Islam in Canada

• Yet, a haunting question lingers: have we fallen into some of the same practices we so vehemently condemn, specifically systemic Islamophobia?
• On Canada Day in 2013, John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were arrested by the RCMP after allegedly attempting to bomb the British Columbia legislature.
• However, three years later, Canadians discovered that the arrests were not the success story the RCMP portrayed them to be.

Inside Project Souvenir

• In response, the RCMP launched an elaborate surveillance operation it called Project Souvenir.
• Undercover “Officer A” roped Nuttall into a fictitious jihadist organization planning a large-scale attack on the West.
• Officer A threatened Nuttall with expulsion from the organization if he did not come up with a viable attack plan.

The over-policing of Muslims

• There was no corroboration for the CSIS alert that initiated the investigation in the first place, but police proceeded with it anyway.
• What Roach describes as “over-policing” of Muslims has led to rampant human rights abuses.
• These cases paint a brutal picture of the over-policing of Muslims in Canada, underpinned by suspicions of Muslims as terrorists.

Mass surveillance

• A recent study by criminology and sociology academics Baljit Nagra and Paula Maurutto sheds further light on CSIS’s mass surveillance of Muslims in Canada.
• The study documents how CSIS fosters a culture of informants and reveals how racial narratives surrounding perceived “radicalized extremist” Muslims have provided legitimacy for sweeping surveillance at the hands of intelligence services under the guise of the war on terror.