Hate Crime Statistics Canada [2026]

Police-reported hate crime in Canada reached 4,882 incidents in 2024, a rate of 11.9 per 100,000 population and a 169% increase from 2018, according to Statistics Canada 2026. The data covers police-reported incidents only; self-reported surveys suggest the true scale is far larger. This page draws on the crime statistics pillar to compile national hate crime data across motivation type, province, victim group, and the 2020–2024 trend.

What counts as a hate crime in Canada

A hate crime in Canada is any criminal offence motivated in whole or in part by bias, prejudice or hate based on a protected characteristic. Examples include assault, mischief, uttering threats, and wilful promotion of hatred. Protected characteristics include race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity or expression, per the Department of Justice Canada 2023.

Hateful motivation does not create a new category of crime. Instead, it triggers enhanced sentencing under Criminal Code s. 718.2(a)(i), meaning almost any offence can attract a heavier sentence when hate-motivation is proven. Three sections of the Criminal Code create hate-specific offences with their own maximum penalties:

• Section 318(1): advocating or promoting genocide carries up to five years imprisonment on indictment. The same section defines an “identifiable group” as any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or disability, per Criminal Code s. 318.
• Section 319(1): public incitement of hatred likely to lead to a breach of the peace carries up to two years imprisonment on indictment, per Criminal Code s. 319.
• Section 319(2): wilful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group in statements other than private conversation carries up to two years on indictment. Proceedings under s. 319(2) require the consent of the Attorney General.
• Section 430(4.1): mischief targeting religious property, educational institutions, or community facilities with hate motivation carries up to ten years imprisonment on indictment, per Criminal Code s. 430(4.1).

The RCMP 2025 guide draws a further distinction. A hate crime is a criminal offence proven to be motivated by hate. A hate incident is conduct that is discriminatory and hateful but does not reach the Criminal Code threshold. Both require a police response; only hate crimes can result in prosecution.

How Canada counts hate crimes: the data sources

Statistics Canada collects hate crime data through two separate instruments, each capturing a different layer of victimization.

• Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Survey: the primary source for police-reported hate crime data. It covers approximately 91–99% of Canada’s population through submissions from municipal and RCMP detachment police services, published annually via The Daily and the Juristat series (catalogue 85-002-X), according to Statistics Canada 2024.
• General Social Survey on Victimization (GSS): conducted every five years and last fielded in 2019, the GSS captures self-reported hate-motivated incidents not reported to police. It provides the only national estimate of the true scale of hate-motivated victimization in Canada, per Statistics Canada GSS Cycle 33 2021.
• Police-reported Information Hub: an interactive dashboard that aggregates UCR Survey data from 2014 to 2024 across three tables, with definitions, methodology notes, and downloadable datasets, from Statistics Canada 2024.

One important methodological caveat: Statistics Canada expanded its hate crime data collection in October 2021 to add new motivation categories and secondary motivation tracking. Pre-2021 and post-2021 data are not fully comparable on a like-for-like basis.

Hate crime by motivation type: race, religion, and sexual orientation

In 2024, race or ethnicity was the leading motivation, followed by religion and sexual orientation. The table below shows counts and shares from Statistics Canada 2026.

Race and ethnicity targets, 2024. Black Canadians were the most victimized group with 873 incidents, up 6% year-over-year. South Asian Canadians followed at 321 incidents (up 15%), and Arab and West Asian Canadians at 310 incidents (up 16%), per Statistics Canada 2026.

Religion-motivated incidents. Jewish communities accounted for approximately 70% of the 1,342 religion-motivated hate crimes in 2024, while Muslim communities accounted for roughly 17%. In 2023, religion-motivated hate crimes surged 67% to 1,284 incidents. That jump was driven by a 71% increase in antisemitic incidents (to 900) and a 94% increase in Islamophobic incidents (to 211), per Statistics Canada 2023.

Sexual orientation and gender identity. Sexual orientation-motivated hate crimes fell 26% in 2024 to 658 incidents after reaching a peak of 860 in 2023 (up 69% from 2022). Gender identity or expression hate crimes rose 8% to 139 incidents in 2024, according to Statistics Canada 2026.

Hate crime rates by province and territory

The table below shows 2024 provincial hate crime rates from Statistics Canada 2026 alongside 2023 rates from Statistics Canada 2023.

Urban areas experience hate crime at roughly 2.5 times the rate of smaller towns. According to Statistics Canada Juristat 2021, 84% of all hate crimes occur in Census Metropolitan Areas despite CMAs housing a smaller proportion of Canada’s total population.

In 2022, six Ontario cities were identified as high hate crime areas. Ottawa led at 28.3 incidents per 100,000, followed by Kingston (23.1), Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo (22.7), Hamilton (20.6), Greater Sudbury (18.7), and Brantford (16.4), per Statistics Canada 2024. For a detailed breakdown of crime rates in one of these municipalities, the crime statistics for Oakville page examines local incident data alongside provincial context. For Ontario’s full auto-theft picture, the auto theft statistics Ontario post tracks a closely related crime surge that follows many of the same urban concentration patterns.

