Very quickly, there's one thing I want to point out in terms of the burden on the communities to eradicate the misconceptions. The community feels that it is their responsibility to eradicate those myths, misconceptions and stereotypes, and I really feel that's unfair. We were not the ones who created those misconceptions in the first place, so why should we be responsible for telling people that we're not terrorists? It should come from the top down. It should really come from a campaign from the federal government to show that our communities are welcoming, that we are nice people and we are good citizens of this country. That burden shouldn't fall on the communities themselves.
The other thing I want to point out very quickly is in terms of the previous question on cyber-hate and hate crime reporting. One project we're doing here at CASSA is to work with four different police units across Ontario to see how their hate crime reporting system works at present, where the gaps exist, how the community envisions those programs to be and what would be an accessible way for communities to report hate crimes.
As we know, two-thirds of hate crimes across the country are unreported. How do we change that? We're a small organization. We can only do so much and work with certain police services across the province. Is there a way for the federal government to take that initiative to work with police units across the country to have a streamlined approach for people to report hate crimes? The second part of it is public education about how to report on hate crimes.
We had an experience a couple of weeks ago where we had an event. There were two people who Zoom-bombed the event with profanities against the speakers. One of them was a South Asian woman. We had a very difficult time trying to find out how to report that to the police. It was a hate incident. It was hate speech, but we were pushed from one department to another department, from one police unit to another police unit. As an organization, we have the resources to assign staff to do that, but as individuals, people don't have the time or the energy to invest hours on end in trying to report the crime, so it's left unreported.
We're really working with the police to see how we can make this system more community friendly and accessible.