Statistics Canada Article on Police-Reported Hate Crimes

Statistics Canada has published a new article on Police-reported hate crimes, 2015.

Key topics include motivations for hate crime (e.g. race/ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation), types of offences, geographical comparisons and accused/victim characteristics. The article uses data from the Incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey which gathers data from police records:

"Overall, police reported 469 Criminal Code incidents in 2015 that were motivated by hatred of a religion, 40 more incidents than the previous year. These accounted for 35% of hate-motivated crimes reported in 2015."

"Police-reported hate crimes targeting the Muslim population increased from 99 incidents in 2014 to 159 incidents in 2015, an increase of 61%. At the same time, the number of police-reported crimes targeting the Jewish population declined from 213 in 2014 to 178 in 2015. Hate crimes targeting the Jewish population accounted for 13% of all hate crimes, followed closely by hate crimes targeting the Muslim population (12%)."

"Approximately 10% of the population in Canada were part of a non-Christian religion in 2016. According to recent projections by Statistics Canada, the number of people in Canada with a non-Christian religion could almost double by 2036. Within this group, the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh faiths would see the number of their followers grow more quickly, although still representing a small portion of the population overall. In 2015, a number of police services increased outreach to ethnic groups, including Muslim communities. In addition, the National Council of Canadian Muslims made efforts to encourage reporting of hate crimes to police."