A Carleton student is speaking out after receiving a threatening note in her mailbox last week.
Eren Cervantes-Altamirano, a masters of arts student at Carleton, said she found the note in her mailbox the morning of Nov. 18.
The handwritten note read “Canada is no place for immigrants or terrorists. Go home.”
After finding the note, Cervantes-Altamirano said she posted it on Facebook and Twitter, asking people what she should do with it.
She called the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) that morning to report the incident, but said she was told it wasn’t an emergency situation and that someone would follow up with her later that day.
In a CBC article, chief of police Charles Bordeleau, said, “This is not Ottawa. And I’m glad that she’s coming forth and that she’s informing us of that so we can follow up on it. We’ll see exactly what, from an evidentiary perspective, we can gather from that letter.”
However, Cervantes-Altamirano said she was surprised to see Bordeleau’s statement, as the police hadn’t even seen her at all at that point.
She said she went to the station on Nov. 20, and said the police officer who met with her said there was nothing they could do with the situation.
“At that point in time, the police man and one of his co-workers were like, ‘Well, you know, we don’t even believe that this was either racially or religiously motivated,” she said.
However, Cervantes-Altamirano said she thinks the note is part of a broader problem within Canadian society.
“Issues of racism and Islamophobia are not taken seriously,” she said. “The fact that I had to go in and they told me this is neither racially nor religiously motivated speaks to a lack of awareness, and a lack of education on the part of the people that are asked to be implementing anti-racism strategies.”
“We’re talking about the fact that someone who has certain privilege feels entitled enough to actually go and put their hand in a private mailbox and do these kinds of actions,” she said.
“We’re talking about something that actually has tangible implications for people. For me, it was a note, but just as easily it could have been something else.”
A spokesperson from the OPS said they are unable to comment on open investigations unless charges have been laid.
Cervantes-Altamirano said she does not want the story to be just about her.
“The point in here is not ‘I got a note, and now I’m in the news.’ The point in here is ‘these are things that are happening,’ “ she said. “Not everyone reports [it] because not everyone is in a position to report this, but this is an issue. [It] has been going on for many decades, and if we want to be successful at actually tackling Islamophobia and racism we need to talk about systemic issues.”
“Racist and Islamophobic people in Canada are not nuanced. They are not pinpointing ‘oh, you are Muslim’ or ‘oh, you are an immigrant’ . . . it’s just a general ‘othering’ of whether you’re a minority or whether you’re a Muslim or whether you look different,” Cervantes-Altamirano said.
