A major American news outlet has labelled Vancouver "."
Bloomberg cites a to back up the claim, including that anti-Asian hate crime in the city has year and a survey that says one out of two B.C. residents of Asian descent have experienced a hate incident in the last year.
"Last year, more anti-Asian hate crimes were reported to police in Vancouver, a city of 700,000 people, than in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities combined," writes journalist Natalie Obiko Pearson.
In the story, Pearson points to a recent study from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University. In it, statistics show anti-Asian hate crime in the four largest Canadian cities rose more quickly than in the U.S. In Vancouver anti-Asian hate crimes made up more than a third of all hate crimes reported to police. The study notes Canada has a broader definition of what a hate crime is.
"The region is confronting an undercurrent of racism that runs as long and deep as the historical links stretching across the Pacific,"
She notes that COVID-19 is the apparent trigger of the latest incidents.
"The disproportionate rash of incidents has raised an unsettling question: Maybe Vancouver isn’t the bastion of progressive multiculturalism it thinks it is," she adds.
