Hate crimes against Black people rose 6% to 873 in 2024

Police in Canada reported 873 hate crimes targeting Black people in 2024, up 6 per cent from the year before and the second-highest total for any single group, Statistics Canada said in its latest annual release on hate crime.

The agency published the figures on March 30, 2026, in Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2024. They are the most recent national numbers available. Police services covering more than 99 per cent of the population contribute to the survey.

Overall, police reported 4,882 hate crimes in 2024, a rise of one per cent from 2023. The national rate slipped to 11.9 incidents per 100,000 people from 12.1, a decline of two per cent, Statistics Canada said. The count has more than doubled since 2018, up 169 per cent.

Within that total, hate crimes motivated by race or ethnicity rose eight per cent to 2,377, and Statistics Canada said the increase was driven by incidents targeting Black populations. By our calculation, the 873 incidents targeting Black people made up about 37 per cent of race- or ethnicity-motivated hate crimes and about 18 per cent of all hate crimes.

Only crimes targeting Jewish people, at 920 incidents, were more numerous than those targeting Black people, according to the agency’s detailed table of motivations. Incidents targeting South Asian people numbered 321, Arab or West Asian people 310, East or Southeast Asian people 185 and Indigenous people 59.

The table shows how the figure has moved since 2020. Police reported 676 hate crimes targeting Black people that year, then 647 in 2021 and 842 in 2022. The count was 821 in 2023 before rising to 873 in 2024. That is 29 per cent higher than in 2020, by our calculation.

The national total grew faster over the same period, from 2,646 incidents in 2020 to 4,882 in 2024, an increase of about 85 per cent. As a result, the share of known-motivation hate crimes targeting Black people fell from 26 per cent in 2020 to 18 per cent in 2024, even as the number of incidents climbed. Growth in crimes targeting religious groups and people because of their sexual orientation accounts for much of the change in the mix.

Statistics Canada counts both confirmed and suspected hate crimes. It records each incident by its primary motivation, as determined through the police investigation. The agency’s release does not give a rate per 100,000 for individual groups, and it does not break the Black-targeted figure down by province, city or by violent and non-violent offences.

The agency cautioned that the numbers capture only incidents that come to police attention. Reporting can be affected by language barriers, trust in police and fear of stigma, it said, which means the police-reported count is likely to understate how often people experience hate-motivated crime.

The figures sit alongside other recent evidence of unequal treatment in the justice system. Race-based data from Toronto police, which we reported earlier, showed that officers charged Black people at 3.9 times the rate of white people. This week, a group called for a probe into the evaluation of Black recruits in the Ontario Provincial Police, as we reported on Saturday.

Ottawa has also moved on some supports for Black communities. The federal government announced more than $6 million for Black communities’ health this month, and in September committed $135.7 million to Black Canadian groups.

The patterns have long roots. Black Nova Scotians fought for decades over how governments treated their communities, a history traced in our account of how Halifax razed Africville over five years, then apologized.

Until a newer release is published, the 2024 numbers are the national baseline: 873 police-reported incidents in a single year in which Black people were the targets, a figure that has not fallen below 640 in any of the last five years.

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