People stroll by the waters and shores of the Ottawa River in Ottawa in July, 2023.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman.
Incivility is on the rise, according to The Globe and Mail, with city halls and council chambers across Canada becoming theatres of antagonism.
In 2025, roughly two-thirds of Canadian city councillors who responded to a Canadian Municipal Barometer survey said they had experienced harassment. In New Brunswick, about one-third of city councillors have considered resigning due to constant abuse. From Whitby and Sarnia in Ontario, to St. Stephen, N.B., and Kamloops, B.C., the image of the self-effacing, polite Canadian is giving way to something far uglier, even at the local level, among our neighbours.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Earlier this year, the City of Ottawa held a City of Kindness symposium, where community leaders and faith leaders gathered to highlight how acts of kindness help foster a sense of belonging and create a more caring, connected city.
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The impetus was a series of violent hate crimes last year that included the assault of a young Muslim woman on an OC Transpo bus and the stabbing of an elderly Jewish woman at a grocery store. Condemnations and an increased police presence followed. Yet, Mayor Mark Sutcliffe felt something more needed to be done to bring the community together and strengthen shared values at a basic human level. He and his staff consulted community leaders and a local faith council. Their ultimate response was simple, yet powerful: put a premium on human kindness as a way of bringing people together in a genuine manner.
And so, the one-day symposium was organized and held during Kindness Week (the third week of February), originally established by the Kindness Week Act in 2021. The Act, the first of its kind to be passed anywhere in the world, was spearheaded by Sen. Jim Munson and the late rabbi Reuven Bulka, and was meant to encourage Canadians to lend a hand, volunteer, and donate.
At the symposium, participants heard about the benefits of kindness, its centrality to so many faith traditions, and its simplicity. Anyone can participate, and its benefits ripple throughout, strengthening our social fabric. After brainstorming practical ways to make kindness a habit, participants were invited to sign a kindness pledge.
As part of its bicentennial celebrations, the city launched the 200 Days of Kindness project, in which the good people of Ottawa are invited to submit their ideas of kindness, which are shared daily. Thus far, examples include “leave a kind note for a waiter,” “thank someone working outdoors in all weather,” and “help clean the snow for your neighbour.”
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This simple yet profound exercise can be taken up by city councils across the country. It’s an invitation to build community, lower the partisan temperature, and strengthen our social fabric. It’s wholly organic, genuine and powerful – a movement for the present, and for the future.
These features of community strength came to the forefront during the brutal ICE raids in Minneapolis, where ordinary folks stood up for each other in the freezing cold. According to New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, such courageous civic activism was “propelled by a single idea – I am my neighbor’s keeper, whoever he or she is and however he or she got here.” This gave rise to the term “neighboring,” which Mr. Friedman described as “going out to protect the good people next door or down the block. Not because I favor illegal immigration, but because I oppose the fundamental indecency” of ICE “trying to fulfill their daily quota for evicting illegal immigrants by arresting my neighbors, most of whom work hard, pay taxes, go to church or mosque and help me dig out my car from the snow in winter.”
Thankfully, we have yet to see a Canadian equivalent of ICE on our streets. Still, we can come together to help relieve the distress of our fellow community members during other kinds of disasters. For instance, Mr. Sutcliffe shared his own idea for kindness: a corps of Ottawa volunteers who can help with sandbagging during springtime flooding. Perhaps we can look into setting up city corps across this country, composed of volunteers ready to act locally when needed.
Issues and individuals will always be seeking to drive us apart, and it is understandable that current events may lead us to despair. Yet it is not too late to rediscover our collective humanity by acting on our individual potential at a local level, and on those things we can control to better the human condition around us.
We are not helpless. In fact, our humanity is what empowers us toward all that is good.