Hate speech and online hate

Online hate disproportionately affects young Canadians. Statistics Canada's Canadian Internet Use Survey found that 71 percent of youth aged 15–24 had encountered online hate content in the prior year — well above the national average of 49 percent across all age groups.5 The Dais's 2025 Survey of Online Harms in Canada1 found separately that 12 percent of Canadian residents reported being personally targeted by hate speech online, with rates 50 to 100 percent higher among racialized residents, recent immigrants, those living with disabilities, and 2SLGBTQ+ residents. Statistics Canada's UCR Survey recorded 4,777 hate crime incidents in 2023,2 up 32 percent from 2022. Cyber-related hate crimes rose from 92 reported incidents in 2018 to 219 in 2022.

Justice system costs

This sub-component is derived from Statistics Canada and Justice Canada data. The UCR records 219 cyber-related hate crime incidents in 2022, of which approximately 23 percent — roughly 50 incidents — involved victims aged 12 to 17. Of these, 35 percent proceed to charges and court. Applying Justice Canada's 2014 cost-per-case methodology and accounting for changes in spending and criminal incident demand in the twelve years since,3 we estimate between approximately $0.5 million and $2.3 million in justice system costs attributable to cyber-related hate crime affecting Canadian youth. This represents a small share of the broader online harms cost base; the bulk of justice system costs associated with online harms to children and youth are captured under cyberbullying, child sexual exploitation, and online harassment categories elsewhere in this analysis.

Mental health costs of victimization

Applied to the approximately 5.0 million Canadians aged 15 to 24 within this paper's scope — of whom 12 percent, consistent with the Dais (2025) survey, report being personally targeted by online hate speech — and assuming 8 to 14 percent4 of targeted youth experience impacts sufficient to seek mental health treatment, at a blended treatment cost of $1,500 to $2,500 per person annually, this yields $72 million to $211 million in annual mental health system costs. For context, if the same attribution were applied to all Canadian residents targeted by online hate (approximately 4.3 million across all ages), the estimated cost would range from $520 million to $1.51 billion — underscoring that the youth-focused scope used in this paper is conservative relative to the full societal burden.

Civic and institutional costs

Online hate imposes costs on civic life beyond individual victims — costs that don't show up in any individual victim's medical bill or lost paycheque. When young people stop posting in public forums, when youth volunteer engagement declines, when emerging political and community leaders from targeted demographics decline to enter public life — those are real economic costs. They're just harder to measure because they're spread thin across millions of Canadians and across institutions rather than concentrated on identifiable individuals.

Statistics Canada's General Social Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating documents that Canadians contribute approximately 5 billion volunteer hours annually to civic organizations, charities, religious institutions, school councils, sports leagues, and community groups. Survey research from The Dais, Pew Research Canada, and equivalent international studies consistently shows that 5 to 10 percent of those personally targeted by online hate report withdrawing from public-facing civic activities. While this is a real economic cost, translating targeted-individual withdrawal rates to a precise population-level dollar figure requires assumptions about the broader chilling effect that cannot be directly grounded in current Canadian empirical literature. We therefore treat this as a category of harm that is real and economically significant, but not quantifiable with sufficient precision for inclusion in the headline estimate.

For illustrative purposes only: if a 1 to 2 percent chilling effect on national volunteer participation were assumed — well below what the targeted-individual data would suggest — and valued at the federal minimum wage of approximately $18.15 per hour, the implied annual welfare loss would be approximately $910 million to $1.8 billion nationally, of which youth aged 15–24 would represent approximately $155 million to $325 million annually. This figure is excluded from Table 1 and from all headline totals.

Overall, the total estimated cost for the hate speech and online hate category is $73 million to $213 million annually.