Over the last few years, the city and country I live in, Ottawa and Canada, have been committing increasing resources to combat “hate”. In November 2019, the United Way of Eastern Ontario launched Ottawa’s United for All coalition. U4A was billed as “a coalition of 44 organizations representing 150+ partners who are all committed to overcoming hate-based violence, racism, and extremism in East Ontario.” The coalition’s website says it includes “social service agencies, faith-based organizations, policymakers, human rights groups, health providers, school boards and post-secondary institutions, grassroots social justice groups, criminal justice professionals, cultural groups and more.” The coalition also includes the Ottawa Police Service (maybe they’re the “criminal justice professionals”?) but no Black-led groups or police abolitionist groups, and only one Indigenous group.
The Government of Canada’s Budget 2022 announced the launch of a National Action Plan on Combatting Hate to be combined with a new anti-racism strategy to replace the existing one.
Also in March 2022, the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF) and the Chiefs of Police National Roundtable announced the formation of a joint Task Force on Hate Crime at a national hate crimes conference. The announcement said the task force would be co-chaired by the CRRF and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The problem is that initiatives to combat hate in Ottawa, which is the home of the federal government, have had the impact of funneling money to the Ottawa police and initiatives at all levels have done little to address hate, let alone systemic, state-led anti-Black hate. This, despite the fact that Statistics Canada reported that Black Canadians faced the most hate crimes in Canada in 2020.
Instead, what we’ve seen is that the War on Hate, much like the War on Drugs, at all levels, is:
1) disproportionately harming Black Canadians by diverting focus and resources from addressing systemic, state-led, anti-Black hate;
2) fueling police budget increases; and
3) doing little to address the rise in white supremacist hate.
This isn’t because the War on Hate has failed. On the contrary, like the War on Drugs, it’s going exactly as planned.
One of the clearest indicators that Ottawa’s War on Hate isn’t designed to actually stop hate is the fact that the Ottawa police didn’t charge a single Ottawa Freedom Convoy protestor with a hate crime despite some of them carrying signs with Swastikas, being members of known white supremacy groups and allegedly verbally harassing women and racialized Ottawa residents for three weeks.
That the United for All coalition was never intended to address state-sponsored hate is clear from the fact the Ottawa Police Service are members and the coalition has been silent on issues like the OPS’ own data showing they continue to use force disproportionately on Black, Indigenous and Middle Eastern Ottawa residents – and have presented no plan to stop doing so.
Another question raised by the War on Hate is – hate against who? The Government of Canada has shown itself to be very selective in the hate it targets as indicated by a November 2023 open letter to the federal government from El Jones, a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In her letter, Jones cites February 2023 Government of Canada press releases announcing a change to the way the government would vet funding requests for community and anti-racism projects. According to these reports, government ministers would have the power to terminate funding to groups who “espouse hate and discrimination”, including vetting of social media accounts of staff of organizations who have received funding.
Jones asked whether the government would be suspending funds to CIJA (Centre for Israel and Jewish affairs) and reviewing the record of its funding. She argued that “even the most cursory read of CIJA’s social media reveals deeply disturbing anti-Palestinian racism, incitement to violence, and harassment of advocates speaking for Palestinian lives. The recent anti-Semitism conference hosted by CIJA and attended by numerous government leaders and officials featured a speaker who posted deeply dehumanizing content online, including a depiction of Palestinians as cockroaches. This post was labelled by Twitter as “sensitive content” due to its hateful nature – as the community note pointed out, the depiction of ethnic groups as cockroaches has a long history in inciting genocide, notably in Rwanda.”
Jones had not received a reply as I write this…
The fact the Ottawa police are members of the United for All coalition is one indication of the close ties between anti “hate” groups and police. Another indicator was former U4A leader Abid Jan leaving the United Way in March 2023 to become Director, Community Safety and Well Being…with the Ottawa Police Service.
This movement of people between the police and other organizations is one aspect of what we call “collective resistance”. Another example was former Ottawa police Chief Financial Officer, Cyril Rogers, becoming Ottawa’s General Manager and Chief Financial Officer in January 2023.
