On April 7, B’nai Brith Canada released its annual antisemitism audit, tracking another record-breaking amount of online hate speech, graffiti, threats, arson and gunshots targeting the country’s Jewish community. The organization revealed its highest-ever tally: 6,219 recorded incidents occurred in 2024.
But experts say that number doesn’t tell the whole story.
A new Statistics Canada report on hate crimes handled by Canadian police—they counted only 900 hate crimes against Jews out of 4,777 total—contains some disturbing findings. According to the data, 72 percent of all hate crimes didn’t get solved in 2023, and more than half of all alleged suspects are known to police as repeat offenders.
If there is any good news in the new report, Statistics Canada says that no one got hurt in the vast majority of hate crimes against Jews in recent years, or 90 percent. Many were crimes of mischief against property, including synagogues and other Jewish community buildings.
So what do the numbers mean, and what message should Canadian Jews be demanding of politicians, law enforcement and the courts? On today’s episode of The CJN Daily, we’re joined by two of Canada’s leading experts on police-reported hate crimes: from Statistics Canada, Warren Silver—himself a former Montreal police officer—and Mark Sandler, a criminal lawyer who chairs the Alliance of Canadians Combatting Antisemitism.
Transcript
Transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors.
Ellin Bessner: That’s what it sounded like last year on Parliament Hill when B’nai B’rith Canada released its annual audit of antisemitic incidents for the year 2023, in the wake of surging antisemitic hate against Canada’s Jews on our shores since October 7. The total was 5,791 cases, the highest in 40 years, double the year before. Today, their 2024 audit is coming out, but it won’t tell the whole story.
A new report from Statistics Canada on police-reported hate crime cases breaks down what law enforcement is seeing. Police showed they collected 900 legitimate hate crime reports against Jews that year. That’s still way up from the year before when it was 527 antisemitic hate crimes reported to police. For context, Canadian Jews are the target of 70% of all religiously motivated hate crimes for the year, more than any other minority group, more than the LGBTQ community, more than Black Canadians who came in at 784, more than Muslims, who faced 211.
And even though the report says police actually know who half the suspects are, who are committing these hate crimes, since data shows they’re repeat offenders in trouble with the law for other reasons already, police are not solving most of these hate crime cases—just over one in four. The rest, 72%, don’t get solved.
These new police-reported hate crime numbers also show that they’re just the tip of the iceberg because only one in five Canadian victims of hate crimes ever goes to the police in the first place.
I’m Ellin Bessner, and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Monday, April 7, 2025. Welcome to the CJN Daily, a podcast of the Canadian Jewish News and made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
And before we get into today’s story, I want to let you know about The CJN’s new, fully reimagined print magazine. It’s called Scribe Quarterly. It’s a beautiful, innovative work of Jewish journalism catering to the Canadian Jewish community. And it’s completely free. Just sign up today at thecjn.ca/subscribe.
While talking about hate crime data might seem a bit dry and technical for a podcast, I wanted to share it with you because facts matter, and Canada’s in the middle of an important election where antisemitism and community safety is one issue that Jewish voters might be weighing. So I felt it was important to dig deeper into what lies behind the hate crime numbers and what some experts think should be done about it.
On today’s show, you’ll hear from two of Canada’s leading hate crime experts. Later, we’ll bring in Mark Sandler. He’s a criminal lawyer and hate crime trainer. He’s got a prescription. But first, I’m joined by Warren Silver with Statistics Canada. He helps teach Canadian police forces how to gather hate crime data and how to recognize hate crimes when they see them. Silver himself used to be a police officer in Montreal before he joined the federal agency, and he supervises the annual hate crime report each year. And he joins me now from Victoria.
Warren Silver: Thank you.
Ellin Bessner: How many times a year does your agency report on hate crimes? And this one that just came out, where does that fit in?
Warren Silver: Okay, so we collect crime from police all year long. We collect on every different type of violation—so break and enters and assaults, mischiefs, absolutely everything—every month from every police service in Canada. And we try to look at the trends, we try to look at what’s driving things. So that report came out just this week, and it uses the same data but goes into much more depth.
Ellin Bessner: Now we get to see the flavour—who’s doing it, the victims, where, what kind, who’s getting hurt, who’s not, and whether they’re getting solved.
Warren Silver: I think the information is very valuable for the Canadian public. I think it’s valuable for members of minority communities, such as the Jewish community and others. I think it’s also valuable for government and policymakers, because the more we understand hate crime, the better we can address it.
Ellin Bessner: Because then they could tell the police, “Hey, obviously you have a problem, hire more hate crime investigators”, right? Or “Give us more resources to cover protests.”
Warren Silver: Yeah. So I can’t really comment on how police will use that data or how governments may use that data, but those are some examples of things that they might do.
