In 2001, as a constable with the Edmonton Police Service (EPS), Stephen Camp noticed how few hate crimes appeared in the force’s yearly arrest statistics. “For a decade, we were reporting between three and seven hate crimes per year,” said Camp, who began patrolling Edmonton streets in 1991. The disparity corresponded to what he had read in researching the subject, which showed a significant discrepancy between what communities experienced and what police reported.

Two years later, with funding from the federal government, Camp established the force’s first hate crimes unit. Reporting of hate instances spiked in the years following, to 62 in 2003, then 80 in 2004, and 278 in 2007.  For Camp, the data suggested many people were long unwilling to report the offences, often because of mistrust of police, or because they didn’t know hate-crime laws existed. Many police departments, meanwhile, were ill-equipped to identify and log the offences.

Camp began advocating for a standalone hate-crime provision in Canada’s Criminal Code in 2006 because he suspected what he saw in Edmonton was happening across the country: hate crimes were significantly underreported.

Camp’s decades-long efforts recently paid off. Introduced in February, the federal government’s Online Harms Act makes hate-based acts separate indictable offences under the Criminal Code; currently, hate crimes are considered aggravating factors in other crimes. His work, particularly a 2021 paper on the subject, was a key factor in the proposed change. “Camp’s report, in addition to the generous insight of many experts in the field, was instrumental in the bottom-up approach our government took in the creation of this important legislation,” said Chantalle Aubertin, a spokesperson for federal Justice Minister Arif Virani. 

The provision is part of the Liberal government’s broader fight against internet harms ranging from online hate to child sexual exploitation, which places greater onus on web and social media companies to curb them. Bill C-63 proposes an amendment to the Criminal Code making it a specific offence to commit a crime where hatred of a protected group is the underlying motivation. The provision has faced particular scrutiny, though, not least because it carries a sentence of up to life in prison—a penalty that has riled defenders of free expression.

“Our position is that there is a substantial risk that in some circumstances, the possibility of life imprisonment would constitute cruel and unusual punishment,” said Anaïs Bussières-McNicoll, the fundamental freedoms director at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. “There is also a concern that the mere existence of a possibility of life imprisonment could have a significant impact on freedom of expression, in the sense that it could chill free speech.”

Life imprisonment is expected to be used only for underlying offences that already carry such a sentence, including attempted murder, according to Aubertin.

For Camp, the issue boils down to bad data that has long made collecting hate crime statistics a challenge. A 1995 Statistics Canada report noted that police forces use differing thresholds to identify a hate-based crime. Some logged an offence as hate-based only if it targeted race, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender or disability—a so-called “exclusive definition” of the term. 

Others logged any crime motivated “in whole or in part, by a bias” as hate-motivated. “Jurisdictions adhering to an exclusive definition report significantly lower rates of hate crimes,” the report said. The problem persists, even among police forces that have dedicated hate-crime units, Edmonton included. “Hate crime is a tricky one to track, because it’s not an actual offence in and of itself,” said EPS spokesperson Cheryl Voordenhout.

For Camp, the resulting mismatched, incomplete data coming from the estimated 177 police forces in 10 provinces and three territories fails to capture the severity of the problem. “Police, amongst myriad responsibilities, are like vacuums, and one of the inadvertent things they do is collect crime data,” he said. “But without a standalone hate crime section, they are confronted with challenging methods to properly catalogue it unless they devise their own.” 

Camp became aware of racial animus as a young boy growing up poor in Halifax. As an undergraduate in the 1980s, he watched as groups like the white supremacist Heritage Front gained prominence in Canada. He drew inspiration from Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. At the same time, he saw how hate-based crime affected religious and sexual minorities. “My uneasiness and revulsion were quite strong, knowing this was wrong,” he said. 

In 2006 he pitched hate crime as a standalone offence to be incorporated into the Criminal Code to then-Conservative MP Rona Ambrose. “She appeared to like the idea,” he said, though it would take 18 years and a change in government for it to come to fruition. Camp retired in 2020, and today serves as a consultant for the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.

The Liberals first promised to address the issue months after the mass shootings at two New Zealand mosques in 2019. A lengthy consultative process followed, before Justice took over the bill last fall from Canadian Heritage.

Though it has taken decades, Camp is nonetheless happy to see his idea take shape in legislation. “Having a standalone provision will allow us to have the tools to curtail hate crime, like better data collection, prosecution and police understanding, all of which is about ensuring public safety,” Camp said.