Don’t let 2018 be known for its summer of hate
The ugly face of hatred — eyes bulging, cheeks burning red, mouth contorted in fury — has been showing itself far too often in Canada as of late.
Consider the evidence of merely the past few weeks. And bear with us through the painfully lengthy list of outrages. Collectively they show the peculiar and disturbing distemper of our times.
This past Tuesday, the RCMP charged a 32-year-old woman from Manitoba and another, aged 25, from Saskatchewan with uttering threats and inciting hatred after horrible social media posts casually discussed shooting Indigenous people.
In late July, Toronto police charged a middle-aged white man with assault and threatening death after a visibly Muslim family was accosted at the city ferry docks by someone who screamed he was going to “kill” them.
Four hours before that incident, a 17-year-old Muslim woman was walking to a bus stop in Halifax when a white man began insulting her, her faith and telling her to go back where she came from.
Not long after, Peel Regional Police charged a 35-yearold woman with assault with a weapon for allegedly trying to rip the hijab off the head of an 18-year-old Muslim woman while flicking a lighter at her.
Also in July, Hamilton police charged a 47-year-old Stoney Creek man with threatening death after a nasty encounter in a Walmart parking lot with another man, a Canadian citizen who apparently came from India.
It hardly needs saying that these were vile, vicious incidents. Rude from the perspective of good manners, cruelly painful from the perspective of the victims, unprovoked based on the available facts, they are an affront to cherished Canadian values of tolerance and inclusion.
It will, of course, be up to a court to determine whether each case violated vital laws. It hardly takes a judge to say such incidents rend the nation’s social fabric which has been so carefully woven together from different strands of race, ethnicity and religion as well as sexual and gender identity.
Whether or not such incidents of hateful abuse are being reported more often today, thanks in part to people recording them on cellphones, they appear to be on the rise.
According to Statistics Canada, there were 1,409 criminal incidents motivated by hatred in Canada in 2016, up three per cent from the year before. The agency also says two-thirds of individuals who said they were victims of hate crimes never reported it to police.
Perhaps in a country of more than 35 million people, a country that is one of the world’s most diverse, these figures are not overwhelming. Hate crimes represented less than 0.1 per cent of the 1.8 million crimes reported by police services.
And it is also true that, compared with many if not most other countries with diverse populations, Canadians work hard at getting along with each other — and have exceptional success doing it.
Yet the recent spate of hateful, possibly criminal, outbursts and attempts at violence, is deeply worrisome.
Many of the incidents that targeted Muslims followed in close proximity the mass shooting in Toronto last month, which left two people dead and 12 wounded and was committed by a gunman who was Muslim.
Experts speculate other hate crimes may be the irrational response of those threatened by the increasing diversity of Canada’s population.
Whatever its root causes, hate is as obscene as any other four-letter word.
We must all stand on guard against it. And we must learn to look beyond the differences of others — the tint of their skin or the covering on their head — to see the basic humanity we all share.