Trigger warning: This story includes mentions of racist violence.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was pelted with gravel after boarding a campaign bus in London, Ont., earlier this week, he was getting a taste of the vitriol many racialized, religious, and LGBTQ Canadians live with on a daily basis.

Hate-based attacks, be they verbal or physical, are routine in this country, ranging from racial slurs to the Quebec City mosque massacre of 2017, where white supremacist Alexandre Bissonnette murdered six Muslims during a prayer service with a military-style assault rifle.

“There is no clearer evidence of the existential threat presented by the dangers of online hate to the Canadian Muslim community and Canadians in general,” says a new election guide by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) of the massacre.

Released hours before the election’s English language debate, the guide calls for political parties to consider everything from major reforms to the Canada Border Services Agency to a fund dedicated to victims of hate-based violence. Hate-motivated slurs and attacks on racialized, LGBTQ, religious, and disabled Canadians are on a sharp rise. 

According to Statistics Canada data from 2020, the number of hate crimes reported to police jumped by 37 percent during the first year of the COVID-19 to 2,669 incidents, from 1,951 incidents in 2019. Hate crimes related to a victim’s race or ethnicity went up by 80 percent, representing the majority of all reported incidents.

“We’re at this peak point in the election — and we’re also at this peak point when it comes to the rise of hate crimes in Canada,” says Fatema Abdalla, communications coordinator at NCCM, in an interview with Future of Good. Yet Les Scheininger, president of the Canadian Jewish Community Forum, says discussions about hatred are absent from the election. “It has not had any role in the campaign,” he says. “The curious thing is, it’s been very, very quiet. There’s been very little in the media. At the same time, we’ve got a situation where politicians are being attacked.”

The Liberals, Conservatives, NDP, and Greens all promise in their campaign platforms to take hate seriously, with policies ranging from better equipping police forces with anti-hate units (the NDP) to doubling funding for the Security Infrastructure Program to protect religious buildings from racist attacks (the Conservatives). Some of their policy ideas came out of discussions with the NCCM, Abdalla says, such as the NDP’s promised national action plan to dismantle far-right extremist organizations and white supremacists.

But non-profits and charities like NCCM who address hatred say Canada’s political parties need to start a much more comprehensive — and frank — discussion about hatred in this country to tackle it effectively. They also need to use tools that are already available in Canada’s legal and educational systems to make this country safer for everyone, they say.

Rising hatred in Canada

The long history of racism and hatred in this country, combined with conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and an unwillingness of Canadian law enforcement to adequately charge suspects in hate crime cases, are all fuelling a political climate where racist attacks are a fact of life for many Canadians..

When broken down by race and ethnicity, East Asian and Southeast Asian Canadians faced the largest jump in hate-related crimes (a 301 percent increase over 2019), followed by Indigenous peoples (152 percent), Black Canadians (92 percent), and South Asian Canadians (47 percent). “In 2020, police reported the highest number of hate crimes targeting each of these populations since comparable data became available,” read a report from Statistics Canada on the data. Scheininger says anti-Semitism is also on the rise in Canada, too: Statistics Canada found that Jewish Canadians comprised the largest number of hate crime victims attacked on the basis of their religion. 

However, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network says the vast majority of people who face hate crimes never report them to authorities. The actual numbers are probably much higher. In 2019 alone, Statistics Canada estimated there were 233,000 hate crimes in Canada, according to an analysis by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. “This means that, in Canada, you’re more likely to be the victim of a hate crime than be injured in a motor vehicle accident,” the organization wrote.

The lack of reporting to police is possibly because of the rate at which police forces in Canada are accused of racist or hateful behaviour. “There is racial, ethnic, religious, and misogynous harassment within our agencies and institutions,” wrote Scheininger on the Canadian Jewish Community Forum’s website in August. “Presently, it would appear that things are getting worse and not better.”

Racist fears about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic are part of the reason for this uptick. Fight COVID Racism, an initiative tracking hatred during the pandemic, has logged more than 1,119 separate incidents across Canada as of Sept. 9. They range from an Asian international student being told to get off a Halifax bus because of the racist association between Asian people and COVID-19, to a racist beating of a 15-year-old Asian boy behind a high school in Saskatoon. “Federal, provincial and municipal governments and all political parties must recognize anti-Asian racism as a distinct area of discrimination that requires immediate action,” a report by the Chinese Canadian National Council – Social Justice says.

