Canadians must unite against growing bigotry
May marks both Asian Heritage Month and Canadian Jewish Heritage Month. It is the perfect time to celebrate the contributions our two communities bring to Canada and the blessings of a country that, more than all others, accepts and embraces differences and diversity.
However, all is not perfect. Here too, bigotry, discrimination and hate are growing.
The pandemic has made Asian-Canadians even more susceptible to hate incidents. According to a recent study, reports of racist incidents in Canada increased by 47 per cent in 2021 compared to 2020. Similarly, Statistics Canada's most recent report, released in March 2022 and tracking incidents between 2019 and 2020, revealed the number of police-reported crimes motivated by hatred of a race or ethnicity increased an alarming 80 per cent — from 884 to 1,594. Canadians of East or Southeast Asian heritage were the targets of an increase of 202 incidents and the South Asian population of 38 incidents.
The same Statistics Canada data show Canada's Jewish community, just one per cent of the Canadian population, was the target of 62 per cent of all hate crime targeting religious minorities. While there was a 16-per-cent decline in hate crime targeting religious groups overall, hate crime targeting Jewish-Canadians increased by five per cent. Clearly, something must be done. Here are some policy suggestions we offer for consideration by our governments:
First, education. It is central to solving the problem. No one is born hating — haters are taught. Canadian schools must teach not just tolerance, but respect and the benefits of embracing diversity. We need to equip Canada's youth with the tools to understand how culture and identity inform experience while rejecting harmful tropes, conspiracies, and denigrating one another.
But education is not only for children. It applies to all, now and in the future. That is why the Day of Action against anti-Asian Racism, recognized by cities across Canada, and Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) are important.
Those days — and others like them — remind us to reflect on the impact that bigotry can have on individuals, communities and our entire country.
Another element in the fight against hate is the internet. While it offers us a world of positive possibilities, the internet has also contributed to a world of hate.
We thus call on the federal government for legislation to combat online hate which would, among other things, create an independent regulatory regime, compel social media companies to serve as first responders, and increase the transparency of social media companies' internal policies, procedures, and guidelines — including how artificial intelligence and algorithms are programmed.
Hate symbols can have a powerful impact on vulnerable groups. Nazi flags or brandishing white supremacist emblems at the truckers' convoy on Parliament Hill was shocking. We call on Parliamentarians to adopt MP Peter Julian's Bill C-229: An Act to amend the Criminal Code (banning symbols of hate).
Regarding real-life hate crimes, we should build on the important review of hate crime policies, practices and challenges following the example of that conducted by the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police.
While we recognize that a number of municipal police departments in B.C. and the RCMP have established hate crime units that do very important work with limited resources, we urge police units across the country to emulate the Ontario example and to conduct a review of existing policies and establish dedicated hate crime units whose members are trained in identifying, recording, and investigating hate crimes to meet the needs of victims and successfully prosecute perpetrators of hate.