Liberals block study into church burnings and synagogue attacks
Author: Clayton DeMaine
The Liberal chair of the Heritage Committee blocked a Conservative motion to have the committee study crimes against religious institutions such as church burnings and synagogue shootings.
Conservative MP Andrew Lawton attempted to call the House of Commons Heritage Committee to study crimes targeting religious institutions, such as church burnings and synagogue shootings, but was blocked by the committee’s Liberal and Bloc MPs.
During the House of Commons Heritage Committee on Thursday, Liberal MP and committee chair Lisa Hepfner declared Lawton’s motion to begin a study on crimes against religious institutions in Canada to be outside the committee’s scope. Her ruling was supported by the Bloc and Liberal MPs, who formed a majority on the committee.
Following the failed motion to begin the study, Lawton put forward another motion to have the committee “recognize that faith and religion are integral to Canadian history, culture, traditions and national identity” and to report their vote to the House of Commons.
The Liberals, however, also moved to block such a vote from reaching the House of Commons for members to review and vote on, including Prime Minister Mark Carney.
“We have, as a committee, been denied the opportunity for a couple of weeks now to actually be able to have a public airing of a lot of the issues that Canadians have expected us to deal with,” Lawton said to the committee on Thursday.
Lawton noted that since 2015, police-reported hate crimes targeting religion have more than doubled from 469 to 1,115 a year, and those targeting Jewish Canadians, who make up only about one per cent of the population, have more than quadrupled from 178 to 788.
He also noted that the government had confirmed in a written question that since 2015, there have been 423 arsons targeting places of worship, with 90 of them occurring in 2021 alone.
“More than 100 churches have been burned or vandalized since 2021, and at least 33 of them were destroyed by fire, with arrests in only nine of those cases. Six worshippers were murdered at the Islamic Cultural Center of Quebec City in 2017,” Lawton said. “Synagogues have been firebombed and shot at, and Hindu temples, Sikh Gurudwaras, and mosques have been repeatedly targeted.”
He also noted the shooting at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ontario, where a gunman opened fire at a synagogue filled with Jewish congregants celebrating a nighttime Yom Kippur ceremony. And that Carney himself had recognized that Canada was failing Jewish Canadians.
The motion would have invited Culture Minister Marc Miller in for questioning on the rise in religiously targeted crimes, as well as Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, Justice Minister Sean Fraser, religious leaders, Statistics Canada and various police services and their hate crime units to discuss the issue.
“Hate against faith communities is very real. This has been very close to home in London, where a little over five years ago, the Afzal family was murdered for no other reason than their Muslim faith,” Lawton said. “A despicable act of hate and terror.”