I first came up with the concept of collective resistance after seeing a woman from the Tamarack Institute talk about what she called collective impact at a November 2022 conference. She said collective impact was a key operating principle for Tamarack and defined it as “a network of community, members, organizations and institutions that…advance equity by learning together, aligning and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems-level change.” However, when I saw her definition an alternate definition – of collective resistance – immediately popped into my head:
“Collective resistance is a network of community, members, organizations and institutions that…impede movement toward real equity by working together, aligning and integrating their actions resulting in resistance to population and systems-level change.”
The November 2022 conference was the United Way’s Leveraging Our Strengths conference – focused on implementing equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives.
In his new role as Ottawa’s General Manager and Chief Financial Officer, Cyril Rogers gave a presentation on the City budget at a consultation hosted by three city councillors in February 2023 and said money from the police budget couldn’t be moved anywhere else. When I challenged this by reminding him that, in 2021, the Ottawa Police Services Board and City Council approved $3 million dollars less than the police asked for – and used the money for youth mental health services – Rogers then admitted that money could in fact be moved from the police to other things. If he had done that just once, I might have thought he temporarily had his facts wrong – but then he made exactly the same claim at an October 2023 budget consultation. This kind of misleading information helps justify police budgets that help fund the War on Hate.
A key tool of collective resistance is creating initiatives that claim to be working for fundamental change but have little to no criteria, or misleading criteria, to measure what they’re actually achieving, if anything. The Ottawa Police Service’s hate crime unit is an example.
In January 2023, the Ottawa Police Service issued a press release titled “Annual Hate Crimes data show a 13% increase in reporting to police”. The first line of the release was, “The Ottawa Police Service Hate and Bias Crime Unit released its 2022 Annual statistics. The Hate and Bias Crime unit saw 377 total incidents, including 300 criminal and 77 hate incidents, which marks an increase of 13% over 2021.” Later, the release said:
“The groups most victimized are:
Jewish
Muslim
Black
LGBTQ+
Arab West Asian
East and South Asian”
The release didn’t say how many incidents each group faced and when I asked the guy who is the Ottawa police hate crimes unit (the “unit” is only one guy) – why that was, his answer made no sense. One thing he did say in an earlier conversation that did make sense was that the number of hate crimes against Black people is probably three times higher than what’s reported because Black people are likely reluctant to report incidents to the police because they have little faith the police will do anything.
In addition to weak to non-existent evaluation criteria, another way War on Hate initiatives support collective resistance is taking a really long time to produce anything to evaluate. Federal government consultations on the new Anti-Racism Strategy and Action Plan on Hate ended May 8, 2022 but the government web page on the initiative still says, “The Federal Anti-Racism Secretariat is currently synthesizing what they heard from communities across Canada in their various engagement sessions to inform the development of a new anti-racism action strategy for Canada.”
Our definition of collective resistance is similar to the definition of system racism in Turner Consulting’s November 2023 report Systemic Anti-Black Racism by the Numbers: Canada vs the US:
“Systemic racism describes how policies, institutional practices, organizational culture, individual attitudes, and other norms within a system work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial inequity. Systemic racism is not something that a few people or organizations choose to practice. It is a key feature of our social, economic, and political systems.”
Interestingly, the only reference to the “War on Hate” that came up when I Googled it was Henry Kopel’s book War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom. Kopel is a former U.S. federal prosecutor and serves on the global advisory board for the Abraham Global Peace Initiative which bills itself as “a prominent international Canadian NGO that educates, advocates and publishes articles, reports and produces exhibits, symposiums and media content to counter Antisemitism; combat Holocaust denial; advance The Abraham Accords, defend Israel, Canada and their allies; and advance freedom, democracy and universal human rights.”
The “War on Hate” is focussed on the wrong enemy – by design. The real hate is in the actions taken everyday by the organizations, led by mostly white people making six figure salaries, that run programs that provide some relief while also supporting collective resistance against addressing systemic, state-led, anti-Black hate. These organizations get funding to provide Bandaid solutions to more serious societal issues. And if you’re in the Bandaid business – it’s in your interest for people to keep bleeding.