Canadian taxpayers are helping to foot the bill for an Islamic organization that offered its services for attendees of the Al-Quds Day demonstration, a protest in support of the Iranian regime.
As first unveiled by one eagle-eyed observer on social media, with further research from journalist Andy Lee, the Muslim Legal Support Centre (MLSC) offered their free legal advice to help “support” attendees of the Al-Quds Day protests in Toronto. The Al-Quds Day protests were originally founded by the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, which calls for the annihilation of Israel, and which regularly features open glorification of terrorism on Canadian streets.
According to its website, the MLSC, established in 2018, is funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario, as well as the Department of Justice Canada, and the Government of Canada, and the funds are hardly token.
According to the federal government’s records, in 2025 alone, the MLSC received some $700,000 in taxpayer funds: $565,011 from the Department of Justice to – among other efforts, “conduct public legal education sessions to inform Muslim communities about their legal rights” and to fight “gendered Islamophobia.”
The same year, the MLSC was granted $125,000 from the same department in order to provide “Muslim tenants in Ontario” with advice on tenant rights, and $11,126 from Employment and Social Development Canada as part of the Canada Summer Jobs program.
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The plot thickens further.
The MLSC was co-founded by Faisal Mirza, who currently serves as a judge at the Ontario Superior Court, as well as an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto law school.
In 2017, Mirza, via the Faisal Mirza Professional Corporation, served as a lawyer suing the federal government on behalf of International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy (IRFAN), a charity that had recently been banned as a terrorist entity. The government alleged that it had transferred nearly $15 million to Hamas-linked organizations. It remains banned today.
Even after representing a banned terrorist entity suing the federal government, Mirza was later appointed to the National Security Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA), which, according to Mirza’s biography on the University of Toronto website, “provided the government of Canada with independent accountability of national security and intelligence activities.” Currently, there are six members of the NSIRA.
Mirza was appointed to that role in October, 2020 for a five-year term. During his tenure, the NSIRA recommended that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) pull back its terrorism-related auditing of Muslim charities in Canada,according to a report from Juno News.
As noted by the news outlet, the NSIRA recommendation closely mirrors criticisms of the CRA’s audit of Muslim charities from a separate study authored by the University of Toronto’s Institute of Islamic Studies and the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), called “Layered Suspicion.”
The NCCM, formerly called CAIR-CAN, was founded in 2000, and has been accused of having links via its parent organization CAIR, to the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist network.
In the report from NCCM and the Institute for Islamic Studies, the authors complained that because Hamas – the Palestinian terrorist group banned in Canada – also has both “social and political/military wings,” that the “Government of Canada does not recognize that distinction as it relates to anti-terrorism financing.”
In his work as a judge, Mirza has been accused by one columnist as having “a habit of projecting racism in assessing any interaction with the state and undermining public safety with his assumptions.”
Taken together – taxpayer funding, legal support for an Al-Quds Day rally, and the web of troubling connections around it – the Muslim Legal Support Centre (MLSC) raises questions Canadians deserve clear answers to, and to which the news media has an obligation to investigate in our view.
