CHAPTER 11

Canada: The Wedge Issue

In the annals of Canadian terrorism investigations, Project Thread falls somewhere between a gripping episode of 24 and an amateur production of A Comedy of Errors.

Most Canadians, including many in the Muslim community, barely recall what happened in Toronto in August 2003, when a “possible Al Qaeda sleeper cell” was identified in the suburb of Scarborough. Or so thought the RCMP as they arrested twenty-two Pakistani students and one Indian—all Muslims and all taking courses in a diploma mill by the prosaic name of Ottawa Business College—on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack.

At first blush, the activities of some of the men did seem to echo parts of the 9/11 plot. One of them, for example, took flying lessons, and his flight plan covered such sites as the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station east of Toronto. Another had covered a wall in his room with a poster for Lufthansa, the German air carrier. The RCMP alleged that several “unexplained” small fires broke out in apartments some of the accused shared. These apartments, investigators revealed, were sparsely furnished, which suggested that the students followed a plan of moving around to avoid discovery, or that they never intended to live in them for an extended period. A taste for minimalist decor formed part of the case against the men: it would cut down on the packing when the time came to run away.

In a media backgrounder handed to journalists immediately after the arrests, the RCMP cited the students’ age, regional background and religious affiliation as further evidence of their terrorist leanings. All the men were between eighteen and thirty-three, and all but one had “connections to Pakistan’s Punjab province, noted for its Sunni Muslim extremism.” Stories of a network of terrorists in our midst soon made their way to Canadian media outlets, which played on the public’s fears of our date with terrorism. But this time, the stories came with a happy ending: “Canada’s 9/11 Moment Averted.” Phew!

Within a few weeks of the arrests, which attracted international headlines, the case against the men began to crumble and allegations that the investigation was mired in racial stereotypes from the start gained credibility. Of the four hundred students taking courses at the unregistered business school, the RCMP pulled out names that sounded Muslim or included “Muhammad.” (A 2003 article in the Toronto Star about the aftermath of the operation featured the startling headline “They Only Arrested the Muhammads.”) The terrorism investigation devolved into a case of immigration fraud. It was revealed that the owner of the now defunct school, who never faced criminal charges, issued registration papers to students to the tune of $700 apiece. Almost all the students were eager to stay in Canada by any means.

Canada deported thirteen of the targeted twenty-three back to Pakistan—despite protests from activists and lawyers that their lives would be in danger—while ten claimed refugee status. All have their names now forever associated with a “terrorism” investigation; the odd media reference here and there shows they were still trying to rebuild their lives more than a decade after the arrests. An internal RCMP review in 2004 absolved the force of any wrongdoing and described the investigation as “sound and logical.” History has added insult to reputational injury by relegating the men’s ordeal to a footnote in Canada’s war on terror. The more high-profile (and more legitimate) case of the Toronto 18 broke in June 2006, dominating headlines and the national conversation. The plot to storm Parliament Hill and detonate truck bombs in downtown Toronto led to convictions against eleven men under Canada’s post-9/11 anti-terror laws.

Still, Project Thread remains significant because it has created two blueprints for the treatment of brown Muslim men of a certain age within the Canadian security system. The first involves racial profiling, which casts these men as potential mass murderers just because of their names, their skin tones or their national origins. The second builds on the first by sacrificing the human rights and dignity of suspects, including the presumption of innocence, in the name of keeping Canadians safe and secure. The fact that some of these men shared accommodations or got together for meals turned the basic right of free association into guilt by association. The string of assumptions and errors took a strange turn when one of the accused claimed that the RCMP had mistaken him for his brother, with whom he shared an apartment. He was found hiding in a pile of laundry, according to a Globe and Mail report. Some of the students spent a few weeks in detention while others languished there for several months, facing verbal abuse from other inmates and prison guards for crimes they hadn’t committed or were unlikely to be convicted of. In the twelve years that followed, that preview turned into the main feature in the Canadian government’s relationship with its Muslim citizens, and Islam in general.

AS CANADIANS WE OFTEN talk about ourselves and our institutions in a language that sets us apart from, and makes us feel superior to, our more militaristic neighbours to the south. We pat ourselves on the back for refusing to take part in George W. Bush’s folly in Iraq in 2003, but often overlook how far we have followed in Washington’s footsteps in that other war with no end in sight: the war on terror. We’ve issued security certificates for permanent residents and foreign nationals, placing them under house arrest or detaining them in a holding centre in Ontario for years. The accused and their defence lawyers don’t get access to all the evidence against them—just a summary decided upon by a federal court judge. Since 9/11, five men (all brown and Muslim) have been issued security certificates and have been fighting deportation to Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and Syria—countries where their safety cannot be guaranteed.

