This increase is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, especially when looking at Canada’s most deadly terror attacks – both carried out by white nationalists who shared the same Islamophobic agenda.
“If you look at [Veltman’s] narrative, he was very explicit that he had to preserve Canada’s national identity. [Bissonnette] talked about the need to protect his family because he believed Muslims posed an inherent danger.
“In both cases, they bought into the ‘Geat Replacement Theory’, which claims there is a white genocide afoot, and that the Canadian government is complicit in this attempt to overrun white Christian Canadians by enhancing the immigration of black and brown Muslims,” Dr Perry explains.
Institutional injustice
Despite Trudeau’s progressive efforts, these radical beliefs are proliferating across the country at a dangerous pace. According to Statistics Canada, the number of police-reported hate crimes targeting Muslims has increased 71 per cent since 2020.
Yet police-reported data fails to paint a complete picture of anti-Muslim violence.
Ataullahjan’s report states only 1 per cent of Islamophobic hate crimes are brought forward to law enforcement. Charges are laid in only a fraction of those cases, and convictions are even fewer.
Surveys of Canadian police officers detail rampant racism and a reluctance to take hate-motivated crimes seriously. Many officers, both young and old, view Islamophobia as a distraction or a political issue, rather than a serious law enforcement responsibility.
“When Muslims say they don’t want to report hate crimes to law enforcement, it’s because they feel that the police won’t take them seriously. Thousands of people don’t make complaints because of police inaction. It’s a great injustice to the country that we live in, which claims to treat us all equally,” says Ataullahjan.
National sense of denial
This sense of marginalisation has left many Muslims feeling betrayed by their country. Trudeau’s platform of multiculturalism is ultimately what won him the election, yet violent Islamophobia has only gained ground during his time as prime minister.
“When [Stephen] Harper lost the election to Trudeau in 2015, one of the main things that defeated him was his anti-Muslim rhetoric. Harper drove the anti-immigrant piece, but Canadians didn’t embrace it at the time. Trudeau was much better at espousing the multicultural promise, which is largely why he won,” Dr Perry explains.
“So it’s a real wake-up call for Muslims when they’re the targets of hate crimes. They feel like they’ve been deceived, and their illusions of Canada are shattered.”