Is it safe to be religious in Canada?
A Review of Canadian Religious-based Attitudinal and Hate Crime Data (June 1, 2023)
As you can imagine, safety is generally a wider concept than just physical well-being. Intolerance and racism can have lasting impacts on one's emotional well-being, sometimes to a greater extent. Accordingly, I will examine some data on religious intolerance, as well as on acts that rise to the level of hate crime.
First, let’s look at some statistics from a 2015 Bibby poll.6 It asked respondents whether they have ‘negative feelings about select religious groups.’ The results are codified according to whether the respondent identified as embracing religion, rejecting religion, or are somewhere in between. We would expect that many people who reject religion might have negative feelings about religious people, and numbers bear that out. The five most commonly identified religions being subjected to this negative feeling were: Evangelicals (51%), Muslims (48%). Mormons (48%), Sikhs (29%) and Roman Catholics (29%). Not overly surprising, except for where Evangelicals rate. It is somewhat counter-intuitive to the theory that religious dislike is primarily aimed at purportedly ‘foreigner’ religions.
Now, lets look at the figures for people who claim to embrace religion, regardless of faith. Of this group, 48% say they have negative feelings for Atheists, 45% for Muslims, 32% for Mormons, 31% for Sikhs, and 22% for Hindus. Each one of these is greater than the national average, regardless of religious inclination (albeit, not always by much). The first thing that grabs me is that so many religious people, the majority of which hold love as a major doctrine, have these negative feelings in the first place. I guess what we don’t know is whether such negative feelings are a factor of not liking people in the identified groups versus misgivings that they do not follow the ‘right’ religious path. Regardless, negativism is a destructive force in religion and these figures do not bode well.
We will now turn our attention to the much more egregious side of religious intolerance; being acts that rise to the level of hate crime. Let’s start with a high-level review of the general state of crime in Canada.
Statistics Canada reports1 total criminal incidents in 2021 at 5,375 per 100,000 people. This is composed of 890 violent crimes, 2,219 property crimes and 2,266 other crimes. Total crimes are only around half of what they were in 1991, but have seen only a modest decline of seven percentage points over the last decade. Violent crime increased around two percentage points.
Even though Canada is a very diverse country with multiculturalism accepted by most as a defining feature of the country, hate crimes do occur. I reviewed data available from the Government of Canada’s open government portal2 that collates total hate crimes over the period 2014 to 2021. As with all crime statistics, hate crime data can only capture those that were reported to a police force. The actual prevalence will always be greater than what the numbers bear out.
I will start with a review of hate crimes as catalogued and classified by Canada’s various police forces. Total hate crimes reported in 2014 came to 1,295. This rose to 3,360 in 2021; a 159% overall increase. The trend was a constant year-to-year increase, with a strange blip in 2017 during which there was a one-year spike. According to CBC3, this was largely driven by crimes reported in Ontario and Quebec aimed specifically at Muslim, Jewish and black people. No reasons for the spike were suggested.
Looking at the most recent year for which statistics are available (2021), total reported hate crimes came to 3,360, as noted above. These crimes were categorized as follows.
Race and Ethnicity (1,723)
Religion (884)
Sexual Orientation (423)
Language (35)
Disability (15)
Gender (62)
Age (12)
Other (75)
About 37% of the top figure was attributed to crimes against black people, while 27% relate to Asian ethnicity, and 11% relate to Arab ethnicity. Other ethnicities round out the total.
More closely related to the theme of this article is hate crimes due to religion. The trend for religious-related hate crime mirrors that for total hate crimes. From 2014 to 2021, these crimes increased 106%, and these numbers show the same peculiar spike in 2017. Another difference is a spike in the last year reported (2021) to 884. If this year were to be left off, religious hate crimes would only have increased 24% (over seven years).
The 2021 figures are comprised of the following victimized groups.
Jewish (487)
Catholic (155)
Muslim (144)
Other (89)
The high number for Roman Catholics should be considered in light of the prevalence of this religion in Canada. In 2019, 32.0% of poll respondents identified as Roman Catholic. In contrast, only 1.0% reported being Jewish and 3.7% as Muslim4. Using 2021 statistics5, this would total to around 11.5 million Roman Catholics, 1.4 million Muslims and 370,000 Jews. On a per 100,000 people basis, Roman Catholics come to 1.3 hate crimes, Muslims to 10.3 hate crimes and Jews to 131.6 hate crimes. This indicates that hate crimes against Jewish people are the most common by far.
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1. Statistics Canada, Police-reported crime statistics in Canada 2021,
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2022001/article/00013-eng.htm
2. Government of Canada, Open Government Portal,
https://search.open.canada.ca/en/od/?sort=score%20desc&page=1&search_text=
3. CBC, Hate crimes reached all-time high in 2017, Statistics Canada says,
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/statistics-canada-2017-hate-crime-numbers-1.4925399
4. Statistics Canada, Religiosity in Canada and its evolution from 1985 to 2019,
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2021001/article/00010-eng.htm
5. Statistics Canada, Census Profile, 2021 Census of Population,
https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?LANG=E&GENDERlist=1,2,3&STATISTIClist=1,4&DGUIDlist=2021A000011124&HEADERlist=0&SearchText=Canada
6. Bibby, Reginald W, Resilient Gods: being pro-religious, low religious or no religious in Canada,
UBC Press, 2017, page 124