Hate crimes on the decline. Liberals pretending otherwise.
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Summary
Hate crimes in Canada are on the decline, according to Statistics Canada, but a new report from the Justice and Human Rights Committee argues that online hate is on the rise. Andrew Lutton explains why this is not the case.
Transcript
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When Justin Trudeau and the Liberals were elected, they promised evidence-based policy,
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decision-making, and legislation rooted in evidence, not in ideology. I think most people
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just kind of shrugged and laughed when he said it, not really believing it. But
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what about when the evidence says the opposite of what the Liberals are trying to do? That's
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certainly the case when it comes to combating hate speech and hate crimes. I've done numerous
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videos on it. This report from the Parliamentary Justice and Human Rights Committee that calls on
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legislating into human rights law regulation of online speech. But there's another dimension to
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this. The very premise of that committee's study, the premise of this report, was that hate crimes
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are on the rise. Let me read literally the first sentence of the description of this report.
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With the rise of hate crimes reported to the police and the use of online platforms to promote hate
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hatred, several groups have requested that this issue be studied by Parliament. Right there,
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the very first words of the very first sentence, with the rise of hate crimes. Except that isn't what
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the numbers are suggesting. And this isn't just some fringe study that says this. We're talking about
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data from Statistics Canada. Despite the government ramp up in the fight against so-called hate, which it
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doesn't define in any of its reports or materials, hate crimes are actually on the decline. The number
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of police reported hate crimes decreased in 2018 by 13%, which is not an insignificant sum, going down from
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2073 in 2017, which is a higher than normal year, to 1798 in 2018. Hate crimes against Muslims, according to the
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report, were down the most with more moderate declines in hate crimes against other groups. And continuously,
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the largest victimized group by hate crimes is the Jewish community. Anti-Semitic hate is once again the
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most common type of hatred we see. Why these numbers are important is not to say that hate and hate crimes
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don't exist in Canada. It's to say that anyone talking about them being on the rise or them being a clear and present
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danger. Those terms were used by witnesses standing before the Justice and Human Rights Committee's online hate
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study are not in alignment with what the facts say. What's worse is that we've allowed groups and political advocacy
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organizations and commentators and pundits and yes, the Trudeau liberals to weaponize the fear of hate. To present this
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image that Canada is a much more hateful and disharmonious place than it actually is and to use this as a way to
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wedge in legislation that otherwise no one would go for. Look at the anti-Islamophobia motion M103. That
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motion was put in because the government said, oh no, but hate crimes against Muslims are on the rise. And
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that's why a lot of people were too terrified of criticizing it because they didn't want to be seen as
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Islamophobic. And now we have a Justice Committee report where the premise is inherently disproven by the
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government's own numbers. Yet still I haven't heard a peep from anyone in the government about it. So when
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the numbers are saying that hate crimes are down and the legislation is saying that hate crimes are up, you
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have to question where the agenda is. And unfortunately there is a hate industry in Canada, across the West,
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organizations that make considerable sums of money by presenting this narrative. And one of the suggestions that
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was actually put to the Justice Committee was that third party groups like Muslim groups or gay groups or groups
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representing minority interests would become the entities to which hate crimes would be reported rather than police.
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So these groups are ultimately seeking a budget and a mandate to do things that should be the work of law enforcement.
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And this was actually one of the concerns that I had with the Justice Committee's findings.
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They embraced that suggestion in one of the recommendations saying that people often feel more comfortable
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reporting hate incidents and hate crimes directly to civil society organizations. So police forces should
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work collaboratively alongside these so-called civil society organizations in data collection and more importantly
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resources need to be allocated to these groups, to these organizations.
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So what we have now is these groups and special interest groups specifically that stand to benefit
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from the government presenting this narrative that hate is on the rise when we should be as a country
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very grateful that it's on the decline. Do we have more work to do as a society? Yes, but that's not coming
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about through any of the recommendations that big government is proposing. For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.