‘Hate against one of us is hate against us all’: King City students learn about dangers of hate, intolerance

Tour For Humanity bus teaches students, teachers about Holocaust

Yorkregion.com
Feb. 8, 2023
Laura Broadley

Just two days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, students at King City Public School got a lesson on human rights.

The Tour For Humanity bus from Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies (FSWC) stopped Jan. 24 at the elementary school to give students and teachers a chance to learn about hate and intolerance.

The bus is a 30-seat, wheelchair accessible, mobile education centre that teaches students, teachers, community leaders and front-line workers about the Holocaust, genocide and Canada’s human rights history through workshops.

“We know that hate against one of us is hate against us all,” Michael Levitt, president and CEO of FSWC, said.

Holocaust education is especially important, Levitt said, as awareness about it among students is diminishing.

Those students who do know about the Holocaust get their knowledge from social media, he added.

“We know the role social media is having right now in fuelling hate and discrimination. This is an opportunity for these wonderful students to come on and hear about the Holocaust,” Levitt said.

Since Tour For Humanity launched in 2013, it has visited more than 800 schools across Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Quebec, representing more than 150,000 students, educators and community members.

To reach more people, a second Tour For Humanity bus was launched last year.

During a stop, the bus can host up to 180 students in about five workshops.

“We educate students on the dangers of hate and intolerance through a series of different workshops targeted to different age groups, anywhere from Grade 3 and up,” said Daniella Lurion, Tour For Humanity director.

During a workshop, the FSWC educators will take participants through different topics, including the Holocaust, Canadian Indian residential schools, Japanese internment camps and recent hate crimes.

“We encourage all students on the bus to leave the bus and make positive changes in their communities,” Lurion said.

The benefit of having a bus instead of the educators going into classrooms is that the bus is a “safe space,” Lurion said.

“While we are on school property, we’re not in their space, they’re in ours,” she added.

The goal of the Tour For Humanity is to have students leaving the bus asking questions about what they learned.

“What we do on the bus is designed as a starting-off point,” Lurion said.

The total number of police-reported hate crimes in Canada jumped from 1,951 in 2019 to 3,360 in 2021, a 72 per cent increase, according to Statistics Canada.

Hate crimes are defined by Statistics Canada as “crimes in which the offender is motivated by a characteristic of the victim that identifies the victim as a member of a group toward which the offender feels some animosity.”

Statistics Canada notes there are varying definitions of hate-motivated crimes used by police services throughout the country, and therefore the collection of data is difficult. It also makes note of the number of incidents that are never reported to police, which may run as high as 95 per cent.

There were 1,619 police-reported racially motivated hate crimes in 2020, but that number rose to 1,723 in 2021, a 6 per cent increase. Hate crimes motivated by religion (including Jewish, Muslim and Catholic) jumped from 530 to 884 in 2020 and 2021, respectively, a 67 per cent increase, according to Statistics Canada.

“Recognizing and understanding issues and incidents of hate and discrimination, both globally as well as here at home in York Region, help us understand the actions we really need to take to try to combat that,” said Tod Dungey, associate director of leadership and schools at York Region District School Board.

Providing education opportunities for students and teachers is a way the school board is facing that challenge.

“That’s how we really believe that we can help change actions, help build students into adults who are going to fight for and be allies for those of every faith,” Dungey said.