“Community activists raising a boxing glove at the top of a mountain. Symbolizing our will to fight and struggle for Our Folk, Family, and Future,” reads the caption under the photo, taken from Sam Lawrence Park, a popular vista atop the Niagara Escarpment and posted to the social media site Telegram. The post also includes a video of the men, masked to hide their identities, throwing untutored punches at each other in sloppy sparring matches.

The group, calling itself “Nationalist 13” has been growing on Telegram, a popular digital den for white nationalists. There were only a handful of members when it started in June, but it now has more than 1,000 followers. Online, the group targets Black people, politicians, Jewish people and the LGBTQ community, particularly transgender people.

For several months, Nationalist 13 has crept out of the digital shadows as a gang of vandals, proudly claiming responsibility for placing neo-Nazi propaganda stickers on lampposts, playgrounds, street signs and other public structures largely around Hamilton.

They have also joined anti-drag show protests and, in their most visible acts to date, engaged in combat-style training in Hamilton parks and waved white nationalist flags from a Red Hill Valley Parkway overpass.

But the extremist group is not operating in a vacuum, and it is certainly not alone. There is a rising tide of hate in Ontario, although much of it not the work of organized groups like this.

Hate incidents — from assaults to vandalism — have been increasing in Ontario for several years, with police services reporting 612 incidents in 2016, and nearly triple that in 2021, with 1,629. The trend is reflected nationally where police-reported hate crimes jumped from 1,951 in 2019 to 3,360 in 2021 — a 72 per cent increase.

The majority of these incidents are non-violent, with the charge of mischief — which includes vandalism — being the most common criminal charge laid by police.

The police statistics do not reflect the true state of hate in the province — police and anti-hate groups say many hate incidents go unreported, although how many is difficult to determine.

What is clear is that the rise in incidents is not matched by a rise in hate crime charges or convictions, a Metroland investigation has found.

From 2018 to 2021, Ontario police services reported 4,360 hate-motivated incidents in the province. Thirty hate crime charges were laid over the same time period, representing 0.68 per cent of the reported incidents.

Of those charges, only 11 resulted in convictions, representing a mere 0.25 per cent of all reported hate incidents in Ontario.

Metroland reviewed dozens of incidents in several Ontario communities over the past seven years. A small snapshot of these includes:

• A mosque in Peterborough was firebombed in 2016. In 2021, four people were killed in a truck attack on a Muslim family in London, Ont. April 2023, in one of the latest anti-Muslim incidents in Ontario, a man went to a Markham mosque, shouted anti-Islamic slurs, threatened to burn the building down and tried to run over congregants.

• A 2017 anti-immigration rally in Peterborough organized by a neo-Nazi turned into a violent clash between demonstrators and hundreds of counter-protesters.

• In Hamilton, a riot broke out in 2019 after a Pride event in Gage Park was attacked by Yellow Vesters — the predecessor of the “Freedom Convoy” movement — homophobes and white nationalists carrying anti-LGBTQ signs.

• The owner of a Waterloo yoga studio, a Black woman, closed her business after she was bombarded with anti-Black harassment and death threats.

• In June 2022 in St. Catharines, a vandalism rampage saw anti-Black graffiti sprayed on the statue of famous Black abolitionist Harriet Tubman at a school named after her and the N-word sprayed on nearby vehicles, including outside a Black-owned restaurant.

• In Welland, Hamilton, Peterborough, Kitchener and other cities in 2022 and 2023, anti-trans protesters repeatedly targeted all-ages drag shows and public library story readings, with protests and social media posts pushing false claims that drag performers and trans people are sexual predators.

The rise in hatred is happening against a backdrop of deepening political divisions and a decline in civility, fed by economic strife, exacerbated by online extremism, fueled by the “Freedom Convoy” movement and embraced by some politicians and political parties.

“I think that we’re in a moment right now, which is a linchpin moment, where we’re either going to keep it in the grenade or we’re going to see some things explode,” said Hamilton Centre New Democrat MP Matthew Green.

