Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to again raise in the House the issue that I addressed back in June in question period when I put some questions to the Minister of Justice about a Statistics Canada report that had just been released which showed that hate crimes in Canada were up by 35% between 2007 and 2008. I will just go over what the report indicated at that time.
Fifty-five per cent of those hate crime incidents were based on race or ethnicity, with folks from the black community and the South Asian community being the victims of those crimes most often. Twenty-eight per cent were based in religion, and the members of the Jewish community were most prominently affected in that case. Sixteen per cent were hate crimes based on sexual orientation.
Of all of the hate crimes, those based on sexual orientation were by far the most violent. Seventy-five per cent of hate crimes based on sexual orientation that Statistics Canada looked at in that survey were violent crimes, as compared to 38% of hate crimes based on race being violent and 25% of those based on religion being violent.
It was a very serious situation that was being described. We know that many hate crimes also go unreported in Canada, unfortunately, because of the extra issues involved. There may be a violent assault but there is also this extra component of someone being targeted because of his or her membership in a minority group or in a minority, and the extra problems that causes and the extra emotional content of that kind of attack.
It is troubling to see these increases, troubling to see the level of violence associated with them and it is something that we need to be addressing in our society as a whole.
The first question I put back in June to the minister was what the government was planning to do to increase the confidence of victims of hate crimes in the police and in the criminal justice system so that the reporting of these crimes might be increased. The minister, in his response, said something about the Canadian Human Rights Commission looking into this issue and then went on to talk about other issues.
I believe the Canadian Human Rights Commission is looking at the whole question of hate speech but it is a different issue than the kind of extra component of a criminal act, especially for assault where there is someone being targeted because of his or her membership in a minority organization.
The second question was around specifically the gay and lesbian, bisexual, transgender and transsexual community and the fact that the violence of those hate-based crimes was rising faster. I asked what the government might do to address that, what education programs might be in the works and what data there was. We know that hate crimes data, especially related to the GLBTT community, is very inconsistent and that the statistics are very inconsistent across the country. Therefore, I was asking what the government would do to address those issues. The minister did not address that question at all. In fact, he went off on a completely different tangent on something else.
The issue is still there. What is the government prepared to do to address the violent hate crimes that face the GLBTT community in Canada? What is it prepared to do in terms of ensuring that there is consistency in how our police report and record hate crimes? Those questions still need to be answered.