Vitriol and hate towards newcomers to Calgary is making the work of helping those same individuals more difficult, according to Calgary based Centre for Newcomers.

As a result of both online and in-person hate directed at newcomers, the centre has said they have had to curtail the number of social media posts that they make, and have had to take security at their northeast location more seriously.

What that means is that newcomers looking for information and support are likely to find it more difficult to receive.

“We have to be very careful about putting up social media posts, because sometimes a lot of the responding to this social media posts, for example, have been quite hateful. We had one in one day that had over 200 messages that were very, very hateful,” said Dr. Kelly Ernst, Chief Program Officer for the Centre for Newcomers.

“We’ve had incidences at our centre where people driving by or shouting things were in the very worst case, one incident of an assault that was clearly motivated against somebody who is a newcomer.”

Statistics provided by the Calgary Police Service indicated that in 2024, the service investigated 17 hate crimes and 24 hate-motivated incidents directed towards immigrants and newcomers to Canada.

Hate and bias-motivated crimes have also been on the rise in Calgary, more than doubling from 115 in 2019, to 243 in 2023.

That trend is mirrored nationally, which saw 1,951 police-reported hate crimes across the nation in 2019 rise to 4,777 in 2023. The number of incidents based on race or ethnicity rose nearly 150 per cent in that same period, going from 884 to 2,128.

Dr. Ernst said that there was a hope that the number of incidents would peak with the U.S. election and that there would have been a decline, but recent actions by that administration have led to renewed fears of violence and hate against newcomers.

“We see that there’s probably going to be even greater emphasis put similarly here in Canada. That’s worrisome because what that does is it scapegoats newcomers for other societal problems that newcomers probably had nothing to do with,” he said.

Ernst said that blaming newcomers for issues like affordability and housing is missing the broader macroeconomics that are happening worldwide that see virtually every country facing the same issues.

International politics leads to local issues

Dr. Ernst said that the U.S. election of Donald Trump has also led to an increased number of people from that nation who are looking to come to Calgary.

“I’m already getting emails from people in the United States who are US citizens, saying, ‘How do I apply for refugee status in Canada?’ The volume of that has really bumped up since the Trump administration has gotten in and some of the executive orders that have been passed or signed,” he said.

“So, when we see this unfolding in the next coming year, we’re going to see the impacts to our country, to our city, to our province, to here in Centre for Newcomers.”

He said that the Centre for Newcomers acts as a microcosm for what’s going on in the greater populace of Calgary.

“It’s not just our centre that we need to be worried about. So, if we’re seeing problems here, we know there’s problems elsewhere, and we’d really like to see some of those problems subside everywhere in the city and and in the country,” Ernst said.

“I think the bottom line is we have to think about if there are problems, these are policy problems.”

Ernst said the message to Calgarians was that when newcomers are vilified, it means sidelining the potential of people to solve the very problems that society faces.

“That amazing potential is an untapped resource that we can tap into to make our country better, make our economy better, employ people, do all of the things that we would like to do as a country, even help in the tariff wars for example,” he said.

“But we’re not seeing newcomers as that opportunity, because when you were vilifying people, we see newcomers as the problem. So we have to flip it around. I guess my message is, start looking for that opportunity, and you’ll see that those opportunities can actually be realized if we put our efforts there.”