Article content continued

In 2012, a mosque in West Quebec had its windows smashed; hate graffiti was painted on it that same year. A mosque in Saguenay was defaced with animal blood. A butcher’s shop was vandalized in Sherbrooke. A gift-wrapped pig’s head was left last summer at an entrance door to the Quebec City mosque targeted Sunday. Anti-radicalization expert Amarnath Amarasingam says Muslims in Quebec feel more insecure than in the rest of Canada.

Perhaps, yet Quebec is hardly alone. The 2015 federal election reached its nadir when the federal Conservatives pledged to reinstate a ban on women wearing the niqab during citizenship ceremonies. This position didn’t come out of thin air: A poll for the Privy Council Office showed a dismaying number of Canadians agreed. Since then, at least one Conservative leadership candidate has repeatedly peddled a “Canadian values” test for those wishing to immigrate to Canada.

We are a country of rapid demographic change: One in five Canadians is foreign-born, according to the 2011 census, the highest such proportion in the G8. (Asia, including the Middle East, is the largest source of immigrants.) Slightly more than one million people identified themselves as Muslim (about 3.2 per cent of the population), the second-largest religious group after self-identified Christians.

These changes demand conversation, not confrontation.

We do not saddle Canadians with collective guilt over the carnage at the mosque. Blame rests squarely with whoever held the gun, not with people who merely hold beliefs.