Green said economic and social pressures, made worse by the pandemic, the housing crisis and inflation, are pushing people to their limits. The “Freedom Convoy,” which opposed COVID-19 vaccines, masks and vaccine mandates and included figures like Pat King who pushed white nationalist conspiracy theories, arose out of that strife.

“Hate is now in the public square. In 2016, Donald Trump brought its face into the public square. But there’s another part of it that is economic,” said Kojo Damptey, former executive director of the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion. “The strife of recessions and stagnant wages gives ammunition to people to say, ‘Oh, look it is because of these people that I am not making enough, and it is because of those people that our jobs are going away.’ ”

While the stats show a rise in incidents, hate crimes are nothing new, say targets of bigotry like Niagara Falls resident and activist Sherri Darlene, who has been trying to get her community to take notice for years.

“A pickup truck full of grown white men slowly drove by and screamed, ‘Get the f– out of our neighbourhood, you f–ing n–s’,” Darlene said. “This is what I’m so desperately trying to convey to our city officials, our Niagara Regional Police. It is so deep seeded here in Niagara. We’re third, fourth generation here on my mother’s side of the family. My mother was born here, grew up here. They’ve got horror stories.”

Absorbing hatred has become so commonplace, they don’t even consider reporting an incident to police.

“Many LGBTQ-plus people would rather not be themselves with simple actions of holding hands with their partner walking down the street, for fear of an incident,” said Hamilton drag performer and nightclub manager Bradley Hamacher, who has been living with an ongoing harassment campaign for months after being targeted by a far-right political party.

“I’ve never called the police. It’s just become the norm for me.”

Compromises can seem the best way to move forward for those worried calling the police will just make them more of a target.

“You suffer in silence or you figure out ways to be able to survive and a lot of the time that’s a part of it. It’s a matter of, ‘How do you survive,’ ” said Kerry Goring, chair of OUTNiagara, an LGBTQ-plus advocacy group. “Do you ring the alarms bells and make a spectacle or do you take that deep breath and do what you got to do to live another day?”

Kim Martin, co-chair of the anti-hate coalition No Hate in the Hammer, worries that hatred has “become normalized.”

“People are feeling emboldened and free to express it,” she said.

Yet even in an increasingly volatile political climate, some victims of hate say hope is not lost.

“You can’t let the evil people win. You’ve got to stand strong,” said Michael Andrade, whose Caribbean restaurant was in the path of the St. Catharines vandalism spree.

“Education is the key. Anything you do is education. If you want to be a truck driver, you’ve got to go to school for it. If you want to be a carpenter, you’ve got to go to school. If you want to stop hate, you’ve got to bring it in the classroom. That’s all we can do.”

Hamacher, who goes by Miss Drew when on stage, has thick skin.

It is not a point of pride. As the manager of the queer bar and restaurant The Well in Hamilton and a drag performer for 25 years, it’s an occupational necessity.

“This is something everyone in the LGBTQ-plus community has to have,” he said. “It is the reality of all our lives, or we wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

Even so, the November tweet by New Blue Ontario Party co-founder Belinda Karahalios, the one he says set off months of harassment that included death threats, was different.

Hamacher was set to perform as his drag alter ego, Miss Drew, in Cambridge for an all-ages fundraiser to help the families of the victims of the 2020 mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado, a LGBTQ nightclub, during Transgender Awareness Week. Before the show could begin, Karahalios, the former Tory MPP for Cambridge, took to Twitter.

“Why is @fordnation using taxpayer dollars to pay for adult men dressed as women to ‘perform’ for children? Drag shows — by their nature — are not for ‘all ages,’ ” Karahalios tweeted to her more than 18,000 followers with an image of the poster for the fundraiser.

The avalanche of hate began then, said Hamacher, who shared the messages he received with Metroland.

“F–ing kill yourself,” said one message.

