Canada’s continuum of hate: time to address COVID-accelerated bigotry

OTTAWA—How big of a problem is hate-motivated violence in Canada? The fact is, no one knows. Only a small portion of all hate crimes are reported to police, with estimates of incidents going unreported ranging from 60 per cent to 95 per cent. That’s partly because many people, particularly newcomers to Canada, avoid involvement with the police and don’t make a report or because the police don’t evaluate a report as credible. Even so, all indications are that hate-motivated incidents have been on the rise, with a big uptick, not surprisingly, since Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president in 2016 was seen as a signal for bigots everywhere to come out of the shadows. In 2017, police reported 2,073 criminal incidents in Canada that were motivated by hate, a stunning 47 per cent increase from the previous year, according to Statistics Canada. That increase was largely attributable to an increase in police-reported hate crimes motivated by hatred of a religion or of a race or ethnicity. Since 2017, the rate of reported hate crimes has stayed historically high. For 2019, police counted 1,946 cases, with more incidents targeting people over their race and sexual orientation. And in Canada as elsewhere, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated hate incidents, violent and otherwise, against people of Asian descent. Vancouver police witnessed a large jump in hate crimes last year, reporting 98 cases compared to 12 in 2019. And it seems to be getting worse as the pandemic drags on. A report from the Chinese Canadian National Council’s Toronto chapter said it had received information on 1,150 incidents of anti-Asian racism since COVID-19 emerged, with almost half of them happening early this year. Most of the incidents involved “verbal harassment,” though 11 per cent of the reports involved physical force, aggression, or unwanted physical contact. In 10 per cent of incidents, the victims were coughed at or spat on. “Collectively and individually, these racist incidents have resulted in deep and long-lasting impacts on the Asian Canadian community as a whole,” Avvy Go, director of the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, said in a statement calling for action by Parliamentarians. “As Asian Canadians, our lives have been taken over by a constant sense of paralyzing fear. Every time we step out of our home, we wonder if the attack will happen to us, again.” The climate of anti-Asian antagonism has been fed by political figures criticizing Beijing’s early handling of the outbreak, in particular by Trump, who has repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” as part of his effort to deflect blame for his own mishandling of the pandemic when it first broke out in the U.S. This kind of incitement has had an impact in Canada, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has acknowledged. These incidents are an element in a larger pattern of increasing right-wing extremist presence in Canada. Although hard to keep track of, hate groups, including online organizations, are estimated to number between 200 and 300 now, perhaps double what they were a few years ago. In February, after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the Trudeau government said its intelligence agencies consider ideologically motivated violent extremism a “growing threat” and added 13 extremist groups, including the Proud Boys and several other neo-fascist organizations, to the Criminal Code list of terrorist entities. At the same time, the government said countering the online component of these organizations remains a “complex and ever-evolving issue.” And last month, after the attack that killed six Asian-American women in Atlanta, MPs passed a motion condemning the rise of anti-Asian racism and urging the government to do more to confront hate crimes. The government has several programs in place to address discrimination and systematic racism and plans to tighten up regulation of hate speech on the internet. But the legal system has been grappling for decades with trying to balance laws against hate incidents with free speech protections and most racist incidents don’t meet the threshold of a criminal offence. Of those that do, only a small portion result in charges being laid. Regardless of COVID-19, the federal government needs to go beyond rhetoric and marshal a national consensus to get a lot tougher on this kind of hateful behaviour. A good place to start would be to follow through on NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s House of Commons motion calling for Ottawa to convene a federal-provincial meeting on tackling hate crimes, co-ordinate efforts to upgrade tactics for countering this trend, and fund new dedicated hate crime units in communities across the country. It’s time for action, not more talk. Les Whittington is a regular columnist for The Hill Times. The Hill Times