How bad is Islamophobia? Someone finally asked Canadian Muslims

...Last week in the House of Commons, for instance, Iqra Khalid made several impassioned entreaties to her fellow MPs, invoking the spectre of “more than one million Canadians who suffer because of Islamophobia, who are victimized on a daily basis.” But this isn’t quite the horrible state of affairs described by Muslim Canadians when someone actually bothers to ask them.

Last April, a CBC-Environics poll revealed that Muslims in Canada are annoyed less by discrimination in this country than by all the damn snow. About a third of the Muslim respondents said the really lousy thing about Canada was the weather. Only nine per cent said it was discrimination. One of five respondents said they couldn’t identify anything about Canada they didn’t like. Eight in ten said Muslims are treated better in Canada than any other Western country.

Still, 30 per cent of Muslim respondents said that in the preceding five years they had experienced discrimination that was based on their religion, ethnicity or culture. This is not something Canadians can be proud of, and it would be well worth the time of Khalid’s proposed standing committee study to look into this closely. But it’s well shy of a million Muslim Canadians being victimized by “Islamophobia” on a daily basis...