“The only people who want to perform in front of children are groomers and paedophiles,” wrote another, echoing the bigoted tropes of anti-drag and anti-trans protesters that claim drag performers are part of a conspiracy to sexually abuse children. The false allegations are often shouted by protesters who regularly appear at public libraries when drag performers read to children and their parents, or at all-ages shows at restaurants.

Hamacher has had to increase security for his shows at his bar. The harassment reached a point where some of his staff quit to escape it.

The trouble started again in March during the Hamilton Centre byelection. Flyers supporting New Blue candidate Lee Weiss Vassor featured the same image tweeted by Karahalios, using the drag show to criticize the “wokeness” of Premier Doug Ford, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh.

“They were being handed out at a drag protest,” said Hamacher, who has reached out to the New Blue Party with no response. “Someone brought them to the nightclub to show me.”

Given the ongoing vitriol and false accusations blasted at drag performers and trans people online and in protests, and the gay night club shootings in the United States, Hamacher fears it is only a matter of time before someone is killed in Canada.

“I worry about it every time I perform and every time I go to work,” he said. “As I said, this is something everyone in the LGBTQ community lives with. But to have a political leader involved in it, that changes it. What kind of leaders are these people?”

The anti-drag sentiment was further echoed in the last several months by the People’s Party of Canada leader and “Freedom Convoy” idol Maxime Bernier, who told his more than 240,000 Twitter followers that drag queens are part of an “insidious ideology.”

In an emailed statement to Metroland, Karahalios defended her views and the flyers as part of their belief in “parental rights” and opposition to provincial funding being directed at all-ages drag shows.

“We do not condone threats or harassment on anyone and regret to hear about any such incidents happening to Miss Drew,” reads Karahalios’ statement. “We encourage Miss Drew to call the police.”

Even if Hamacher reported the incidents to police, there is no guarantee a hate crime charge would be laid even if detectives identified them as being motivated by hatred.

Although police report the number of “hate incidents” annually, there is no charge labelled “hate crime” under the Criminal Code of Canada. The umbrella phrase refers to three charges in the code: Section 318 criminalizes advocating genocide, and two provisions under 319 say the “wilful promotion of hatred,” and “the public incitement of hatred” are crimes.

However, advocating genocide and the wilful promotion of hatred charges can only be laid with the consent of a district Crown attorney. The third charge can be laid by police alone, but only if the public incitement of hatred is likely to result in a breach of the peace.

Police officers from the services interviewed by Metroland say proving the motive behind an incident is often the most difficult part of their investigations.

“The main issue is, when dealing with a hate crime, the police have to prove and the Crown has to prove the motivation for committing that offence was due to that person’s bias or hatred towards an identifiable group,” said Det. Const. Pat Boal, the hate crime officer for the Niagara Regional Police. “And that’s where the difficulty usually lays with these types of investigations, is with proving the motivation.”

Boal said even with a case that on its surface is obvious, such as a person spray painting a Nazi swastika on the home of a Jewish family, motive can be a slippery beast to grasp.

“Would that person have known that that house belongs to a Jewish person? You’d have to establish that. Did the person even write that or draw the swastika on that person’s house because they hate members of the Jewish community?” said Boal. “You’re talking about someone’s ideology and that sometimes can be difficult to prove as well.”

Legal hurdles are not the only barrier to laying a hate-related criminal charge, says Timothy Bryan, a University of Toronto sociology professor who studies how police are responding to hate incidents in Ontario.

In a recent survey of police officers in Toronto, Peel and Durham services, Bryan found officers also have to navigate their own biases and a police culture that gets handed down from one officer to another, leaving scant room for new ideas or approaches.

“I think there’s this perception that hate crimes are self-evident and they’re clear when they’re actually not in many cases. Police have to use their judgment to wade through the messiness of it,” said Bryan, whose study recently appeared in the Canadian Review of Sociology. “Police officers’ impressions of what they think they’re seeing comes down to a lot of things. It comes down to their personal assumptions and their personal biases. But it also may come down to the culture of their police unit.”

