Canada has seen a steep rise in hate toward South Asians on social media in recent years, with a large spike occurring during the recent federal election — especially aimed at former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, according to a new report.
The report, titled “The Rise of Anti-South Asian Hate in Canada” and published by the U.K.-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, used the social media monitoring tool Brandwatch to analyze posts that mention Canadian cities and regions and South Asians on X.
Between May and December 2023, they found 1,163 posts containing explicitly hateful keywords toward South Asians. During the same period in 2024, that number rose to 16,884 — an increase of more than 1,350 per cent.
The report says Canada has been singled out as a cautionary tale — in the eyes of far-right influencers and extremists globally — of how immigration policies can lead to an “invasion” of South Asian migrants.
Steven Rai, an analyst at ISD who focuses on domestic extremism, pointed to the American-based X account EndWokeness, which has 3.7 million followers, as one that has made numerous posts about South Asians in Canada “overtaking society.”
“Canada is held up by a lot of racists as the example of what happens to a country when it’s supposedly overrun with South Asians,” Rai said.
“Domestic extremists within Canada are promoting that stereotype and that gets picked up by people all around the world.”
The ISD notes that hate isn’t confined to the online sphere. Between 2019 and 2023, police-reported hate crimes against South Asians in Canada increased by more than 200 per cent, according to Statistics Canada.
The ISD defines domestic extremism as a belief system grounded in racial or cultural supremacy, as well as misogyny, based on a perceived threat from out-groups, which can be pursued through violent or non-violent means.
Between May 2023 and April 2025, the institute tracked more than 26,600 posts using anti-South Asian slurs in relation to Canada.
In the lead-up to the federal election campaign, between March 1 and April 20, more than 2,300 posts from Canadian accounts contained anti-South Asian slurs. There was a notable spike on April 17 in response to the English-language leaders’ debate. Rai said the majority targeted Singh.
Rai believes Singh is often a target of hate not only because he’s a brown man who wears a turban, but also because he’s articulate, well-dressed and has reached the upper echelons of Canadian society.
“If you’re a white supremacist and you’re seeing someone like Jagmeet Singh flourish and gain prominence in Canadian politics and in society … a person like that is really seen as a profound threat,” he said.
Reena Kukreja, an associate professor at Queen’s University, said South Asians have become a cause célèbre of the far right because they are highly visible, with significant diasporas in communities such as Brampton, especially due to the large flow of international students and temporary foreign workers from the region in recent years.
While South Asian migrants have recently been blamed for economic anxieties connected to the housing crisis and unemployment, the report also describes posts describing South Asians as “dirty, dangerous and clannish.”
“It’s a channelization of fear which has always existed about the racial other,” Kukreja said.
The ISD report highlights Diagolon, a loosely knit online group that it describes as “white supremacist accelerationists.” Accelerationists believe a collapse of modern-day society is necessary to bring radical social change.
Jeremy MacKenzie, the founder of Diagolon, has defended the group as a meme or joke meant to provoke the media and society at large. But his personal Telegram channel is rife with posts insulting Indian people and using slurs against South Asians. He frequently uses the words “war” and “invasion” and said in a recent video “our people are literally dying off.”
There are also posts framed around the Great Replacement, a racist conspiracy theory that contends there is a co-ordinated effort to replace white people with racialized immigrants in western society. Rai said this is central to Diagolon’s ideology, often propagated under a veneer of jokes of memes.
“I think they’re trying to normalize hate,” he said. “We see countries, politicians talking about migrants being invaders … And I think groups like Diagolon are taking note of that, and they feel emboldened to go out in public and rally around things like mass deportations.”
MacKenzie did not respond to a request for comment.