In fact, with the all-encompassing Bill C-51 passing into law in 2015, Canada may have matched, if not surpassed, the most draconian provisions of anti-terror laws in the US and Britain. What the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin started between 2001 and 2006, the Conservatives of Stephen Harper continued (and then some) in their near decade in power—an era that came to an end on October 19, 2015, when the Liberals won a majority under the leadership of Justin Trudeau. Both parties, in varying degrees, predicated their anti-terror legislation and the operation of their security services on the blueprints created by Project Thread: racial profiling on the one hand, limiting rights of the profiled (or accused) on the other. In their book False Security: The Radicalization of Canadian Anti-Terrorism, law professors and commentators Craig Forcese and Kent Roach describe Bill C-51 as “the most radical national security law ever enacted in the post-Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms period.” The bill, they write, transforms the judiciary “from a protector of Charter rights into a pre-authorizer for Charter violations.”

And while C-51 and the string of anti-terror laws that have passed through Canada’s Parliament since 9/11 never explicitly target one ethnic or religious group, they “have become code for anti-Muslim legislation,” declares constitutional and criminal lawyer Nader Hasan during an interview in his downtown Toronto office. “It’s a bit gauche in this day and age, or not socially acceptable, to be a complete racist or bigot.”

Instead, and for a host of complicated political and ideological reasons, the Conservatives have used Arab and Muslim Canadians as a wedge issue, mastering the art of “xenophobic demonization,” as one journalist put it, whenever they needed a boost in the polls. This echoes the “racism without racists” strategy in the neo-liberal politics of the United Kingdom, especially in its focus on values. The Conservative messaging constructs Muslim and Arab Canadians as inherently inimical to Canadian values of free speech, transparency and human rights, especially of women, through two interrelated narratives: security and culture. Arab and Muslim men have found themselves caught in the security zone (Project Thread, the Toronto 18, the October 2014 attack on Parliament Hill), while women are entrapped by cultural assumptions (the hijab and niqab debate, and the “barbaric cultural practices” hotline that the Conservatives came up with during the 2015 federal election as a way for Canadians to snitch on their Muslim neighbours). While these security and culture narratives often relate to Muslim- and Arab-specific issues, the cumulative effect of this baiting is a generally more anti-immigrant and less tolerant society. Anti-brown discrimination drags down the whole country.

A March 2015 survey from EKOS Politics suggested that in Canada, opposition to immigration had reached heights not seen in twenty years. Running alongside this bump was a sharp increase in race-based discrimination as the number of Canadians who thought that too many non-whites were being allowed into the country reached the 40 percent threshold for the first time ever. Frank Graves of EKOS tied the disappointing results to areas where the Conservatives had seen a resurgence under Harper. Of those who identified themselves as Conservative, 51 percent believed that too many visible minorities live in Canada (compared to 32 percent for Liberals and 35 for the NDP). And while the same survey showed that 64 percent supported banning the niqab at citizenship ceremonies, Graves suggested that the issue had emerged as the “first really explicit” debate about values in Canadian politics for some time. “The Conservative movement has been very successful in using values to secure emotional engagement for its supporters.”

To be fair, the Harper Conservatives didn’t cast all Muslims or Arabs as enemies of the state. According to Nader Hasan—the Canadian-born, US-educated Muslim son of a Bengali father and Norwegian mother—the Conservatives felt compelled to prove that they were not categorically anti-Muslim by cherry-picking which segments of the community to be seen with in carefully orchestrated photo ops that featured “dark-skinned Muslim men.” Hasan suggested that some of these men had little connection to the community and didn’t understand the issues their fellow Muslims were protesting, specifically the more hawkish aspects of the government’s foreign policies in the Middle East (whereby any criticism of Israel was interpreted as anti-Semitism or hate speech). Former immigration minister Jason Kenney cut federal funding for the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) in 2009 for what he believed to be the organization’s anti-Semitism and support of terrorist organizations in the Middle East. While many in the Arab community, myself included, would argue that CAF failed to control the more radical voices within its base, few would go as far as suggesting that it condoned terrorism or incited anti-Semitism. Like many Arab and Muslim organizations, CAF took a strong position on what it believed to be the annexation of Palestinian lands by Israel since 1967—a position also held by many social justice and progressive groups, as well as churches and unions. I would even describe some of these views—including a desire to end the suffering of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza—as mainstream among Arabs and Muslims in Canada. But the mainstream of this particular brown community had no traction among the Conservatives.

Someone from an Arab community group (who spoke on condition of anonymity) told me that the Harper government had established strong connections to what it believed to be “persecuted” minorities within the Muslim faith—the Ismaili and Ahmadiyya sects. Harper built alliances with, in particular, the more affluent but small Ismaili community, a hundred thousand of whom live in Canada. Harper expressed his personal admiration for the Aga Khan, the hereditary leader of the Ismaili Muslims, during the latter’s visit to Canada in early 2014. (Harper singled out the Aga Khan’s dedication to pluralism, then went on to belittle the “food and festival multiculturalism of recent decades” and invoke a “frontier” spirit in which character mattered more than lineage.) The two men announced a $100-million joint venture between Canada (which will cover 75 percent of it) and the Aga Khan Foundation for development projects in Asia and Africa. That’s the kind of brown the former prime minister seemed to like: moneyed and apolitical.

