions of girls and women around the world who do not have the opportunity to make a choice “. The National Council of Canadian Muslims and the Muslim Advisory Council of Canada then ruled that this was Islamophobia, successfully demanded an apology from the newspaper and called for sanctions against the pediatric surgeon.
The recent #LetUsTalk campaign launched by Canadian Yasmine Mohammed and American Masih Alinejad also highlighted the fact that Western women of Muslim culture are themselves accused of Islamophobia when they tell their stories. They say they fear Islamist ideology right here in the West. What will be the impact of these new federal initiatives on the voice of these people?
As Richard Malka, the lawyer for Charlie Hebdoin his pleading entitled The right to piss off God (Grasset, 2021): “Renouncing free criticism of religions, renouncing caricatures of Muhammad, would be to renounce our history […] to a critical spirit, to reason, to a world governed by the laws of men rather than those of God. It would be to renounce teaching that man is a cousin of the monkey and does not come from a dream, and also to renounce that the Earth is not completely round. It would be to give up considering the woman as the equal of a man. This would be giving up on homosexuals not being punished with death after atrocious tortures, and I would point out that, curiously, the 72 countries in the world where homosexuality remains an abomination are almost the same as those where the crime of blasphemy continues to exist. »
According to the European Court of Human Rights, which has regularly been called upon to rule on the subject: “Those who choose to exercise the freedom to manifest their religion, whether they do so as members of a majority or a religious minority, cannot reasonably expect to be exempt from criticism. They must tolerate and accept denial…and even the propagation by others of doctrines hostile to their faith. »
Let’s hope that Ottawa will take this into account and that its initiatives will not have the effect of silencing criticism of religions!