Warning: This story contains some disturbing details.
Late one night in April 2015, a drunk man entered a convenience store in the town of Hinton, Alta., and told the person behind the till he didn’t want to be served by a Black woman.
Riley Bryn McDonald used the n-word. He asked for the manager. He then picked up a cup of hot nacho cheese sauce and threw it in the clerk’s face.
The sauce stung her eyes and dripped across her face, hair and upper body. McDonald told her she should “go back to Somalia.” Then he walked out.
The case was not widely reported, but a record of McDonald’s sentencing turns up in the Canadian Legal Information Institute database, which keeps track of court judgments from across the country.
The past weeks have seen a focus on the racism that is a reality of life for Canada’s visible minorities. There has been a spike in attacks against Asian-Canadians in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China.
Meanwhile, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis has shone a light on police brutality against Black and Indigenous people in Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has even acknowledged systemic racism.
Given that backdrop, McDonald’s case provides an insight into racist offences in this country and the complexity of prosecuting them. No province is immune.
WATCH | Professor Kathy Hogarth talks about addressing racism in Canada:
CBC News Network’s Michael Serapio speaks with Kathy Hogarth, associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s school of social work. 6:52
The Criminal Code contains provisions for hate crimes but they’re largely reserved for offences involving hate propaganda or the promotion or advocacy of genocide. McDonald was originally charged under one of those sections, but the charge was stayed and the Crown proceeded to treat the offence as a hate-motivated assault instead.
That’s how the majority of crimes involving racism are prosecuted in Canada — as regular offences under the Criminal Code, with bias, prejudice or hate considered aggravating factors for sentencing.
Canadians have been grappling with the question of how the law should tackle hatred for more than half a century. If the courts are any indication, they’ve yet to come up with a consistent answer.
“There’s a lot of issues as to how seriously our criminal justice system sees hate crimes,” said Avvy Go, director of the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic in Toronto. “What is even more disheartening right now is that a lot of these cases are not even investigated as hate crimes.”
Attacked for ‘wearing a scarf around her head’
Some incidents have resulted in jail time. Some haven’t.
Judges have often expressed outrage at the offences, and some have called on lawyers to craft suggestions for sentencing that can both make amends to the community and produce some kind of change in an offender.
McDonald blamed alcohol for his outburst and claimed he was embarrassed by his actions. Defendants usually try to offset punishment in criminal offences through mitigating circumstances, which largely amount to excuses for their behaviour.
On May 8, Clara Kan and her mother were victims of racist Asian slurs in Richmond, B.C. Police say victims of racist attacks are often reluctant to come forward. (Maggie MacPherson/CBC)
Is incarceration the way to stamp out the type of behaviour that politicians and the public frequently denounce? At the very least, experts say judges, prosecutors and police need to be on the same page when it comes to the seriousness of hate-motivated crimes.
In a 2012 case used as a precedent to sentence McDonald, a Nova Scotia judge insisted a 51-year-old grandmother with a clean record spend time behind bars for attacking, insulting and shoving a woman of Pakistani heritage at a mall “for no reason other than wearing a scarf around her head.”
“We do not ask or require that every Canadian be the same, whether you are from Newfoundland, Nunavut, British Columbia or any place in between,” Pictou Supreme Court Justice Ted Scanlon told the offender, Katherine Feltmate.
“A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian no matter what their vintage, religion or attire,” he said, sentencing her to 60 days in jail.
Despite this precedent, Riley Bryn McDonald spent no time in jail.
‘Hate is as old as man’
Calls for legislative action to deal with hate date back to Nazi propaganda seeping into Canadian society in the build-up to the Second World War. Concerns heightened in the 1950s and ’60s with the emergence of extreme right-wing groups and the widespread distribution of hate literature, most notably in Ontario and Quebec.
In 1965, the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda tabled a report that would give birth to Canada’s hate crimes legislation. The committee was chaired by Judge Maxwell Cohen and included Pierre Elliot Trudeau, then a university law professor. Trudeau was prime minister when the amendments to the Criminal Code were passed into legislation in 1970.
As Cohen noted in an essay reflecting on his commission’s work, the enactment of the hate laws sparked fierce debate. The tensions he described have dogged the prosecution of hatred ever since.
Pierre Trudeau was prime minister when amendments to the Criminal Code regarding hate crimes were passed into legislation in 1970. (CBCX News/CBC Archives)
“On the one hand, there was a new emphasis on individual freedom,” he said. “On the other side, there was a growing recognition that these very liberties could be dangerously abused.”
The preface to the 1965 report warns, “Hate is as old as man and doubtless as durable.” It also contains a warning that could as easily refer to the current spread of anti-Asian slurs through social media as the anti-Semitic pamphlets and slogans that emerged in Cohen’s day.
Ours is “a world aware of the perils of falsehood disguised as fact and of conspirators eroding the community’s integrity through pretending that conspiracies from elsewhere now justify verbal assaults,” Cohen wrote. He called them “the non-facts and the non-truths of prejudice and slander.”
‘A tough thing for a lot of people to hear’
According to Statistics Canada, Canadian police reported 1,798 criminal incidents motivated by hate in 2018, the second-highest number in a decade. Only 31 per cent of those crimes were solved, and of those, 68 per cent resulted in charges against one or more individuals.
Section 318 of the Criminal Code deals with promoting and advocating genocide, whereas Section 319 concerns the public incitement of hatred.