Less than a year ago, Andrade arrived at his Caribbean Eatery restaurant to find vehicles in the plaza spray painted with the N-word and other racist graffiti. The school, just minutes away, was hit with homophobic and racist scrawls on the brick walls and windows. The bronze statue in a courtyard of the famed underground railroad conductor who led enslaved people to freedom had paint on its face and slurs at its base.

Andrade says he’s had to deal with racism since he first came to Canada from Jamaica in 1986 to pick peaches in Niagara-on-the-Lake, though nothing as brazen as this.

If people are going to go out in the middle of the night with spray paint and target a school named after Tubman that’s for little kids, who knows what they’re going to do next, he said.

He pulled his granddaughter from the school and enrolled her elsewhere. The new school is further away, so he cannot walk from the restaurant to school to pick her up.

“I don’t have that pleasure now but I feel like she’s safer where she is now,” he said. “You can’t take the poison and depend on the antidote. Prevention is better than a cure. I’m not going to have her go there knowing that someone is targeting the school.”

Two teens each face 13 counts of mischief under $5,000 in the vandalism spree but no hate crime charges were laid.

Andrade said if someone commits a hate crime, they should be charged with it. Not doing so sets a precedent that doesn’t account for the impact of hate crimes. They scar people, he said, and it can last a lifetime.

“When you give them a slap on the wrist, the next guy that comes up, now the lawyer can just use their case to buffer his case and say, ‘Why should he get hate crime because this guy only got mischief?’ ”

Even if the teenagers were charged with one of Canada’s three hate-related crimes, data from Ontario’s attorney general’s office shows they would not likely be convicted.

In 2021, for example, less than 0.4 per cent of hate incidents resulted in a conviction for a hate crime.

Although there were 4,360 incidents from 2018 to 2021, charges were only laid 30 times. Of those, 25 resulted in no conviction.

The University of Toronto’s Bryan said the high failure rate of hate crime charges in court can make officers hesitant to recommend one of the three Criminal Code charges to Crown attorneys. Rather than expend time and resources pursuing a charge that might fail in court, police will focus on a charge they know has a greater chance of sticking, like assault or mischief.

Det. Const. Fabiano Mendes of the Hamilton Police Service’s hate crime unit said officers are “committed to investigate any occurrence, even if it doesn’t result in charges.”

“It’s important even that sometimes when charges are not warranted, that we provide necessary support. So it’s a phone call from the hate investigator with victim services,” Mendes said. “And it’s important for us to know that the stats and the data on hate incidents as well, because somebody who might be involved in a hate incident today, might be involved in a hate crime tomorrow. Having that history is important for us to build a case later on in court to show that pattern of behaviour.”

Boal, Niagara Regional Police’s hate crime detective, said the hate-based motivation of a crime can still play a role in sentencing, even if a hate crime is not before the courts.

“It would become an aggravating factor when it came down to sentencing. Like any other criminal charges, the police can make requests and recommendations, but it ultimately falls to the courts,” he said.

In 2021, for instance, a St. Catharines man found guilty of dangerous driving in a racist road-rage incident was ordered by a judge to write a 5,000-word essay on the impacts of racism in society, despite not being charged with a hate crime. The day after the traffic incident he had sent the victim, a Black woman, several racist Facebook messages.

Although no hate crime charges were laid, Justice Harvey Brownstone nonetheless called the incident “a hate crime” and “an act of severe racism.”

Anti-hate activists say Canada’s hate crime laws need more robust case law behind them to determine if they work and to hold those who commit acts of racism to account.

“In order for those who perpetrate hate crimes to be held accountable, and in order to broaden and strengthen what is considered a hate crime by the justice system, the charges would need to be tested in court, but hate crimes rarely ever make it that far,” said Saleh Waziruddin of the Niagara Region Anti-Racism Association.

