Excerpt:
A recent Environics poll in association with the CBC, Canada's national broadcaster, surveying attitudes of and toward Canadian Muslims, seemed to be good news for Canada. It was released and widely reported, it would appear, with an expectation that the findings should have a calming effect on Canadian fears of homegrown terrorism. Since the arrest last summer of 18 Muslims of varying ages for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks in and around Toronto, Canadians have had good reason to be concerned. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the survey to dispel those anxieties. A hard look at the statistics suggests that what occurred in Britain in July 2005--when four British Muslim suicide bombers struck London's underground railway and a bus, killing 56 fellow citizens--could just as likely happen here.
The survey interviewed 2,545 individuals, 500 of them Muslims. Seventy-three per cent of Muslim respondents described themselves as "very proud" Canadians. When asked how they viewed the arrests of the 18 alleged terrorists, 73 per cent responded, "These attacks were not at all justified," and 82 per cent said they, "had no sympathy for those who wanted to carry them out."
Licia Corbella of the Calgary Sun, however, exposed the unsavoury reality buried within the survey. She notes that 12 per cent of Muslims surveyed--a figure amounting to 84,000 in a population of 700,000 Canadian Muslims--identified themselves as extremists supporting terrorism. Even taking into account the margin of error of 4.4 per cent either way in the survey (19 times out of 20) and rounding the figure at seven per cent of the population, the number of Muslims self-identifying as extremists comes to 49,000. To give that figure some context, it means there are more than twice as many extremists in this country as there are soldiers in Canada's standing army, according to Canadian Conference of Defence Associations statistics.