On its face, Section 319(2), the section Riley Bryn McDonald was originally charged under, says that “every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty” of an offence.
But RCMP Const. Anthony Statham, one of two members of B.C.’s hate crime team, says those charges are generally used in situations where offenders are inciting others through speech and propaganda to act in a way that might breach the peace. Charge approval also requires a sign-off from the provincial attorney general.
Instead, most acts people might think of as “hate crimes” are charged as regular offences under the Criminal Code — like assault, uttering threats or harassment.
Last July, a man accosted an Arabic-speaking woman and her two-year-old daughter on a Montreal street, uttering racial slurs and sexually violent threats. The incident was caught on video. (Facebook)
But Section 718 of the code requires judges to consider an enhanced sentence based on evidence an offence was “motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or any similar factor.”
Statham and his partner work the rare cases that involve Sections 318 and 319, but they also assist police around B.C. in dealing with other offences where hatred plays a part.
He said the complexity of the law can make it seem as though people can “get away” with hurling racial epithets at strangers on the street.
Statham said the majority of cases are what police would term “hate incidents” — they may be offensive, hurtful and harmful to the community, but many are non-criminal.
“Using a racist slur is typically something that’s protected as a form of freedom of expression,” Statham said. “Which is a tough thing for a lot of people to hear.”
Fight to have offence recognized as hate-motivated
But many hateful incidents go far beyond offensive language.
In 2010, the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic (CSALC) in Toronto helped victims prepare for the prosecution of Trevor Middleton, who was charged with aggravated assault after he and others pushed Asian anglers into the water near Mossington Park Bridge off Lake Simcoe.
A scuffle ensued between members of the two groups, and one of Middleton’s friends was badly beaten. When the anglers drove off, Middleton chased them in his pickup truck, ramming their car repeatedly until it crashed into a tree. The driver of the car — who was not Asian — suffered brain damage.
CSALC director Avvy Go said her clinic pushed to have the offence recognized as a hate crime and they helped the community prepare a victim impact statement. The victims told Go’s organization the incident had changed the way they lived, violating their sense of safety and security.
Avvy Go, director of the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic in Toronto, said the criminal justice system is not taking racist attacks seriously. (Susan Goodspeed/CBC)
“This crime is an extreme manifestation of the all too common sentiment that Asians are not ‘real’ Canadians,” said the victim impact statement said, which was provided to CBC. “We are made to feel like we are intruders and outsiders who can be assaulted at random simply because of what we are, and not what we do.”
The Crown wanted eight to 10 years, but Middleton got two years less a day. Go said the community was outraged.
“From our point of view, the criminal justice system as a whole is not taking these crimes seriously,” said Go.
‘Nothing will be done if they don’t report’
Toronto-based researcher Abbee Corb works with police forces across Canada, teaching officers how to investigate hate crime and speak with victims.
She says hate crimes are vastly underreported, and that many victims are wary of speaking to police because they come from backgrounds where police are part of the issue. The result is a circular problem.
“People don’t report because they don’t think anything’s going to be done,” said Corb. “And nothing will be done if they don’t report it.”
Corb thinks more emphasis should be placed on recognizing hate crimes and speaking with victims as part of regular police training. She also said police need to build bridges to minority communities to build trust and solicit help in investigations.
Caught on video
The ubiquity of cellphone cameras has contributed to a growing awareness around racist attacks as victims and bystanders capture offenders on video. While Charter protections around freedom of expression mean many of those incidents don’t rise to the level of a crime, there are exceptions.
WATCH | Is George Floyd’s death a turning point for racial justice?
As hundreds attended a memorial in Minneapolis for George Floyd, his death was hailed by civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton as a possible turning point for racial justice in America. 3:09
Some judges have acknowledged that constant video recording puts an onus on everyone to take the problem of hate-motivated crime more seriously.
In 2017, Karry Vernon Corbett was caught on video shouting racially charged insults at an Indo-Canadian lawyer, who had turned his camera on Corbett after seeing him yell at a 72-year-old parking officer.
Corbett was charged with what’s known as a “no touch” assault — a provision of the law that has particular relevance to the aggressive behaviour that victims of hate crimes experience.
Karry Vernon Corbett was given a two-month conditional sentence after he was caught on camera hurling racial slurs at a bystander in Vancouver. The judge said the incident could have been used to craft a sentence aimed at healing the community. (Ravi Duhra/YouTube)
The presiding judge noted that the Criminal Code definition of assault includes when a person “‘attempts or threatens, by an act or gesture, to apply force to another person’ and that other person reasonably believes that the accused has the ability to complete the act.”
Judge Kenneth Skilnick accepted the proposition — reluctantly. He said he hoped that in the future, the sentence to a similar case might involve the offender making amends to the community in question and perhaps be ordered to enter into some kind of “victim-offender reconciliation process.”
According to Skilnick’s judgment, Corbett argued he hadn’t intended to “publicize his racially offensive outburst so prominently” and he didn’t think the publicity it received should be held against him.
Skilnick didn’t agree.
“We live in an age where almost everyone has a cellphone and almost every cellphone has the capacity to video-record conduct. In addition to the moral responsibility for all of us to treat our fellow citizens with respect, the ubiquitous nature of video-recording is an additional reason for people to conduct themselves properly and lawfully in public.
“Now, more than ever, the rest of the world is watching what we all do.”
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
