In early February, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the closure of the offices of the special envoy to combat Islamophobia and antisemitism, and the decision to fold both into a single, new council, led by Marc Miller, the minister of Canadian Identity and Culture.

The move was discussed by Shree Paradkar, investigative reporter at The Toronto Star. But Paradkar’s February 5 piece, “Canada’s axed Islamophobia envoy says Muslims’ need for support from federal government ‘hasn’t gone away,’” was less an investigation than it was a thinly-veiled opinion column masquerading as journalism.

Paradkar’s column exclusively addressed the concerns relating to Amira Elghawaby, the outgoing Islamophobia czar, mentioning only in passing that there even was also an envoy for combatting antisemitism. This decision by Paradkar is notable and bizarre, given that Canadian Jews are at far higher risk of being a target of hate crimes than Canadian Muslims, yet their concerns were almost completely erased.

Throughout Paradkar’s nearly-1,200 word piece, Elghawaby was depicted as a victim of undeserved criticism, much of it apparently driven by little more than anti-Muslim hate. Paradkar wrote that Elghawaby faced condemnation in Quebec after authoring an article where she suggested that Quebecers were driven “by anti-Muslim sentiment.”

In fact, there were far more damning statements from her that Paradkar ignored, including when Elghawaby sent a letter to the heads of colleges and universities across Canada, calling on them to hire more Muslim and Arab professors. That prompted the Quebec government to call on her to resign, and for the province’s education minister to pointedly remind Elghawaby that antisemitism, not anti-Muslim hate, is a major factor on campuses.

Elsewhere, Paradkar shared allegations from what she called “a right-wing organization” which accused Elghawaby of using taxpayer funds to fund a pro-Palestinian grant, before seeming to dismiss them out of hand. But despite Paradkar’s flick of the wrist writing off such allegations, they remain serious.

The “right-wing organization” that Paradkar so blithely dismissed is Blacklock’s Reporter, an Ottawa-based news outlet, which said it had uncovered federal Access to Information documents, which apparently found that the Canadian taxpayer had unwittingly paid $80,000 to produce what amounted to a piece of anti-Israel propaganda from York University’s Islamophobia Research Hub, all under the guise of fighting racism.

Amira Elghawaby’s critics have long accused her of weaponizing her office, officially tasked with combatting anti-Muslim hatred, and instead using it to promote pro-Palestinian disinformation, courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer. Indeed, over the last two years, similar efforts have been seen across Canada, ranging from school boards to public sector unions, and more, showing that such concerns are hardly without merit.

Shree Paradkar’s column misrepresented and ignored some of the most problematic criticisms of Amira Elghawaby’s tenure as Canada’s envoy to combating Islamophobia, and instead characterized opposition to her as being based in bigotry, not material concerns about her role and performance.

After a long hiatus as an Israel-obsessed opinion columnist, Shree Paradkar is back with a new title, but it seems with very much the same agenda.