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The number of hate crimes reported by the police reached an all-time high in 2017, mainly due to incidents targeting Muslim, Jewish and Black people, according to Statistics Canada data released on Thursday.
The federal agency said that hate crimes had steadily increased since 2014, but had risen to about 47% in 2017, the last year for which data were collected. In total, Canadian police forces reported 2,073 hate crimes – the highest number since 2009, when data was available.
The increases are largely attributable to incidents in Ontario and Quebec, according to Statistics Canada.
In the worst incident in the country, six Muslim men were shot dead and others seriously injured during the attack on a mosque in Quebec City in January 2017. This spring, Alexandre Bissonnette, 28 , pleaded guilty but did not Islamophobe and instead "carried away by fear and a horrible form of despair".
But the police is also facing an increase in the number of minor incidents.
The hate crime unit of the Toronto police said it had investigated 186 incidents – mostly vandalism and graffiti – in 2017. In the nearby city of Hamilton, police reported an increase of 18% of the number of hate incidents and prejudices.
Alberta and British Columbia also reported an increase in the number of incidents.
The Statistics Canada report indicates that the increase may be partly due to the increase in the number of people reporting hate incidents, but it also warns that many of them do not are not reported.
Hate crimes represent 0.1% of the more than 1.9 million non-traffic crimes reported by Canadian police in 2017.
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