Hawzah News Agency (Quebec - Canada) - Three days after a gunman opened fire inside a mosque in Quebec City in 2017, worshippers walked through the mosque’s doors again.

It was a sign that those at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec, and Muslims across Canada, wanted to find a way back to normalcy.

There were blood stains on the carpets, and bullet holes in the wall and windows.

Ahmed Elrefai, a man who prayed at the mosque, pointed to dried, dark red blood on the floor where his friend had been shot.

“The message is that we will still pray, even with blood on the floor,” he said.

On Jan. 29, 2017, a Sunday evening, six Muslim men were killed at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City. The massacre resulted in six widows and left 17 children without fathers.

Three years later, the path to recovery for Muslim Canadians has been complex, says Amira Elghawaby of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.

“For a moment, it seemed that Canada and governments and society was ready to meet the challenge of this type of discrimination,” Elghawaby told Global News.

“But then, that moment sort of dissipated.”

Despite the calls to action and the promises, in the days, months and years after the Quebec mosque shooting, Islamophobia in Canada did not stop.

During the year of the shooting alone, there were 349 incidents of police-reported hate crimes against Muslims in Canada. That was a jump of 151 percentage points from the previous year of 2016, which saw 139 such reports.

Preliminary numbers for 2018 show there were 173 such hate crimes.