Thank you.
I'm the policy director at Simon Wiesenthal. It's a real pleasure for me to be speaking with you all today. Thank you so much for inviting us to participate.
I'm going to be focusing my remarks largely on the symbol of the swastika today. Yes, it is only one of many dangerous hate symbols that our society contends with, but it is also one that reflects some of the worst, most evil and most dangerous ideas that human beings are capable of conjuring up.
Today, here in Canada, we are too often confronting this symbol of hate. Almost every single day we receive reports from schools that swastikas have been painted on walls and on books in the library. We see it painted on synagogues and other Jewish spaces. We see it on signs and flags at protests and rallies. Perhaps most often, we see it on social media.
The swastika is used as a symbol to intimidate and to terrorize. The meaning rings out loud and clear. To those in our community who survived the Holocaust, the swastika is a sharp memory of what it means to be stripped of one's humanity and to become a slave and a number. It's a reminder of what it is like to never get a chance to say goodbye to one's loved ones. To those from Canada's great generation who fought so courageously to defeat Hitler, the swastika is a reminder of their years of sacrifice and horror, when they did not know whether they would ever come home again. To the families of the 45,000 Canadians who lost their lives in that fight, it is a symbol of unimaginable loss.
I agree with my colleagues from our community, Mr. Farber and Mr. Marceau that it is already illegal in Canada to promote hate and advocate for genocide as per sections 318 and 319 in the Criminal Code, yet we continue to see the swastika proudly displayed outside of neo-Nazi clubhouses. We see it used as a vile political statement to demonize political leaders, including members of Parliament. Last May, during the escalation of conflict between Israel and the terror group Hamas, we saw it used at anti-Israel rallies to degrade the Jewish nation and its people.
Could our hate laws be written more clearly so that law enforcement has a more explicit directive with respect to the inclusion of hate symbols in the conception of illegal hate speech? Yes, absolutely, but the solution must go deeper. Hate crimes are growing dramatically in our country from one year to the next. The Jewish community remains one of the most likely minority groups to be victimized by it.
At the same time, we are seeing hate crimes continuing to stand out from other kinds of crime as the least likely to be cleared, the least likely to see law enforcement identify a perpetrator and the least likely to result in charges and convictions. This is nothing less than justice denied, not just for the direct victims of hate crimes but for our entire society and our values as Canadians.
Clarifying our hate laws to explicitly include hate symbols could be part of the solution to growing hate crime. The solution also requires new resources for hate units throughout our law enforcement services. It requires new opportunities for cutting-edge training for our police so they can build stronger and more convictable cases against hate criminals.
This is, by the way, one area of programming that we at Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center are building and offering to increasing numbers of police every year.
More than anything, solving the problem of rising hate crime comes down to the political will of our leaders, such the legislators here today, to see hate criminals held to account.