It’s been six weeks since a brazen, allegedly bigoted attack took place on the street in a major Canadian city. It should have been national news. Perhaps under different circumstances, it would have been.
In the early hours of June 23, Emma MacLean and her girlfriend were walking in downtown Halifax. By Ms. MacLean’s telling, one man made a “sexually degrading” comment toward her, which catalyzed a verbal confrontation between Ms. MacLean’s girlfriend and the man, who she says “made several disgusting slurs, some being homophobic.” The confrontation then turned physically violent. Ms. MacLean says a group of approximately seven to 10 men started attacking them, “throwing several punches and kicks to our faces, ribs,” which resulted in a broken nose, chipped tooth, and several cuts and bruises.
There is bystander video of the altercation, which indeed shows a group of young men surrounding the women, one of whom is on the ground, while the other appears to receive a punch to the face. Police were called to the scene, but no one was arrested.
That was six weeks ago. Ms. MacLean told Halifax media outlet The Coast that she had been contacted by victims services and the hate crime unit, but as of July 7, she was struggling to get any information about the investigation. I followed up with Halifax Regional Police last week, who said that “officers are continuing to move the investigation forward.”
Though other local media outlets have reported on the attack, there has been zero national coverage, which is a curious thing when incidents of vandalized rainbow crosswalks make national news. But this case – of two women physically attacked, seemingly because of their sexual orientation – didn’t break through the East Coast bubble. Why?
The media report on alleged hate crimes all the time, even before suspects have been identified or arrested. The Prime Minister spoke out when a Toronto girl alleged a man cut off her hijab on her walk to school in 2018 (though the police later determined that it didn’t happen). There was national outcry in June following a suspected hate-motivated arson attack at a Muslim family’s home in London, Ont. Attacks on Jewish schools and businesses are reported nationally. Many individual incidents of homophobic conflicts are picked up and reported on across the country. So why not this one, especially since there is video of the attack?
The answer might be in how Ms. MacLean identified her alleged attackers. Posting on Facebook, she said that the men were Middle Eastern.
It should be noted that the identities and ethnicity of the men in the video have not been independently confirmed, nor do we know what exactly happened on that early morning in June. But we do know that two women have alleged they were attacked by men they say hurled homophobic slurs, and that’s usually something the rest of the country learns about pretty quickly.
My suspicion is that what happened here is that Ms. MacLean’s assertion about the identity of her attackers threw an awkward wrench into what otherwise would’ve been a straightforward story about a seemingly homophobic attack. Indeed, reporting about the incident suddenly risked perpetuating negative stereotypes against Middle Eastern men.
To be clear, there has been no grand media conspiracy to cover up this story, but instead – and I’m presuming – a number of individual reporters and editors caught wind of the story and decided to wait until the identities of the men were confirmed by police to report on what happened to be accurate. That’s not usually done, and might not have been the case (again, I’m presuming) if a group of skinheads had attacked Ms. MacLean and her girlfriend that night. There was always the option to report what happened without any mention of the suspects’ backgrounds.
The national silence on this story speaks to an uncomfortable clash of identities that we don’t quite know how to deal with here in Canada. Though there has long been hostility and oppression toward the LGBTQ community from white conservatives, there is also a tension in some immigrant communities around LGBTQ rights. Immigrant parents, for example, played an active role in the 1 Million March 4 Children rallies across the country in 2023 to protest LGBTQ policies and education in schools. Muslim parents led much of the backlash against changes to Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum in 2015.
Again, we don’t know that the men who assaulted Ms. MacLean and her girlfriend were from those communities. But it is reasonable to presume that the mere mention of their background effectively silenced any public response to the attack. That’s not fair to Ms. MacLean and her girlfriend, and not fair to Canadians who deserve to know what’s happening, good and bad, in their country.