Who is targeted: victim group breakdown

The table below draws on Statistics Canada 2023 and Statistics Canada Juristat 2021 to show how hate crime victimization differs by group.

The 62% male / 38% female split in violent hate crimes reverses sharply when the crime targets sex or gender identity. In sex or gender-motivated hate crimes, 73% of victims were women, per Statistics Canada 2023.

Youth victimization rose 198% between 2019 and 2022 — one of the sharpest increases among any demographic group during the pandemic-era surge, according to Statistics Canada 2022. The co-offending finding is also notable: according to the RCMP 2025 guide, hate crimes are 54% more likely to involve multiple perpetrators than other violent crimes.

The 2020–2024 trend: pandemic spike and sustained rise

Police-reported hate crime climbed every year from 2019 to 2024 with only one pause in the rate of increase. The cumulative numbers tell a straight-line story: 1,946 incidents in 2019, 2,646 in 2020, 3,360 in 2021, 3,576 in 2022, 4,777 in 2023, and 4,882 in 2024. That is a 151% increase over five years, per Statistics Canada 2026. Measured from 2018’s baseline of 1,817, the six-year increase reaches 169%.

The 2021 spike had two identifiable drivers. Religion-motivated hate crimes rose 67%, from 530 to 884 incidents, and sexual orientation-motivated crimes rose 64%, from 258 to 423. Anti-Asian incidents approximately doubled twice over between 2019 and 2021, driven by pandemic-era blame-attribution, per Statistics Canada 2021.

Two sub-trends within the pandemic era stand out. Hate-related homicides reached 23 victims in 2022, a 53% increase from 15 in 2021. That made it the most lethal year on record for hate-motivated killing in Canada, according to Statistics Canada 2022. Cyber hate crimes rose 138% between 2018 and 2022, making online platforms the fastest-growing venue for hate-motivated offending across the pandemic period.

The 2023 surge to 4,777 incidents was again concentrated in religion-motivated crimes, which rose 67% in a single year. The 2024 figure of 4,882 incidents represents only a 1% increase from 2023, the first near-plateau in the trend series. The national rate nonetheless held at 11.9 per 100,000, well above any pre-2020 baseline.

The underreporting gap: police-reported vs. self-reported

The gap between police-reported and self-reported hate crime is one of the widest of any crime category in Canada. The 2014 General Social Survey found Canadians self-reported over 330,000 criminal incidents they perceived as hate-motivated. Police recorded 1,295 hate crimes that same year. The ratio is roughly 250 to 1, based on Statistics Canada Juristat 2021.

The reasons non-reporters give are consistent across survey cycles. Among victims who experienced a hate-motivated crime but did not contact police, 64% believed police would not have considered the incident important enough. A further 62% felt it was too minor to report. Another 58% doubted the accused would be convicted or adequately punished, per the 2014 GSS as analyzed in Statistics Canada Juristat 2021.

The RCMP 2025 guide acknowledges that official statistics significantly undercount actual incidents. Many victims do not report due to fear of retaliation, mistrust of police, normalization of victimization, language barriers, and concerns about not being believed.

Prosecution data compounds the picture. Between 2013 and 2018, only 11% of police-reported hate crimes proceeded to court, and only 7% resulted in a guilty finding. That clearance and conviction rate sits well below the average for other violent crimes, per Statistics Canada Juristat 2021. That 82% no-charges rate is driven in large part by the difficulty of identifying perpetrators, particularly in cyber hate and public-space incidents where anonymity is structural.

What hate crime data means for investigators and communities

The 82% no-charges rate documented in Statistics Canada Juristat 2021 is the most operationally significant finding in this dataset. Police cannot charge what they cannot identify. The primary investigative gap is perpetrator identification — in public-space and online incidents especially.

In 2022, residents of Canadian cities with the highest hate crime rates reported significantly worse quality-of-life outcomes. Only 46% reported excellent or very good mental health, compared to 50% elsewhere, and 42% reported experiencing discrimination before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Statistics Canada 2024. Among racialized residents in Ontario’s six highest-rate cities, 61% reported discrimination in the five years before the pandemic, compared to 37% of non-racialized residents in the same areas.

Cyber hate crimes are now the fastest-growing sub-category. The 138% increase in online hate incidents between 2018 and 2022 means a growing share of hate-motivated offending leaves a digital evidence trail. That trail includes usernames, IP logs, platform metadata, and message content. Documenting and preserving that evidence before platforms delete it is time-sensitive work. Social media and internet investigation services are increasingly engaged by individuals and organizations seeking court-admissible digital evidence in hate-crime-adjacent matters.

As licensed PIs operating across Ontario, we see the consequences of the no-charges gap directly. Clients who have experienced targeted harassment based on identity come to us after police files are closed or stalled. They want witness canvassing, open-source digital evidence, and documented incident patterns that their counsel can bring back to investigators. The data in this post reflects what those cases look like at scale.

For broader crime trend context across Ontario, the crime statistics pillar indexes related datasets on auto theft, municipal crime rates, and public-safety data.