Statistics Canada Article on Hate Crime in Canada, 2020

The Statistics Canada publication Juristat has publish an article on Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2020.

In 2020 police reported 2,669 hate crimes in Canada, up 37% from 2019. 

This was the largest number of police-reported hate crimes since comparable data became available in 2009. 

In 2020, police-reported hate crimes targeting race or ethnicity almost doubled (+80%) compared with a year earlier, accounting for the vast majority of the national increase in hate crimes. 

Other crimes reported to police (excluding traffic offences) decreased by 10% from 2019 to 2020.

Among the highlights:

• Much of this increase was a result of more police-reported hate crimes targeting the Black population (+318 incidents), East or Southeast Asian population (+202 incidents), the Indigenous population (+44 incidents) and the South Asian population (+38 incidents).
• Police reported fewer hate crimes targeting religion for the third consecutive year, after peaking in 2017. Police-reported hate crimes targeting religion declined 16% from 613 incidents in 2019 to 515 incidents in 2020. This decrease was primarily due to fewer hate crimes targeting the Muslim population, which declined from 182 to 82 incidents in 2020 (-55%). Hate crimes against the Jewish population rose slightly in 2020, from 306 to 321 incidents (+5%).
• Hate crimes targeting the Black and Jewish populations remained the most common types of hate crimes reported by police, representing 26% and 13% of all hate crimes, respectively. 
• In 2020, the largest increases in the number of hate crimes were reported in Ontario (+316 incidents), British Columbia (+198 incidents), Quebec (+86 incidents), and Alberta (+84 incidents). When accounting for population size among the provinces, rates of hate crimes per 100,000 population increased the most in Nova Scotia (+70%), British Columbia (+60%), Saskatchewan (+60%), Alberta (+39%) and Ontario (+35%).