OTTAWA – A Liberal MP Friday said the Quebec mosque murders were a “direct result” of the kinds of policies “championed” in recent elections by the federal Conservative party and the provincial Parti Quebecois.
Chandra Arya’s accusation, made Friday in the House of Commons, was the latest attempt by federal Liberals to blame “elements” in the Conservative Party for a sharp rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in Canada.
“The recent killings of Muslims praying in the mosque in Quebec City is not an accident,” Arya said. “This is the direct result of dog-whistle politics — the politics of fear and division.”
Arya, who represents the Ottawa-area riding of Nepean, did not mention any politician or political party by name in his House of Commons statement but he blamed, “the elements who championed charter values, niqab ban, barbaric cultural practices tipline — all targeted at Canadian Muslims.”
In in an interview outside the House of Commons, Arya said he was referring to policies that were part of both the Parti Quebecois in Quebec’s last provincial election and the federal Conservatives in the 2015 federal election.
So far, investigators have not speculated on the motivations or political interests of the individual accused of killing six worshippers at the mosque Ste-Foy, Alexandre Bissonnette.
Nonetheless, Arya connected policies of the PQ and the Conservatives to the killings.
“This had been building up for a period of time. Some day, something had to happen,” Arya said.
Arya’s charge came the day after Heritage Minister Melanie Joly accused federal Conservatives of fomenting Islamophobia by refusing to condemn it.
Hours after Joly made that statement, Omar Alghabra, a Liberal MP from Mississauga, Ont., asked, in the House of Commons, if a Quebec Conservative MP, Gerard Deltell “accepted some responsibility” for “the type of rhetoric” on some Quebec talk radio stations.
Deltell, who was an Action Democratique du Quebec member of Quebec’s National Assembly, before coming to Ottawa as a Conservative in 2015, has been a guest on some radio stations that are accused of being platforms for hosts and other guests who have anti-Muslim views.
Deltell, on Friday, angrily rejected attempts by Alghabra, Arya and other Liberals to connect any Conservative policies with violence in Quebec City.
“It is unacceptable,” he said outside the House of Commons. “I think everybody has to be careful what is said in that room.”
Deltell also noted that, minutes after Arya made his accusation in the House, Conservative Matt Jeneroux, who represents an Edmonton riding, praised the contributions to his community that his Muslim constituents had made and condemned all violence against Muslims.
Moreover, the Conservatives, like all parties in the House of Commons, consented to a unanimous motion last October that condemned “all forms of Islamophobia.”
“Canadians will judge who has the point, who has the most developed common sense in this argument,” Deltell said.