Ellin Bessner: If they or Jewish agencies, like advocacy groups, you consult with those?
Warren Silver: Having this data more readily available quickly, I think will be able to let the different groups react and maybe plan and do other types of programming.
But I can say that by all accounts, we have seen a lot of increases in hate crime. And if we look at the last four years, just on their own, we’ve seen very sharp increases year over year. So in the last four years, we’ve seen more than doubling in the number of hate crimes, an increase of 145%, and that’s quite a large number. So it wouldn’t surprise me that that increase is continuing.
Now, I do want to mention one thing that I think is important for your listeners or readers to know is that hate crime is very underreported. Only about 22% of all hate crimes will come to the attention of police, and so will make it into the data. And because of that, sometimes the increases might be because there is more being done on the part of police, more being done on the part of advocacy groups, more being done with relationships between police and communities. So, for example, I don’t like to compare one police service to another because one police service might be working very hard with the Jewish community and the Black community and the Chinese community and different communities. They might have outreach officers, and those communities might in themselves be doing their own training and advocating for people to come forward. Because of that, that police service might see a huge increase in hate crime, whereas a police service which might not be doing anything, people will look at that and say, “Well, isn’t that great? The numbers are going down.” I believe that hate crimes really are going up, but it’s also important to note many of those hate crimes will not come to the attention of police.
Ellin Bessner: One in five. But your report said, “Hey, it’s a lot worse out there than these numbers seem to show.” And that means 78% or three quarters are not being reported to police, if we look at it the other way.
Warren Silver: So we do something called the General Social Survey on Victimization, the GSS, which is done every five years to ask people, “Were you a victim of a crime? And if you were a victim of a crime, did you report it to police? And if you didn’t report it to police, why did you not report it to police?”
Ellin Bessner: I’d like our audience to actually hear, because I was absolutely gobsmacked. I’m going to read it. According to this most recent survey, Canadians were the victims of over 223,000 criminal incidents they perceived as being motivated by hate in the year before. That’s a lot. That’s like a quarter of a million incidents. And yet you’re only capturing here on your police-reported survey, you know, 4,000 or so per year.
Warren Silver: Right. So many of those incidents, as we said, will not get reported by people to police. Also, these are victimization surveys. So this is what people feel they were victimized. And, you know, for it to be considered criminal, it has very specific criteria versus if it’s not criminal. It could still be, you know, harassment or discrimination, but it might be of a non-criminal nature.
Also, there are other issues in just comparing one set of data to the other. So what I would say is I think they’re very complementary. One tells us about what people are experiencing and what people view as their own victimization. The other is official police reports.
We know that there are several types of crimes—sexual assaults, for example, hate crimes—different types of crimes that are more likely to be underreported. To address that, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has done things to try to make changes to the definition of what we consider “founded,” for example, so that we take a victim-centred approach when people report to police. Also, we allow for third-party reporting. Somebody can report on behalf of somebody else; you can report on behalf of a friend or neighbour without that person having to come forward. And so all of these things might help in the percentage of people who are willing to come forward or the percentage of hate crimes that will come to the attention of the police.
Ellin Bessner: All right, of the ones that we talk about in your report, the statistic that really jumped out at me as well was that very few get solved.
Warren Silver: I can say that hate crime, by its very nature, might be more difficult to solve because it’s often a stranger attacking another stranger. Whereas, there’s a lot of other types of crimes where it might be like an assault between family members, or it could be people who are known to each other. Also, the majority of hate crimes that we have are non-violent in nature. And because of that, a lot of them are things like mischief. So mischief is the Criminal Code word we use to talk about graffiti, for example. So if somebody spray paints a swastika on a stop sign, unless somebody actually sees them doing it, it might be very hard for police to solve.
Ellin Bessner: But it does show that there’s a lot more out there. And unless you have excellent cameras, excellent guards, excellent witnesses, only one in four is going to get solved.
Warren Silver: Well, a lot of the hate crimes we have, we don’t actually have a suspect or a charged person involved in it. So it is hard.
Ellin Bessner: As you said, 90% there was no physical force, no injury, no weapons against Jews. So that’s some good news, I guess, right? That nobody’s getting murdered. A few people are getting sent to the hospital, but mostly it’s no physical injury. How do you see that? Can you find any hope in this?
Warren Silver: It’s not really my position that I can say, like, there’s good news or bad news. That’s not something that we do. What I can do is just kind of present the data. I can try to contextualize it. I can say, compared to a lot of other crimes, you know, the majority of hate crime is non-violent in nature. It is different from one type of hate crime to another. So those targeting people for sexual orientation tend to be more violent than those targeting people for religion, for example.