In finding themselves afoul of the Conservatives, Arab and Muslim Canadians joined an ever-expanding list of communities whose interests clashed with the party’s agenda. The Harper government set its sights on environmental groups and indigenous populations, for example, as each presented a threat to its fantasy of unfettered expansion in the energy sector. Even a consciousness-raising movement such as Idle No More became a target for spying and surveillance by the Ministry of National Defence in 2013 for perceived threats to military personnel or possible interception of weapons shipments. It was not a coincidence that when a Cree woman from Alberta won a Mrs. Universe beauty contest in August 2015, she used the platform to denounce the Conservatives’ attacks on Native people. “With the bills that have been passed, we are being treated like terrorists if we’re fighting for our land and our water,” Ashley Callingbull-Burnham told a CBC News program.

In the weeks leading up to the 2015 federal election, when most of the reporting for this chapter took place, several members of the Arab and Muslim community talked of a collective chill. Fear of government, suspicion of one another and reluctance to talk to the media (or me) about aspects of, as one of them described it, the “hate-hate relationship” between the government and most Muslim communities didn’t surprise me. A decade of a political culture that considered scapegoating Arabs a viable strategy for political survival would do that to a community.

Sophie Harkat has lived with this culture of fear for more than thirteen years now. Her husband, Mohamed Harkat, an Algerian refugee in Canada, is one of the five men issued a security certificate. In December 2002, he was arrested and detained without charge for more than three years in solitary confinement. Since 2006, he has been under house arrest in Ottawa with what Sophie describes as the harshest bail conditions in Canada. (He wears a GPS tracking device at all times and must be under the supervision of his wife or mother-in-law twenty-four hours a day, among other restrictions.) During Mohamed’s trip through the Canadian judicial system, the Harkats received little support from the Muslim community in Canada. “After Mo[hamed] got arrested, I got a lecture in front of a Muslim group,” she told me during a phone conversation. The standard response, recalled Sophie, went something like this: “We’d love to help, but we’re scared to be associated with you.” (Mohamed declined my request for an interview, as he had just received his deportation papers around the time I approached Sophie to facilitate a conversation with him.) “It’s the white people who are fighting our battles,” she said, citing a number of lawyers and civil liberties experts who have lent a hand over the years. “I can count the number of Muslims [who’ve helped] on one hand.” For Sophie, the experience of “people of dark skin” tells a bigger story about Canada’s loss of compassion for the vulnerable. “I feel bad for the refugees who are coming,” she tells me. “If you’re a refugee coming to this country, you’re going to face a lot of discrimination.”

After talking to Sophie, I realized that I’d underestimated how upsetting on a deep and personal level hearing variations of the same story could be. Was this really happening in Canada in 2015?

Let me say clearly that my anger was also directed at the wannabe jihadis and the Muslim leaders who have tacitly, if not explicitly, indulged their sense of grievance and injustice. I accept that some Arabs and Muslims in Canada have a lot of soul-searching to do, but that doesn’t justify the collective treatment of this community of brown people as suspects in a conspiracy against Canada.

In reporting on brown experiences in Hong Kong, Trinidad, France or the United States, I was able to maintain a certain emotional distance between myself and the people I talked to. Admittedly I was more engaged in stories from the Muslim community in Britain because I had lived and studied there, and I maintain a (perverse) cultural and emotional connection to the former empire in whose shadows I was born and raised. But in writing about Canada, I’m writing about my home, my self, my skin, my now and tomorrow. I have nowhere else to go, no other place to run to. The people I talked to shared my native tongue, were born or raised in Arab countries I have lived in or visited, and often looked a lot like me—at least to an outsider. When I arranged to meet men I didn’t know, I’d tell them to keep an eye out for a brown, Middle Eastern–looking middle-aged guy. They often replied,“Ditto.” I thought it remarkable how some of the women I met reminded me of my own sisters and nieces.

In short, what happens in Canada is too close for comfort. The lives upended by unfounded suspicions, smear campaigns or secretive policies during the past decade could be mine or those of close friends who share my Arab and Muslim heritage—as well as my brown skin, our calling card to the world.

I have lived in Canada for two decades now, one of which predates the Conservatives under Stephen Harper. I can’t say that I’ve experienced any direct racial prejudice or Islamophobia. I consider myself well educated and middle class, and therefore I transcend some of the racial encounters that are all too familiar to, for example, my students from struggling immigrant backgrounds. “We don’t live in the same Toronto,” one of them told me when I talked about how I thought the city was one of the most accepting places in the world. I’ve never identified as Muslim in a public way, although I have taken it upon myself to write about issues relating to that faith community. Yes, when I worked as a drama critic I had minor xenophobic encounters with a small segment of the reading public or with members of the theatre profession, who referred to me as “Ali Baba” behind my back (as I discovered toward the end of my time on the job). It rankled not for personal reasons but because it tested my assumptions about race relations in Canada. I suffered through the odd “Have you taken any flying lessons lately?” jokes from friends who thought they were being funny and clever without realizing they were neither. In short, living in downtown Toronto shielded me from the more pernicious aspects of racism in Ontario or the country at large. Which is not to say that I haven’t kept an eye on anti-brown sentiments brewing as far afield as British Columbia in reaction to a perceived South Asian invasion.

