Instances of police-reported hate crimes spiked in 2021

Pictured is some of the graffiti that was spray painted on the mosque's parking lot.

The number of police-reported hate crimes in Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo saw a drastic jump between 2020 and 2021 with a total of 77 hate crimes reported in 2021 compared to 54 the year before.

In comparison, there were 15 police-reported hate crimes in 2019.

This comes from a new report released by Statistics Canada that outlines the number and rate of hate crimes reported to police.

The figures show a spike across the country in the second year of the pandemic as people were targeted by race, religion and sexual orientation.

The agency said all provinces and territories experienced increases in hate crime reports in 2021 except in the Yukon, where they were unchanged.

“The number of hate crimes reported by police in Canada rose from 2,646 incidents in 2020 to 3,360 in 2021, a 27 per cent increase. This finding follows a 36 per cent increase in 2020. The number of police-reported hate crimes rose by 72 per cent from 2019 to 2021,” the report reads.

The new data shows Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo is the fifth highest census area when it comes to police-reported hate crimes, behind London with 87.

The highest census area was Toronto with 779, followed by Ottawa with 260 and Hamilton with 91 reported hate crimes.

According to the report, from 2020 to 2021, much of the rise in hate crimes targeting a race or ethnicity was the result of more reported hate crimes targeting the Arab and West Asian populations, East and Southeast Asian populations and the South Asian populations.

The report shows the number of reported hate crimes per 100,000 people is 12.6 in Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, compared to the Canadian rate of 8.8.

Locally, the number was 8.9 in 2020 and 2.5 in 2019.