Hamilton police spokesperson Jackie Penman said the current legal framework around hate crimes is a challenge for police, and because of the lack of case law, officers rely on consultations with Crown attorneys and other hate investigators when determining if a charge can be laid.

When the hatred was aimed at Selam Debs in 2021, it came as an unending avalanche of malice.

Caught between a wave of overtly racist threats and the fury of the nascent “Freedom Convoy,” the Waterloo yoga instructor found no safe haven. She was targeted because she was Black, with hundreds of online messages and death threats liberally using the N-word. Her social media accounts were hacked and populated with images of child porn. Her online yoga class was “Zoom-bombed” by a naked white man.

Debs’ yoga studio was already grappling with the economic strain of the pandemic. Her decision to follow COVID-19 public health rules, including using a vaccine passport when she could reopen, and her outspoken criticism of the convoy movement and its links to white nationalist figures, unleashed the digital mob.

“When I talked, for example, about a Black yoga session at the University of Guelph for Black students, faculty and staff, these groups organized to come and attack me. Hundreds of people attacked me (online),” she said. “It was compounding and I no longer felt safe. I finally had to make the decision to protect myself and my family and my staff and students.”

She shut down the studio she ran since 2016 on New Year’s Eve 2022.

“I’ve definitely been in a state of grief for the last couple of months,” she said. “The impacts of the lack of safety and the anti-Black racism and the harm, that part you know, obviously is the reason why I eventually decided to close the studio.”

Debs did call police, but she said they did not take action until her supporters urged them to take the ongoing harassment seriously. Although officers were able to locate and warn some of those sending the racist threats, the messages did not stop.

Her case is but one in the rising wave of hate in Ontario in the last several years. Race and ethnicity are the top reported motivations behind hate incidents in the province, according to Statistics Canada data, more than religion and sexual orientation combined.

But the story behind the statistics is debated by activists, academics and police.

“It could be the case that, you know, victims are reporting more, that there’s greater awareness around a crime,” said the University of Toronto’s Bryan. “The other possibility is that there’s simply more hate crime.”

While some activists, like Kim Martin from No Hate in the Hammer, agree people are more willing to report a possible hate crime, there are other factors causing a rise in total incidents.

“We also reflected on the impact of social media providing some connection and organizing opportunities that were not previously available for people that are wanting to spread hate into communities,” she said.

Acting Insp. Feras Ismail, training officer with the Peel Regional Police formerly of the service’s equity and inclusion bureau, said spikes in hate incidents often follow high-profile sociopolitical trends or events. There was a notable rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, and prior to that, a rise in anti-Muslim hate following incidents involving ISIL in the Middle East.

The presidency of Donald Trump, which included barring people from Muslim countries from entering the United States, added more fuel to the fire.

“There is a financial saying which is when America sneezes, Canada catches a cold,” said OUTNiagara’s Goring. “There’s so much intersection between their world and ours. Many of the sentiments do carry over.”

Some people remain hesitant to report a hate incident to police — sometimes because of historic tensions between some communities and law enforcement, or because they believe police won’t take an incident seriously. This makes it difficult to determine how many hate incidents are happening in a given community.

Even if they are willing to file a police report, victims of hate often feel like they must downplay its impact as to not invite blacklash from the broader community, said Damptey, who had an election sign vandalized with a “White Lives Matter” sticker that promoted the Telegram white nationalist network during the 2022 municipal election in Hamilton.

Damptey was outraged, but said responding with that emotion would have pushed away the very people needed to combat hate.

“If you are over the top, people will feel like ‘This is not a person we want in office who is just angry.’ So you have to keep that in mind,” he said. “You really want people to watch it and go away saying, ‘Whether I’m Black or white, whether I’m part of a racialized community or not, what can I do to make sure that it doesn’t happen again?’ ”

TOMORROW: Read Part 2 of the Metroland investigation Hate Rising

— With files from Joelle Kovach, The Peterborough Examiner

Grant LaFleche is an investigative reporter with The Spectator. Reach him via email: glafleche@torstar.ca