sc94597 on 27 March 2015
| Runa216 said: You know, up here in Canada |
Canada isn't some utopia where anti-LGBT people don't exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_acts_of_violence_against_LGBT_people#Canada
- Jordan Smith, 27, of White Rock, British Columbia, was brutally assaulted on September 27, 2008 by 20-year-old Michael Kandola of Vancouver. Smith was holding hands with another male while walking in Vancouver's Davie Village, an area frequented by GLBTQ individuals, when Kandola started following the pair with four to five of his friends and began shouting anti-gay obscenities towards the gay pair. Kandola confronted the two and punched Smith on the side of his head, knocking him unconscious. Smith required surgery for his injuries. Kandola was charged with assault causing bodily harm, and police sought to invoke Canadian hate-crime legislation against Kandola. A Facebook group with over 4000 members was established petitioning for a minimum life imprisonment sentence for Kandola.[10] On April 30, 2010, the assault was deemed by the B.C. Supreme Court to be a hate crime and Kandola was sentenced to 17 months in jail.[11]
- Anji Dimitriou and Jane Currie were physically assaulted on November 3, 2008 at an Oshawa, Ontario public school while waiting to pick up their children. Mark Scott, the attacker, punched both women in the face, referring to them as "men", "fucking dyke bitches" and spit in Dimitriou's face. He was in court in January 2009, for two counts of assault causing bodily harm.[12][13] However, the incident was prosecuted as a simple assault and not as a hate crime, as Scott neither advocated genocide nor incited anyone else to join in the attack.[14]
- On March 13, 2009, Shawn Woodward was charged with aggravated assault after physically attacking 62-year-old Ritchie Dowrey in Vancouver's Fountainhead Pub, allegedly because "He’s a faggot. He deserved it."[15] Dowrey had briefly bumped into Woodward's shoulder, which the heterosexual Woodward characterized during his trial as a predatory sexual advance.[16] Although Dowrey survived the assault, he suffered serious and permanent brain damage, and spent the entire rest of his life living in care facilities until his death in 2015.[17] At Woodward's trial, Justice Jocelyn Palmer rejected the allegation that Dowrey had groped Woodward, ultimately finding that "[Woodward's] intention was to deny, deflect and dissemble. He fabricated this story to justify his outrageous assault."
- On October 18, 2010, the home of a gay couple in Little Pond, Prince Edward Island was firebombed. Both men escaped the fire unharmed, but their home was destroyed. In late October and November, a series of rallies and fundraising concerts was held in both Little Pond and Charlottetown to support the couple and to oppose homophobic violence.
- On April 17, 2012, Halifax gay activist Raymond Taavel was beaten to death outside Menz & Mollyz, a gay bar on the city's Gottingen Street, by Andre Denny, a paranoid schizophrenic on an unsupervised leave from a nearby forensic hospital for those found Not Criminally Responsible for previous unlawful activity, after attempting to break up a fight between Denny and another man.[20] Taavel was a former chair of Halifax Pride, the city's gay pride festival, and a former editor at the LGBT magazine Wayves and the spiritual magazine Shambhala Sun.[20] Over 1,000 people attended a vigil in Taavel's memory later the same evening, which included performances by poet Tanya Davis, actor and writer Stewart Legere and singer-songwriters Rose Cousins and Ria Mae.[21] Although there were unconfirmed allegations that Denny used anti-gay slurs while attacking Taavel,[22] to date media and the police have not asserted that the case clearly constituted a hate crime, generally attributing the attack to Denny's mental illness rather than to a specifically anti-gay bias.[22] Ironically, Taavel had previously survived a more clearly anti-gay physical attack, which he wrote about in Wayves in May 2010.[23]
- On September. 30, 2012, New Westminister, British Columbia: January Marie Lapuz, 26, was found in her home in the 500 block of Third Avenue around 10 p.m. Sept. 30, 2012 suffering from stab wounds. She died the next morning at Royal Columbian Hospital. Charles Jameson Neel, 22, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in June in her stabbing death and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Lapuz was the first transgender person on the executive of Sher Vancouver, an organization supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender South Asians. She was named the organization's social coordinator, according to its website in 2012.[24][25]
- On October 12, 2013 Scott Jones, a gay resident of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, is stabbed by a knife-wielding man after leaving the Acro Lounge.[26] He is left paraplegic by the attack.[26] His attacker, Shane Matheson, is found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison in June 2014.[27] During his recovery, Jones participates in the creation of Don't Be Afraid, a provincewide campaign to combat homophobia,[28] and is selected as the grand marshal of the 2014Halifax Pride parade.[28]