What is to be done?

Canada’s police and courts are already well within their power to charge suspects accused of perpetuating hate-related crimes, yet some advocates, such as Scheininger, say this doesn’t happen often enough. “The existing laws work but are effective only if they would be used!” he wrote. “They should be used now!” The Conservatives and Liberals are promising to toughen anti-hate laws in Canada if elected, including laws to criminalize hate speech specifically. Meanwhile, the NDP promised to create a national working group on combating online hatred.

The NCCM’s is looking for political parties to toughen up their stances on white supremacist organizations, including creating a list of entities who finance, facilitate, or participate in violent activities. They also want the Canadian government to investigate why national security agencies like the RCMP, CSIS, and CSE do not prioritize the study of white supremacist groups — and the degree to which they’ve been infiltrated by white supremacists themselves. When it comes to helping victims, the NCCM are looking for parties to consider a National Support Fund for Survivors of Hate-Motivated Crimes, a program that could cover loss of earnings, medical expenses, and other costs as a result of an attack.

The NCCM also wants an Office of the Special Envoy on Islamophobia, a body within the Canadian government responsible for combating hatred against Muslims specifically. NCCM says Canadian political parties need to put their money where their mouth is on hatred. “We have heard government and all party leaders say clearly and decisively that we must stand against Islamophobia,” the NCCM wrote in a tweet. “That must mean dedicated resourcing to specifically combat Islamophobia.”

In its platform, the NCCM also calls on the Canada Revenue Agency to suspend its Review and Analysis Division (RAD), a section of the agency responsible for monitoring the use of charities resources for extremism, and “enhance transparency” between the CRA’s Charities Directorate and charities undergoing audit for alleged terrorism financing. Critics have repeatedly said that RAD disproportionately targets Muslim charities.

Young Canadians of Asian descent told the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada over the summer of 2020 that they want to see better education around Asia and Canadians of Asian ancestry in school, as well as better representation in Canadian TV shows and news media. As one 21-year-old Asian Canadian told the Foundation, Canadian education on non-white history is already scant. “To be completely honest, I think Asian Canadian history is at the very, very end of that list,” they said. “So, in that sense, I would really like to see more education, for example, Japanese internment in Canada, I would love to see more than one page of that in a textbook.”

Collecting better disaggregated data on the experiences of Canadians who face hatred is also crucial, according to a report from the Mosaic Institute, a research non-profit focused on prejudice in Canada, released in January 2021. “Far too often, groups that know they face racism or significant discrimination are required to provide ‘proof’ to receive consideration from the government or lawmakers,” its report reads. “Since there is a lack of disaggregated data, there is often no ‘official’ proof, and communities are faced with the further burden of collecting the data themselves.” The Liberal government’s last budget featured a promise to better fund disaggregated data collection by Statistics Canada but, so far, that promise hasn’t been prominent on the campaign trail.

In fact, hatred has, by and large, been displaced from the campaign trail in favour of housing affordability, Canada’s rising cost of living, child-care policy, healthcare, and teeth-gnashing over the Liberals’ decision to call the election in the first place.

The elephant in the room

With 11 days to go in the election campaign, time is running out for party leaders to sell their visions of a better, hate-free Canada to voters. The last English language debate was on Sept. 9. After that, candidates will be on the home stretch, pounding the pavement in swing ridings and shoring up any major weaknesses in the partisan chess game that is Canada’s electoral process.

Abdulla says she’s hopeful that Bill 21 — a Quebec law prohibiting government employees, teachers, and doctors from wearing overt religious symbols such as hijabs or turbans — gets a mention in the English language debate, along with banning white supremacist groups. 

Political conversations on hate are important to a great many Canadians, but ending hatred in this country is an uphill battle on a very steep gradient. Take Bill 21. The Quebec law represents one of the most open acts of legal discrimination against Muslims, Sikhs, and Orthodox Jews in Canada. It also happens to be popular among 41 percent of Canadians surveyed by Angus Reid in 2019 (including just over a quarter who said they “strongly favoured” the ban). Two-thirds of Quebecers support it, too.

Abdulla got her wish. The first question of the English language debate to Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet was about Bill 21: how could he help Canadians outside of Quebec understand why his party supports such a discriminatory law? 

Blanchet didn’t answer the question. 

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