Canadian police saw a marked increase in the number of hate crimes they investigated in 2009, more than half of which were motivated by race or ethnicity.
The 2009 data released by Statistics Canada on Tuesday also showed the number of police-reported hate crimes to be on the rise for the second consecutive year.
The statistics agency said the 1,473 hate crimes reported to police in 2009 represented a 42 per cent increase over the 1,036 hate crimes reported the year before.
Because not all victims come forward to police, StatsCan said the 2009 police-reported total "likely undercuts" the true number of hate crimes that occurred across the country that year.
Statistics Canada said 54 per cent of the hate crimes reported to police in 2009 were motivated by race or ethnicity, which was more than cases in which victims were targeted because of their religion (29 per cent) or sexual orientation (13 per cent).
Four in 10 police-reported hate crimes were violent in nature, while 54 per cent involved mischief offences, such as graffiti or vandalism.
The data from two years ago also showed an increase in the number of police-reported hate crimes against all racial groups. Thirty-seven per cent of these racially or ethnically motivated incidents involved black victims, while the number of hate crimes against Arab or West Asian victims were up more than 60 per cent from the previous year.
In terms of hate crimes targeting particular religious groups in 2009, seven in 10 were committed against people of the Jewish faith, while Muslim (9.1 per cent) and Catholic (8.3 per cent) victims were targeted in a smaller number of cases.
Three urban areas in Ontario (Ottawa, Toronto and Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo) and one in Quebec (Montreal) accounted for most of the increase in police-reported hate crime.
StatsCan said the Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo area had the highest rate of police-reported hate crimes in Canada, with just under 18 incidents for every 100,000 people in the region. The same data showed lower rates in Ottawa (14.5), Toronto (6.9) and Montreal (2.6).
With files from The Canadian Press
