This is pretty sad.
Cautiousness/fear of the unknown: xenophobia thrives on precisely that.
Canadians tolerant - well, mostly, Michael Valpy, Globe and Mail, 1 July 2004
On their nation’s birthday today, Canadians can assure themselves they’re more supportive of same-sex marriage than ever before. They’re overwhelmingly opposed to banning religious symbols and dress in schools. They almost universally approve of their children growing up in a multiethnic, multicultural society.
But ask them if they’d vote for a political leader who is Muslim, and nearly a third would say: “Not likely.” And almost half of all Canadians — 45 per cent — think that anti-Muslim sentiment is increasing among people they know.
Those and other views are revealed in a survey conducted during the election campaign by the Centre for Research and Information on Canada and timed for release on the national holiday. The results mirror CRIC’s findings a year ago, when it conducted a values survey for The Globe and Mail’s New Canada series.
The New Canada poll showed a strongly accepting, inclusive society, especially among young Canadians, but it also revealed what **CRIC’s director of research, Andrew Parkin, described yesterday as not really anti-Islamicism, but a shadow of reticence and cautiousness about Muslims and Islam.
“It’s more about different values than different ethnicity,” he said. " It is kept alive, Dr. Parkin said, by the persistence of security issues in the global media and political agendas, and by violent events in the Middle East.**
Thus, 20-year-old Fariha Naqvi of Montreal has met with stares on the street, rude questions from strangers and even resistance from her own secular Muslim family since she began wearing her headscarf about four years ago.
Teenager Irène Wassem was sent home from her Montreal private school a year ago after she showed up wearing a headscarf. Reem Al Salus, 21, was shocked a couple of weeks back when she arrived at Montreal’s Trudeau Airport from Morocco and was ordered by an immigration officer to remove hers so she could be photographed.
“Still, in general,” said Riad Saloojie, executive director of the Ottawa-based Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, “Canada is seen to be a very free and open space for religious expression by Muslim immigrants.”
Zamona Khan, 18, of Guelph, Ont., one of about 100 girls at her high school who wears the head covering, agrees. “People are really accepting,” she said.
Her mother, Nareeman Khan, who also wears the headscarf, said that during her 30 years in Canada, she has noticed more people asking questions about it and about Islam, not out of rudeness, but because they are eager to know.
Ms. Khan and her two daughters, Zamona and Zara, 17, took part in a demonstration outside the French consulate in Toronto last winter to protest against a French law prohibiting students from wearing religious symbols or clothes in schools. As Zara said, she worried about the “slight possibility” that the same law could be passed here.
Not likely. The CRIC survey shows that the great majority of Canadians oppose any similar law in this country, although there are some significant differences in how the issue is viewed.
Quebeckers, the most secular of all Canadians, are the least opposed to a legal ban. And more than any other group, young women favour a ban, because they are more inclined than other Canadians to see religious clothing and symbols as oppressive of girls and women.
As for electing political leaders, Canadians indicated they would be more likely to vote for a party whose leader was black, aboriginal, a Jew, a homosexual or a woman than a party headed by a Muslim. In the West, Muslims, Quebeckers and homosexuals were lumped more or less equally together as the least popular choices for leaders.
Dr. Parkin said it shows Canadians’ regional differences can be as acute as their ethnic and values differences.
In any event, in contrast to their feelings about what’s happening to Muslims, Canadians see scant evidence of anti-Semitism in the country. Only 18 per cent of respondents — 24 per cent in Quebec — said they thought anti-Jewish sentiment was on the increase among people they know despite recent reports of vandalism and arson at Jewish buildings and facilities.
As for same-sex marriages, Canadians’ approval of them has climbed from 48 per cent last September, just after the federal government announced it would not appeal an Ontario court decision making them legal, to 57 per cent in the middle of an election campaign where three of the four main party leaders favoured them.
“It’s hard to know whether September was a blip or now is a blip,” Dr. Parkin said.
Same-sex marriages are supported by 77 per cent of Canadian adults under 30.