Speech to St. Catharines City Council Against (Re-)Installing Nativity Scene at City Hall ( as Chair of Anti-Racism Advisory Committee)

 Dear Deputy Mayor and Councillors, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak tonight.

I am Saleh Waziruddin, chair of your anti-racism advisory committee.

Just to be clear from the get go, I am speaking tonight against having religious displays such as a nativity scene on public property, and not about marking significant dates which is a different item on your agenda and which the anti-racism advisory committee has contributed to.

When I was at university a long long time ago at my dorm there was a man who told me when I first met him: I don't care what religion anyone believes in because we all believe in Jesus Christ.

His Malaysian roommate and I had to sit down with him and explain some of the facts of life.

The Nativity Scene is in fact not universal to all faiths and it may appeal even to a majority but it does not appeal to all of us in the same way. But we can't extend religious displays to all faiths either! We DO have to be concerned not privileging one community over others.

Even though the proposal before you tonight has a line about extending the “same courtesy” to other religious groups, in reality this means nothing, and the result will be the same as before: privileging the majority faith community.

It's important to understand at least two reasons why that will be the result, making that one line in the motion in reality a fig leaf which might make us feel like we are being inclusive when actually we are not.

Only a few of the many faith communities in St. Catharines even have the institutions, organization, resources, and people to organize a public display. People of many faith communities have to even travel outside of our city for their basic religious services.

But another reason is that not all faith communities even have a tradition of having displays and dioramas. It would at best be an attempt to piggy back on a tradition of the majority faith community.

For these reasons the actual result, regardless of our seemingly inclusive wording, will be the same as the problem we had before: the majority faith community will get the privilege of being established on City properties.

Which brings up another important point that came up at the Social Sustainability Committee meeting last week: City properties are not the place for religious displays. They are present elsewhere in the City, the corporation's property is not the place they need to be.

Further, many residents are agnostic or atheist, and there is no way to give them equal access by the very definition of a religious display, and the majority of major faiths will be privileged over their beliefs.

Finally, there is another point that came up in the extensive discussion at the anti-racism advisory committee meeting: there are relatively novel or recent religions founded around contemporary political or legal issues, and one specific example that came up in our meeting is the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This is a serious issue because it brings up how religions can be used to further completely secular political issues.

We saw with the Region's survey on discrimination that many people said they were discriminated against for not being vaccinated, which is not a protected category here where we live. What's to stop someone from founding a religion to use it as cover to push an anti-vaccination agenda? This is a real possibility. The City would then have to get involved with deciding what is and isn't a legitimate religion, something the corporation should stay wide away from.

But the most important point I would like you all to understand is that re-installing a nativity scene, something we correctly stopped doing, will still privilege only the majority faith community despite saying or inviting other faith communities to do the same, because the point is not all faith communities have the same resources as the majority, or even the same tradition of dioramas and displays.

Let alone agnostics and atheists.

Despite wording designed to accomplish inclusiveness, we can't ignore the reality we live in, where not all faith communities have equal privileges, and so the end result would be privileging the majority with the resources that belong to all of us.

Please vote against re-installing a nativity scene or religious displays on City properties.

Thank you.