In early 2014, I followed (and later wrote about) a controversy in Brampton, Ontario, a city whose population has turned increasingly brown in the past decade or so. An anti-immigration group, Immigration Watch Canada, distributed a flyer that juxtaposed a vintage black-and-white picture of citizens of European descent against a recent colour photo of Brampton’s largely Sikh, brown community. “From this . . . to this,” ran the caption. Although the flyer featured additional textual content about the “changing face of Brampton”—in plainer words, the collective darkening of skin tones—and some census data suggesting the squeezing out of the white population, the two images reduced the demographic shifts of suburbia to one of pre- and post-multiculturalism. “Pre” means good, white. “Post” means bad, brown.

A few months later, another flyer urged (white, presumably) Brampton residents to “Say ‘No’ to the Massive Third World Invasion of Canada.” This flyer featured an image of a stop sign imposed on a picture of a single brown Sikh man. (Immigration Watch Canada denied any involvement with this second flyer.) Charles Davenport, the American eugenicist and anti-immigration advocate we met in chapter 1, would have been thrilled. Taken together, the two flyers build on his sense of white siege to a brown invasion.

In an interview with Global News, one of the spokespersons for Immigration Watch Canada explained the racial divide in the community, one of several in Ontario and British Columbia that are becoming brown, in language that recalled opponents to non-white immigration to America in the early twentieth century: “The people of a European-based background who had lived in Brampton all their lives, their parents and grandparents and way further back than that, had become a minority in Brampton in a very short amount of time—from 2001 to 2011, the percentage of people of European background had dropped from 60 percent to about 30 percent. So the flyer was pointing out . . . is this a good thing to be happening? Is becoming a minority in your community an issue Canadians should be talking about?”

A similar sense of brown versus white could be detected in the words of John Williamson, the former Conservative MP for New Brunswick Southwest. While talking to delegates at a conference in Ottawa in early 2015, the one-time director of communications for Stephen Harper said that it made no sense to pay “whities” to stay home while companies brought in “brown people” as temporary foreign workers. Although he prefaced the remarks by saying he was going to “put this in terms of colours, but it’s not meant to be about race,” it was hard to see how one could separate the two. Williamson later apologized for his “offensive and inappropriate language,” calling his comments the biggest mistake of his career, but that did little to satisfy some of his fellow Conservatives, who feared that the statement would alienate the ethnic voters the party had been courting for years. Local brown people weren’t amused. The president of the New Brunswick Filipino Association told a CBC reporter that she was “hurt” by the comments, since members of her community worked hard and paid their taxes.

As the 2015 federal election entered its last ugly stage, the Brampton and New Brunswick incidents played out like minor provocations. The election felt too personal, too close to the skin, as not all brown people were thrown under the Conservative election bus—just Arabs and Muslims. Each report of a veiled woman getting attacked on the streets of Toronto or Montreal took me back to Paris, where such crimes happen regularly. Each editorial appealing to Canadians’ sense of decency and tolerance scared me more than it reassured me. Have we come to this? Throughout most of September and early October, I feared that Canada would be sucked into the kind of divisive racial politics that have been earning far-right parties wider support among European citizens.

Watching a panel discussion hosted by the Organization for Islamic Learning in mid-September at a banquet hall in north Toronto brought back memories of the day I spent in Birmingham attending the AGM of the Muslim Council of Britain. There I was again, surrounded by a sea of brown men and women, mostly of South Asian origin, wringing their hands over how Muslims had been cast in the role of enemy within. Same angst, different city. Whatever smugness I’d felt in Birmingham was knocked out of me as one speaker after another talked about how Canada no longer “had their back.” Panellist Kamran Bhatti, a software engineer by profession and a part-time de-radicalization activist of Pakistani origin, discussed how Bill C-24 strips dual citizens and immigrants of their Canadian citizenship. Our right to citizenship can be taken away based on information collected in the countries we fled. “Our lives, our bodies, our very place in Canada are under threat,” Bhatti said. The no-fly lists on which many Muslim names appear designate brown folks as “too guilty to fly, too innocent to charge.” I noted the same level of anxiety in other events organized by Muslim or Arab groups in the countdown to the election. If there was a bright spot, it came in the form of a far more engaged Arab and Muslim electorate, something I had not seen in my twenty years in Canada.

Like many immigrants, I came to Canada to escape the political repression and dictatorship of several Arab regimes of my early years. It was depressing to find such blatant Islamophobia in a country that was once a beacon of democracy to the world—a country that had welcomed me with open arms only two decades earlier. I often muse to my Canadian and American friends about the unfair deal they got whenever political leaders talk of missions to bring civilization and democracy to countries they are about to invade or bomb. Western governments have failed to export freedom and instead have imported some of the more repressive systems they sought to destroy, including ethnic baiting and the security state. Brown bodies have paid the ultimate price for this exchange.

