When you realize you’ve appointed an arsonist as fire chief, the thing to do is remove her from her duties as quickly as possible.
But should we delete his post? Especially when you know there are fires to put out?
This is what we must ask ourselves following the appointment of Amira Elghawaby as responsible for the fight against Islamophobia in Canada.
Like many others, we denounced this ill-advised and counterproductive choice1. Mme Elghawaby was to ease tensions between different groups in the country. Two weeks after her nomination, the chicanery is taken and she is not running out of steam. This is proof that he is the wrong person to build bridges.
But now a Quebec movement is calling not only for the resignation of Mme Elghawaby, but the outright removal of his post. Two hundred signatories, including the respected sociologist Guy Rocher, published a letter to this effect2.
In our view, that would be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
We agree with the signatories that it has become difficult to talk about Islamophobia without confusing things.
To be critical of Islam is not to be Islamophobic. And if we believe that Bill 21 unnecessarily violates the rights of minorities, it must be said again and again: it is not Islamophobic, contrary to what we seem to think in English Canada.
This does not mean, however, that the real Islamophobia, the real, the abject one, does not exist in Canada. The attack on the great mosque in Quebec and the truck attack in London, Ontario, are only the tip of the iceberg of a despicable phenomenon that we must fight by all possible means.
Year after year, Canadian police identify between 100 and 200 hate crimes against the Muslim religion. An equivalent number of crimes are directed against Arabs or citizens of “West Asian” origin3.
Added to this is a dimension that is not directly related to Islamophobia, but which forms its breeding ground: the fact that our Muslim fellow citizens are less well perceived by the population than those who practice any other religion.
Between 2019 and 2022, the proportion of Canadians with negative perceptions of Catholics jumped across the country, from 17% to 31%. This is no doubt attributable to the sex scandals and those surrounding the residential schools.
But negative reactions towards Muslims are systematically higher (37% in 2019, 32% in 2022) and disproportionate to those towards Jews (around 18%).
These figures taken from Léger surveys do not concern the perception of religions, which is the subject of separate questions, but of the people who practice them. It should be noted that negative reactions towards Muslims are higher in Quebec than in Canada as a whole (44% against 32%), while the reverse is true for Catholics (26% in Quebec against 31% in Canada).
This overall picture fully justifies the appointment of a person responsible for building bridges between the Muslim community and all other Canadians and for combating hateful speech and acts directed at Muslims.
Those who demand the abolition of the position claim that the person chosen will be instrumentalized to fight Bill 21 in Quebec. We understand this fear. But Justin Trudeau needs to be pressured to appoint the right person and direct him to the right mandate – to fight real Islamophobia.
The idea of creating such a post does not come out of a can of caramel popcorn. This is one of the recommendations of the National Summit on Islamophobia, organized by the Trudeau government in July 2021.
We should also remember that Canada has a person in charge of “preserving the memory of the Holocaust and the fight against anti-Semitism”, the highly respected Irwin Cotler.
Justin Trudeau would do well to replace Mr.me Elghawaby by someone of Mr. Cotler’s stature. This would make it possible to dissipate the controversies and start the necessary work.