Gov’t defies Senate recommendation, won’t register, train Imams

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This article was published 10/07/2015 (3829 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA – The federal government has no intention of following through on a Senate recommendation to start registering or training Imams in Canada, a spokesman for the public safety minister says.

Jeremy Laurin, press secretary to Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney, said the report of the National Security and Defence Committee, released Thursday, makes clear “that the threat posed by the international jihadist movement is real.”

But he said a recommendation to have Imams in Canada trained and certified is not on.

“The recommendation in question is not something our government is considering,” Laurin wrote in an email.

The Senate committee spent more than a year hearing from terrorism experts, Muslim community leaders, police and others about the nature and level of the threat in Canada, including cyber spying, threats to critical infrastructure, terrorist recruitment and financing and terrorist operations and prosecutions. The study began before the murder of two soldiers in Quebec and Ottawa last October, but the report is dedicated to their memory.

“We must be vigilant in a thoughtful, balanced way, without undermining the values that make us great,” reads the introduction to the committee report.

However many Muslim leaders said the report was anything but balanced.

Idris Elbakri, president of the Manitoba Islamic Association, told the Free Press “Muslims have a vested interest in the defeat of extreme ideologies that lead people to engage in acts of senseless violence.”

He said some of the recommendations are reasonable, including working with the Muslim community to create a counter-narriative to denounce the ideology of Islamist fundamentalism.

But he said the idea of certifying Imams is “perplexing.”

“Government meddling in the affairs of religious communities is bad for government and bad for religion,” wrote Elbakri. “Overall, these recommendations illustrate that much work needs to be done for the political establishment to better understand the mainstream Canadian Muslim population and be able to work with it as a partner on the issue of terrorism.”

Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association, said it’s good to know the government isn’t considering forcing Imams to register or undergo government ordered training, but she is still distrustful given the fact the entire report discounted everything Muslim leaders said.

“They were deaf to what we were saying,” said Siddiqui. “They chose their experts and the rest of us were just window dressing.”

Siddiqui felt she was badly treated at the committee, particularly when Conservative Sen. Lynn Beyak, accused her of having ties to terrorist groups through connections to an American Muslim organization that has been accused but not proven to have ties to terrorism.

She described the report’s demands to keep closer eyes on Muslims in Canada as similar to when Canada put Japanese Canadians into internment camps during the Second World War.

Siddiqui said she expects the government may end up shelving the entire report however because the negative reaction to it was widespread and swift.

“It’s an election year,” she said.

Laurin did not indicate which, if any, of the other 24 recommendations in the report the government is working on.

Mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca