The Kenora Police Service and Grand Council Treaty 3 announced a joint initiative to tackle community hate crimes through the Respecting the Challenge project.

With funding from the Ontario Victim Services Secretariat and the Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, the program aims to increase awareness and sensitivity to the issue in the community.

“Should an individual become a victim of a hate crime, they (will) have all these resources they can go to, to either seek support services — counselling services — or seek assistance with filing a complaint,” Rhonda Kelly, justice coordinator for Grand Council Treaty 3, said. “If it’s a complaint against a group of individuals, they’ll have somebody they feel comfortable with that can either assist them with filing a police complaint or trying to make sense of what may have happened.”

Some of the initiatives include: a five-day aboriginal perceptions workshop for police and community members; author Paul Kivel, who wrote Uprooting Racism, is coming to Kenora to help establish a community approach to racism; and a Mennonite peace building institute two-day workshop will develop leadership skills in youth.

The difficulties in determining the degree of hate crimes in the community is a lack of trust, Kelly said. Most incidents aren’t reported, which makes it impossible to get to the root of the problem.

“At this point, the trust just really isn’t there,” Kelly said. “And it’s not just with the police service, the trust just isn’t there and because it’s considered such a norm, almost nobody really complains about it. They feel nobody’s going to do anything about it.

“We know the complaints are out there. My organization knows that.”

Kenora Police Chief Dan Jorgensen said the majority of hate crime complaints he hears come from a third party. It’s rare for the individual effected to come forward.

“We’re told that the people involved don’t think anything will be done, they’re afraid of the system and they don’t trust the police — there are all these issues,” Jorgensen said.

“Very often people who have been the victim of a hate crime, they’re worried about things like retaliation and ‘will the police really help me or will this just make things worse,’” he added, saying the service has a legislated mandate for dealing with hate crimes.

In addition to utilizing community resources to support victims, Kelly said they want to educate the community, particularly the youth — both First Nations and non-natives — on the impact of hate crime.

“I think as adults, we kinda see things as being ‘that’s just the way things are,’” she said. “But for youth, youth are at that age where they see things and I think they’re questioning things and wondering ‘can they play a part.’ I think we have to empower them to be able to feel comfortable to make changes to start changing the status quo.”

“We can educate people,” Jorgensen agreed. “We have to do whatever we can to facilitate the needs of the community, we can’t just put a thumb on it. We have to let them know if there is a problem, we take it seriously and will work with people any way that we can.”

The first step, he said, is building the trust so people can come forward.

“It’s important for us to have people come in so that we can deal with these things,” he said. “If we can’t deal with them, then we’ll never resolve them. They’ll always be there.”