So you can imagine the collective sigh of relief of many Arab and Muslim Canadians when, on the evening of October 19, the Liberals ousted the Harper Conservatives from power. Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau voted for Bill C-51 (and despite some misgivings about his party’s penchant for campaigning from the left and governing from the right), I felt better that night about my future in Canada than I had for the previous decade. At the time of writing this, it was too early to tell whether the narrative of Muslims as a wedge issue would be replaced by one in which, as Trudeau said in his acceptance speech, “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” But the omens look good. The new Parliament is racially diverse—according to one report, the Liberal caucus alone includes thirty-eight of forty-six recognized visible minorities. The list includes a record ten Muslim MPs, with an Afghanistan- and Somalia-born among them. Trudeau named four Sikh MPs and one Afghan Muslim woman to a cabinet that also featured an equal number of women and men.

On a lighter note, I—and millions around the world, I suspect—delighted in a video that emerged after the election in which Trudeau was seen dancing bhangra with a group of brown women at a 2009 event hosted by the India Canada Association of Montreal. It seems silly now how happy that made me. After all, it was probably an attempt to court the brown vote by the then new MP. But after the toxic racism of the election campaign and all the anguish of a country on the brink of intolerance, I allowed myself to be optimistic and rejoice in the sight of my prime minister dancing brown.

YOU CAN SAY, WITHOUT fear of sounding reductionist, that Hussein Hamdani’s life has unfolded as one encounter after another with the colour line: black, brown, white. Even when we sat down to talk at a Tim Hortons in his hometown of Appleby, an hour away from downtown Toronto by commuter train, I found myself marvelling at the diversity of his community of choice. What I had assumed would be a white, suburban setting—what could be more mainstream Canadian than a Tim Hortons on a Saturday afternoon just before a Blue Jays game?—turned out to be a catalogue of skin colours and ethnic affiliations. Hussein, who claimed to have a finely tuned “Muslim radar,” could identify the brown contingent by religion: Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus.

It’s both a party trick and a survival gene sequenced in the DNA of the Hamilton-based lawyer, anti-radicalization activist and (until early 2015, when allegations about his “radical past” surfaced on an anti-Muslim website and in a news report in Quebec) member of the Canadian government’s Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security. Born in Kampala, Uganda, to a Yemeni family, Hussein learned from an early age that skin colour means belonging to one community and feeling excluded from another. The East African nation and former British protectorate once hosted a thriving, economically dominant minority of Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis and Bengalis, commonly known to the black majority as Muhindis. “It’s a catch-all term for anyone who’s brown,” Hussein tells me. (The same people are more generally referred to as Asians.) At about 5 percent of the Ugandan population, this demographic group controlled nearly 85 percent (some say up to 90 percent) of the country’s economy. The Hamdani family owned Uganda’s largest chicken and cattle farm and spoke the lingua franca of the local brown communities: Gujarati or a derivative of it. Everyone knew their place. “At birth you were imprinted with an identity, a community—a clear fence, border, where who you were was defined by your religion and skin colour [with] little transgressing of these borders.” It wasn’t an apartheid system, but it acted as one.

Then came Idi Amin. In 1971, Amin, a military officer who came to be known as the Butcher of Uganda, orchestrated a coup, declaring himself president and chief of the armed forces. The next year he expelled all Asians who were not Ugandan citizens, giving an estimated sixty thousand people up to ninety days to leave the country. He then expropriated their businesses, including the Hamdanis’ farm, claiming that Asian control of the economy stood in the way of native black development (an opinion many Africanists shared). After five unhappy years in their ancestral home of Yemen, Hussein’s family sought refugee status in Canada, settling in St. Catharines in 1977. This time, they had to define themselves in relation to a white majority.

While the Hamdanis didn’t interact much with the mainstream community, Hussein knew he needed to act white if he wanted to make a life for himself in Canada. He learned to play hockey and lacrosse, and performed most of the roles that a teenager in Southern Ontario in the 1980s was supposed to. “My girlfriend was white . . . [and] I was prom king,” he tells me. “But I knew I wasn’t white. No matter how well I spoke English or played hockey and lacrosse, I was somehow different.”

Only a handful of non-white students were enrolled in his high school, but four of them got together to form an informal club: the Brother Brown Club. The members came from different parts of the world—India, East and South Africa, the Middle East—but all shared the experiences of a common and, for St. Catharines at the time, distinct skin colour. The club marked the beginning of Hussein’s social awakening as a brown man in a country that was still adjusting to its changing complexion. (News of skinhead gangs and white supremacist groups operating in the Niagara region at the time, Hussein recalls, only intensified his and his family’s sense of colour anxiety.)