Ellin Bessner: Can you go over who’s actually committing hate crimes in Canada? Because, you know where they’re from, you know their age, you even know that they’ve done it maybe up to six times. The same people!
Warren Silver: Yes. So we know that the median age of persons accused of hate crime targeting the Jewish population was 30. We know that hate crimes in general, people who are committing them tend to be younger than crimes in general. But, you know, the median age for violent hate crimes was 31 years of age. And the median age of victims among those targeted in the Jewish population was 42.
Ellin Bessner: Right. So they’re younger men going after a little bit older people. Almost more than half have done it before and then do it again. What are we not understanding here?
Warren Silver: About half of those accused in an incident involving a hate crime had a prior contact with police and more than half will have police contact afterwards.
Ellin Bessner: It’s the same bad actors are doing it again and again. And this, it shows up in your study.
Back to the beginning. And to end our conversation, what does your report say about the actual link between what’s going on in the Middle East and what we see playing out?
Warren Silver: When you mention what’s happening, you know, the anti-Jewish incidents, if you look at our data, the anti-Jewish incidents have always been very high, but we’re still seeing a lot of increases. And, you know, we definitely believe that there is a link to issues that are happening in the Middle East.
Ellin Bessner: Thank you so much for being on The CJN Daily, Warren.
Warren Silver: Okay, thank you.
Ellin Bessner: While Silver couldn’t take political positions on what his report says, Mark Sandler can. Sandler is a former criminal lawyer and human rights advocate in Toronto who now trains police forces and politicians about hate crimes and modern antisemitism and how to enforce the laws that already exist on the books. Sandler’s the founder of the Alliance of Canadians Combating Antisemitism. He’s seen the new Statistics Canada report and he joins me now. Welcome back to The CJN Daily, Mark.
Mark Sandler: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Ellin Bessner: Do you want to give me sort of your general take on what your top takeaway was?
Mark Sandler: Sure. Well, the top takeaway is not a surprising one, and that is that the antisemitic incidents always have topped the charts for a number of years. And we see within the category of hate crimes based upon religious grounds, that Jews unfortunately outstrip every other group by a long shot. As you’ve said, these constitute reported hate crimes. There is also some analysis that has been done about self-reporting, in other words, people who describe that they have been the victims of hate crimes, though they didn’t report it.
We know that the numbers are not only at tsunami-like levels, to use a description that has been used in our community, but we know that they understate in two different ways, the levels of antisemitic hate crimes. One way is underreporting. The second way is that they don’t make a list of antisemitic hate crimes, if the police do not characterize them as such in the police work. And since I am of the view that the police are underutilizing the hate speech sections of the Criminal Code to recognize, identify, investigate, and charge those who are guilty of antisemitic hate speech, I think the number is even more understated for that reason.
Ellin Bessner: What stands out is that they solve only one in four of them. Only a quarter of them are cleared or closed. So even if you report it, you’re not going to get justice. And why is it so hard, in your opinion, for police to solve these cases? What are the challenges?
Mark Sandler: Well, first, I will say in fairness to the police, the majority of hate crimes that are directed against—and we’ll just talk about the Jewish community for now—tend to be vandalism-like activities. So this ranges from graffiti on buildings to breaking windows or otherwise vandalizing homes or institutions or the like. Or it involves the use of antisemitic graffiti on schools, on school campuses, and the like. And I want to come back to that in a minute because if you’ll see the statistics, an unusual number of these incidents do take place on campuses or in school environments. But my point here is that it is more difficult, forensically, to identify a perpetrator in a case that involves stranger-on-stranger vandalism. Certainly, if you break a window by throwing a rock through it, unless there’s a camera on scene, it is difficult to identify the perpetrator. So about 50%, or a little more than 50%, of antisemitic incidents involve these unknown perpetrators who are engaged in acts of vandalism. And those are more difficult to successfully clear.
Ellin Bessner: We have cameras at all the synagogues now. Police are now releasing photos of the people driving up in the middle of the night with their blowtorches or whatever. So why can’t they find them?
Mark Sandler: So you’ll see they divide vandalism into two different categories. One is conventional mischief that can be directed against the Jewish home, a place of business, and so on, where there aren’t necessarily cameras in place, and the vandalism that’s directed against places of worship, community centres, senior citizens’ homes, and so on, where the cameras tend to be available and used. And you’ll see that the latter category is smaller than the category of the overall vandalism. So in many of these instances, Ellin, there is not camera evidence to support the identity of the perpetrator. But for me, that’s not the complete answer because antisemitic hate speech activity involves about 50%. I’m being very rough in the numbers, 50% of these kinds of vandalism incidents, but the balance is a full range of kinds of offences.
