The Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) at the University of Toronto (U of T) said they have receiving surprise visits from the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Current and former U of T MSA executives, told the Varsity that officers visited them to build relations with the group with the latest occurring over summer.
A former executive member of the Carleton University’s Muslims Students’ Association (CUMSA) spoke with the Charlatan on the condition of anonymity. She has also said she received a visit from CSIS for a similar reason.
Leila Nasr, the communications coordinator at the National Council of Canadian Muslims, said her organization has received five cases of MSA executives being visited by law enforcement over the last four years. She said these numbers don’t show the full picture, as not everyone reports these incidents.
“But, what we do hear and what makes us so certain that this is an ongoing problem is it’s something we hear at time and time again at workshops that we do,” she said.
Nasr said by law, students are under no obligation to speak to CSIS or the RCMP and refusing to speak to them won’t be held against them. However, she warned about lying to them as that is a criminal offence.
Sgt. Marie Damian from the RCMP said in an email that the police won’t provide comment to an ongoing investigation.
“The [Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams] investigate many different persons who may have information essential to an investigation. At times and with the appropriate approvals, they attend universities to further those investigations. We will provide not specific comment to this inquiry,” Damian said.
The Carleton student said CSIS called her while she was in a classroom on campus over the summer. She said while the call didn’t scare her, it surprised her how the agency got her number and knew her position within CUMSA, two weeks after being appointed.
“I was just more concerned . . . where did they get this information from?” she said. “Do they have that close of a watch on everybody that they can just pull this information out?”
According to the Varsity, a U of T MSA exec was visited by CSIS at his home in 2016 where the officers first inquired about the MSA and what it does, but he soon realized they were looking for information on radicalized students.
The Carleton student said when she inquired the two female officers what’s expected of her, they cited previous cases of Muslim students on Canadian campuses who became radicalized and “insinuated” that she reach out to CSIS if she’s aware of any potential cases at the university.
She added that they also asked her to report any hate crimes against Muslim students as they investigate those cases as well.
The former U of T MSA executive told the Varsity that this approach showed “ignorance on how radicalization happens, ignorance on how to de-radicalize,” and suggested that law enforcement would have done better by involving community leaders to address the issue.
Nasr said this approach can instill fear in students and impact the Canadian Muslim community on a broader level.
“It gives the Canadian Muslim community this perception that they are being securitized by law enforcement, that they’re being disproportionately targeted and just being seen through the lens of terror and securitization rather that the individuals that they are,” she said. “I think this creates a lot of distrust between Canadian Muslim students and law enforcement in Canada.”
Graphic by Paloma Callo