Only in 1991, when Hussein started his degree in political science and history at McMaster University in nearby Hamilton, did this hyper awareness of his skin colour transform, gradually, from a social to a religious phase. In his third year, through a series of coincidences and student-housing bungles, Hussein ended up sharing a house off campus with six other brown Muslim men. “That’s when we felt our Muslim consciousness,” he recalls. Looking back at those years, Hussein finds it hard to determine if the men bonded because of their common faith or their skin colour. “It’s about coming to a new world that we all felt at home in,” he explains. “We all came from a white world . . . into an ethnic, brown world where, even if you weren’t religious, you felt a bond.” Indeed, Hussein doesn’t describe his early years in McMaster as overtly religious. He remembers seeing Muslim students hanging out and enjoying themselves at various school cafeterias and thinking that he’d like to be part of this happy community.

During his two years at the University of Toronto (1995–97), studying for his master’s in international relations, Hussein became more and more observant, organizing religious events and study circles for the Muslim Students Association. He was and remains particularly vocal about Palestinian rights and the Israeli occupation, but not in any way that would encourage violence or terror. “We were at the vanguard of this new Muslim way. We were not angry old Muslims,” Hussein says, describing his circle of friends.

While they didn’t see themselves as angry, they did have a desire to live in isolation from white Canadian society. On the morning of September 10, 2001, Hussein and a small group of his friends got together at a café in Toronto’s business district to discuss plans to move en masse to an Ontario town like Milton or Brampton to form “some type of a commune” where they could live a holistic Muslim lifestyle. Others suggested something less cult-like: targeting a community, buying up houses and living as close as possible to one another. Hussein had already started informal conversations with the mayors of several smaller Ontario towns. The question was not whether to break away from the mainstream but where to do so.

Within twenty-four hours, that self-segregation plan was shelved. Permanently. With the terrorist attacks in the US the day after their meeting, Hussein and his friends realized that retreating into an insular world would not help anyone, least of all Muslims. “We realized that our role is not to disengage from the whole country but to build bridges with non-Muslim Canadian society. Our role here is to be fully engaged with the whole Canadian population as Muslims.” As part of this new engagement strategy, Hussein began volunteering with immigration and shelter organizations and advising the chief of police in Hamilton, where he works, on issues of security and youth radicalization. In 2005, when the Liberal government invited applications from various minorities in Canada for seats on the fifteen-person Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security, he put his name forward. Hussein was an obvious and easy choice.

For a decade, he served on this federal body and focused on bridging the gap between RCMP and CSIS on the one side and Muslim youth on the other. And although the makeup of the roundtable changed during the Conservative term in office, from community applicants to political appointees—“people who had no real knowledge of the issues,” he says—Hussein remained an active, if prickly, member. “I was very sensitive if I heard any type of racial or religious racial profiling in policy development. . . . I tried to change the language of the RCMP and the Canadian Border Services.” As an example, he cites his discomfort with prefacing the word “terror” with either “Islamic” or “Islamist”—or Harper’s coinage, “Islamicist”—preferring instead to call it Al Qaeda–inspired terror, at least in those pre-ISIS years.

In the winter of 2015, Hussein’s work as part of Hamilton’s anti-radicalization movement received praise from Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney. Just a few weeks earlier, in late January, he’d made a guest appearance on The Agenda with Steve Paikin on TVO (Ontario’s public television network), where he was treated like a hero who’d stopped many radical youths from boarding planes for Syria or committing terrorist acts on Canadian soil.

By the spring, the model citizen was a fallen hero. Acting on information that first appeared on an Islamic-watch blog called Point de Bascule (the Tipping Point), a French television network in Quebec suggested that Hussein had once espoused radical views. The main evidence against him seemed to be a 1996 document from the Muslim Students Association of the US and Canada, an umbrella organization for Muslim groups on campuses across North America.

The document is more of a survival guide for campus politics than a radical manifesto, but in it, twenty-four-year-old Hussein urged Muslim students to get involved in all aspects of campus life—or what he termed “the Islamicization of campus politics and the politicization of MSA groups.” Both the blog and the TV report also alleged a hidden connection to Ahmed Yassin, the founder-leader of the Palestinian group Hamas, even though in 2004 Hussein had written openly about his visits with representatives of several Islamic movements in the West Bank, including Yassin. As Hussein made clear to the media (and to me), he had been vetted by CSIS and the RCMP in 2005 and given security clearance. He’d contributed to the Canadian government’s anti-radicalization initiative longer than Harper was prime minister.

In late April, Minister Blaney suspended Hussein from the roundtable “pending a review of the facts.” In a statement released to the media at the same time, a spokesperson for the minister made it clear that a decision had been made ahead of said review: “While questions surrounding this individual’s links to radical ideology have circulated for some time, it was hoped that he could be a positive influence to promote Canadian values. It is now becoming clear this may not have been the case.” There soon followed news reports with such headlines as “Hero or Extremist?” By July, Hussein had received a letter thanking him for his work on the roundtable and informing him officially that he was no longer part of it.