And I think we have to do a deeper dive to see why is it that these hate crime offences have such poor clearance rates. And I would hope that some police services would already be doing this, but I don’t know that that’s the case. I would want police services where antisemitic hate crimes are taking place in large numbers to do a deep dive audit to say “What are the bases upon which we were unable to clear these cases?” So that we create a model strategy going forward that identifies deficiencies either in law enforcement or deficiencies in how people report these offences, because we can work with the community, as we already are, in providing them tools for how to best preserve evidence in these cases and how to communicate that evidence in an effective way to the police.
Ellin Bessner: And there’s also a staffing issue too, which may be that they don’t have the personnel hours to sit there for every small little thing because they’ve got murders to deal with, right? And terrorism. No?
Mark Sandler: Well, in Toronto, for example, they’ve greatly expanded the number of hate crime officers that are engaged. But there also has to be a mindset that says vandalism, for example, directed against Jewish institutions or individuals cannot be simply treated as the same as a kid who’s playing ball and throws a ball through a window because he’s upset that the owner has shooed him away. This has ripple effects on the community. It makes the community feel scared, justifiably. It undermines their security. And if people get away with hate crimes, then it emboldens them to do more. And you see that, by the way, in the recidivism numbers.
Ellin Bessner: Okay, I was just going to say the perfect entryway to my, my next really big finding.
Mark Sandler: We’re talking about recidivism generally doesn’t necessarily have to be involved that they were involved in a prior hate-motivated crime or afterwards in a hate-motivated crime. But the recidivism rates tell us a few things. The first is that it tells us how we’re dealing with the hate crimes is not effective in deterring continuing hate crime behavior. Those levels really did surprise me. The second is it tells us that more work has to be done by law enforcement to identify hatemongers. You know, I’ve argued that police are underutilizing the criminal law measures they have in place to address hate speech at protests and demonstrations that cross the line from simply criticism of Israel to demonizing all Zionists without distinction and promoting and supporting terrorist activity. And the reason why hate speech is against the law in Canada was articulately stated by our former Chief Justice in the Keegstra decision to say that it has two effects: one is that it marginalizes Jews and other vulnerable groups because they don’t feel safe and they don’t feel like they can fully participate in our democratic system.
But secondly, it emboldens others to commit more serious crimes. In other words, this hate speech is done for a purpose. It’s designed to get people to do the kinds of antisemitic crimes that we’re seeing documented in our cities. Number two, is, that we’ve got to look more seriously at whether or not the judges are imposing true deterrent sentences in cases involving hate crimes. Leave aside the fact that a number of these cases are not solved. Look at the ones that are solved. Remember that our Court of Appeal has said unequivocally, and our Criminal Code says unequivocally, that hate crimes should be treated more seriously and recognized as heinous crimes that are deserving of deterrent, denunciatory sentences. I don’t see a lot of evidence of deterrent, denunciatory sentences in a number of these cases.
Ellin Bessner: And there’s a whole other issue about bail reform, which is a political issue now during the election campaign, which the Liberals brought in, sort of a more liberal, and I’m going to use a small
l”. “Catch and release” is what Conservatives call it, for people who are put in prison and they’re out doing it again. These figures would seem to give ammunition to people who say: we know that the same guys are doing it, and it’s guys. It’s all almost always young men, age 30, foreign-born or new Canadian citizens in precarious or economic problems getting settled in the country. If the police know who’s doing it, they have criminal records. How do these people continue doing this?
Mark Sandler: The tools are available in the Criminal Code to impose appropriate deterrent sentences when a crime has been motivated by hatred–deterrent sentences, true denunciatory sentences, to send some messages. And I’m not convinced that the right messages are being sent to hate mongers in this community because I’m not convinced that they’re being prosecuted to the full extent of the law for things that they are doing. And second of all, I’m not convinced that the sentences imposed, and I’m only speaking generally, there are exceptions to this, of course, but that the sentences imposed adequately reflect the nature of the crimes that are being committed.
Ellin Bessner: Thank you for being on The CJN Daily.
And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like for this episode of The CJN Daily, made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
To read the research we’ve been discussing in today’s show, please go to the link in the show notes. The Daily is produced by Zachary Judah Kauffman and Andrea Varsany. Executive producer is Michael Fraiman, editorial director is Marc Weisblott. And our music is by Dov Beck Levine. Thanks for listening.
Show Notes
Related links
- Read Statistics Canada’s new report on police-reported hate crimes for 2023 and early 2024.
- Why antisemitic hate crimes top the police charts in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, while Jews in British Columbia report being victims of one or more antisemitic incidents.
- B’nai Brith’s annual audit of antisemitic incidents has surprisingly high numbers. How can this be? On The CJN Daily from 2023.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Judah Kauffman (senior producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Marc Weisblott (editorial director).
- Music: Dov Beck-Levine
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