An anti-Shariah law petition is gaining votes on the Canadian government’s e-petition website at the same time as an anti-Islamophobia motion faces a vote in the House of Commons.

Liberal MP Iqra Khalid had the final say Tuesday evening as her controversial motion faced its second hour of debate.

“M103 is not an attempt to create Shariah law,” Khalid said as she brought up what she labelled “outrageous claims” made by critics of the motion.

The motion calls for a study to look at tackling racism and discrimination but has generated concern, and even multi-faith protests across the country, for singling out the phrase Islamophobia. As I’ve written in several columns, the vague phrase is used as a tool in Muslim majority countries to justify punishing people for blasphemy.

“We are here in the words business. We should not therefore shrug about the meanings of words,” Conservative MP Garnett Genuis said during the debate. “Why not simply define Islamophobia?”

The motion will be voted on by MPs Thursday. If approved - and it most definitely will be - the heritage committee will have 240 days to complete a study that offers recommendations.

Meanwhile, thousands of Canadians are signing petition e-909 on the government’s petitions website. It reads like a direct response to certain concerns about M-103, calling upon the government to propose an amendment to the Constitution Act “stating that Shariah Law or separate Shariah family courts will never have a place in the Canadian Justice System”.

“While I share the principle that Shariah law has no place in Canada, I believe that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would rule that any application of Shariah Law through the Canadian justice system to be fundamentally unconstitutional,” Conservative MP James Bezan, who sponsored the petition, says in an email to the Sun. “Multiple court cases have ruled that Canadian law is to be never overruled for any other set of rules or laws.”

Any Canadian looking to post an e-petition needs an MP to first sponsor it and e-909 was drafted by one of Bezan’s constituents.

While most of the over 250 petitions currently online have vote tallies ranging in the several hundreds to couple thousand, e-909 sits at 14,000 votes.

But it has a long way to go to reach the 70,000 that e-411 received, the petition about Islamophobia that served as a partial inspiration for Khalid’s motion.

afurey@postmedia.com