Excerpt:
The head of a national Muslim group based in Ottawa says he’s not surprised to learn the number of hate crimes reported to police in Ontario and Quebec jumped dramatically last year.
According to Statistics Canada, there was a 47 per cent jump in incidents — mostly hate-related property crimes such as graffiti and other vandalism — reported to police across Canada in 2017 compared to the previous year.
The sharp rise follows “steady but relatively small increases” since 2014, Statistics Canada noted Thursday.
By far the greatest increase in police-reported hate crimes in 2017 occurred in Ontario, where the number of incidents shot from 612 in 2016 to 1,023 last year, a leap of 67 per cent.