Hussein believes that his vocal opposition to Bill C-51 and his personal support for the Liberals (he was involved in a fundraiser for Justin Trudeau that collected more than $130,000 from members of the Muslim community in Ontario) are behind his removal from the roundtable. The allegations have caught the attention of the Law Society of Canada, which, at the time of writing, was conducting its own review. If it supports the government’s position—an unlikely but possible outcome—Hussein may be disbarred. “I’m very, very upset,” he tells me, adding that his livelihood depends on his reputation.

Without realizing it, Hussein had become another casualty of what, in an interview for the Montreal Gazette, he called “the fear industry.” “There’s a campaign to make Canadians afraid of Muslims and the religion of Islam,” he told reporter Catherine Solyom. “The corollary is that only the Conservatives can save us from the Muslims, so they frighten people before the federal election.” The Tipping Point blog is one of a growing number of Muslim-bashing websites that have become a “lucrative business” in the United States and are now a reality in Canada, according to the author of a US report that tracks funding for anti-Muslim organizations.

If someone like Hussein no longer felt safe, what would that have meant for the future of Arabs and Muslims in Canada had the Conservatives stayed in power? Who would have been next?

YOU DON’T HAVE TO be Muslim to feel excluded, experience discrimination or be constantly on the radar of the security state.

Farid (not his real name), a science teacher, took early retirement in 2012 after a particularly nasty encounter with his school board in which, he believes, his Arabic identity figured prominently. A Catholic of Lebanese origin with a history of involvement in his local church, Farid came to Canada in 1990 with his wife and their young daughter. Within months they had changed their minds about moving to Quebec and settled in the Greater Toronto Area, where Farid landed a job as a biology, physics and chemistry teacher in a French-immersion school. His first impressions of Canada were favourable compared with his native Lebanon, then in the final stages of a vicious fifteen-year civil war. “I remember the freedom of opinions, the sense of security,” he told me over coffee at yet another Tim Hortons in suburban Toronto.

The freedom of association and thought in Canada convinced Farid to resume his political activism as a new member of the Canadian Arab Federation and a long-standing one of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). The latter’s main goal is uniting the Levant countries (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine), which were carved up in 1917 and placed under separate colonial mandates. It was this association that led Farid to his first encounter with agents from CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, who questioned his application for Canadian citizenship. Farid had not included his membership in SSNP in the forms, but a Lebanese security agency shared that information with CSIS. His wife and daughter received their passports within the standard three- to four-year window of arriving in Canada, but his was delayed by an additional four years. Still, he thought little of it and carried on with his new life.

Shortly after 9/11, he was once again approached by CSIS. This time, the agency asked him, “as someone who cares about Canadian security,” to share any information he had about the Arab community. He was expected to be a snitch, or to put it in the euphemistic language of the security state, an informant. He declined the offer. Back at work, however, he began to notice differences in the way some fellow teachers talked to him. The fact that he was Christian and had nothing to do with terrorist groups like Al Qaeda did little to alleviate his sense that he was no longer just another teacher but an Arab-Canadian teacher. “Some questioned why and how these people [terrorists] did that. Is it the culture or the religion?”

Farid felt that his colleagues expected him to interpret the actions of Arab and Muslim extremists—actions that some believed he approved of or at least condoned. When, in 2008, he organized a fundraising campaign for children in Gaza, collecting $5,000 for World Vision, one or two teachers cast doubts on his response to what the United Nations, among other international organizations, had declared a humanitarian crisis. The implied question: Would the money go to help the needy or support terrorism? Previous fundraising efforts for the United Way and other charitable groups that targeted the developing world had elicited very little skepticism. Why was this endeavour different? “Because it’s Gaza,” Farid insists, citing the growing anti-Arab sentiments of some colleagues as evidence. “One hundred percent because it’s Gaza.”

The worst was yet to come.

March 5, 2012, started out like another day in Farid’s twenty-two-year career as a teacher in Canada. At recess time, he followed his routine of checking the latest international and Arab news from a number of websites, including the Al Jazeera network and other Arabic-language publications. As Farid tells it, a student came to his office to complain about another. As he was explaining what happened, the student, who was standing behind the teacher’s desk, could easily see the images on the screen. Farid can’t remember the exact story he was catching up on at that time, but he knows it featured graphic images of civilian casualties in the Arab world. It could have been from Syria or Iraq. The experienced teacher dealt with the student’s complaint and thought nothing more of what was an everyday encounter between two teenage boys.

“A week to ten days later, I was called by the principal. There [had] been a complaint about me showing kids violent pictures,” Farid recalls. “The kid told his family, and the family got upset and called the police.” (At this point, he mentions that the kid comes from the Sikh community. I ask if this has any bearing on his sense of anti-Arab discrimination, but Farid doesn’t think so.) The school board decided to put Farid on paid leave while it conducted an investigation. “I went back to my class, gathered my things and left.” In his mind, it was an overreaction but something that could be resolved in a few days at most.

The next morning he received a call from the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) to get his side of the story, a standard procedure. A few days after that call, the police also got in touch. Neither CAS nor the police felt that the case had any merit, and both decided not to follow up on it. The school board took nearly fifty days—“a very stressful period in my life”—to reach a similar conclusion. By then, Farid had decided that it made no emotional sense to continue working in an environment where every action he took, every website he visited, cast him as a suspicious figure, a threat to the safety and security of students and by extension the school. He felt the stigma of being an outsider because of his skin colour and ethnic origin, as well as the paranoia of colleagues around these two racial identifiers. This was a different Canada from the one he had landed in back in 1990. “I was expecting my boss to stand up for me. No one asked what kind of pictures [the student saw]. . . . My guess is that a white teacher in the same situation would have been treated differently.” He picks up an occasional teaching gig, but at sixty-two, Farid has taken early retirement.

More than three years after this encounter, he remains distressed about his treatment. “It changed the way I feel about Toronto,” he says. He thinks that his personal experience mirrors the political changes in Canada, where bills that limit freedom of speech (Bill C-51) or the rights of dual citizens (Bill C-24) have passed. The laws are creating “a lot of questions, concerns about legislating our words, ideas, thoughts as Canadians.”

Time will tell if the new Liberal government repeals or amends these laws.

A KNOCK ON MY apartment door jolted me out of my afternoon nap. It was a Friday, about three weeks before the October 19 election, and I assumed it was one of the candidates from the three major political parties doing the usual door-to-door canvassing. I had missed a recent visit from the Conservative candidate and was looking forward to giving her an earful about her party’s race politics and references to old- and new-stock Canadians. I had a whole rant rehearsed and ready for the moment she or one of her volunteers returned to my building.

But my spiel would have to wait, as the knock came from my next-door neighbour and friend, Dorene. The evening before, she told me, she had watched a news report on BBC America on the conditions in Yemen, where a war between the Shiite rebels and forces loyal to the internationally recognized post–Arab Spring government had entered its seventh month. The report focused on the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Arab world’s poorest country, a story that had more or less disappeared from most other news outlets. All eyes were on the Syrian refugees trying to make it to Europe by land or sea.

Dorene, eighty-seven, could not sit still and do nothing about Yemen—a country she had absolutely nothing to do with, apart from having a neighbour who hailed from it—but she also wasn’t sure what the best course of action would be. Armed with a cheque for a few hundred dollars, she’d knocked on my door for suggestions about which aid organization was doing the most to alleviate hunger or ensure an adequate medical response to an ever-expanding number of casualties. I nearly cried. With so much negativity in the election cycle, I had forgotten that at heart most Canadians are compassionate, kind, generous people who don’t buy into the narrative of a Muslim threat to their existence. When Canadians like Dorene—white and “old stock”—see human suffering in a poor country, they feel compelled to lend a hand and share some of their wealth with the less fortunate, without waiting to hear what religion these people believe in or which sect they belong to. At this moment, most of the world’s displaced happen to be from Syria, Libya and Yemen, among other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Most are Arab, Muslim and part of the collective brown.

I take comfort in social media posts and conversations among friends and students about efforts to sponsor Syrian families or individuals. Synagogues, churches and community groups have been pitching in and strategizing about how best to lend a hand. Their actions have proved louder and more compelling than the voices of those who want a foreign policy based on a Fortress Canada model.

In the (almost) two years I spent reporting and writing this book, I witnessed and heard stories of intolerable insensitivity and cruelty to and by brown people. A maid in Hong Kong told me that when her European employers decided to go home, they tried to find a taker for her and the family dog among other expats on the island. She was humiliated. In Dubai, a construction worker from Bangladesh, whose story I didn’t have the chance to share here, described how his supervisors made light of his debilitating fear of heights when he first worked on a skyscraper. He nearly fell to his death at least once. (He eventually got some jobs on low-rise buildings, working fewer hours and making less money than many of his colleagues.) Our bodies and skin colour render us dispensable, vulnerable. Whenever I heard these stories—including the many you’ve just read—I felt relieved to be heading home, to Canada, in a few days, weeks or months. Something else was waiting for me there, something more tolerant and inclusive.

Part of my faith in Canada is Pollyannaism. I choose to think of this country as full of Dorenes and not Stephen Harpers. But I also know that the 2015 election and all the racist fault lines it exposed are not an aberration but an indication of a specific anti-brown feeling that has been gaining momentum, even in liberal Canada. Arabs and Muslims were offered as the wedge issue, the “them” to the mainstream Canadian “us.” Which brown—or for that matter, black, East Asian, Native—community will be next? As historian Erna Paris noted after the October election: “No immigrant-based country can afford to believe that its leaders will never resort to the oldest, most dangerous, tactic in politics: the devaluation of a national minority. Nor can we Canadians afford to imagine that we will be immune to incitement.”

To be brown in the world today, you must make time to celebrate narrow escapes from prejudice and hate, even while you prepare for those times when you may not be so lucky. Our skin colour gives us away. Vigilance is imperative. For now, I’m celebrating the return of a Canada I fell in love with when I first arrived as a landed immigrant.

If that makes me a Pollyanna, so be it.