RCMP investigate threats against Chilliwack, B.C., Indian restaurants as potential hate crime

Hate crime is supposedly declining north of the border, according to Statistics Canada data, but a police probe into incidents in a B.C. community shows it hasn't disappeared.

RCMP in Chilliwack, a city of about 78,000 in the eastern Fraser Valley, are investigating threatening emails directed against two Indian restaurants, CBC News reports.

The targets were Shandhar Hut Indian Cuisine and the Bay Leaf Restaurant, police say.

Shandhar Hut owner Sam Atti got an email on Feb. 28 warning "Chilliwack is not a place for you," and that it doesn't need "folk from Indian and Surrey (a Vancouver suburb with a large Indo-Canadian population) to pollute this city."

The Bay Leaf, Chilliwack's only other Indian restaurant, got the same email, owner Sumit Guladi said.

Atti's son Paul said he's never experienced such overt racism in his 28 years growing up in Chilliwack, CBC News said.

The Chilliwack Progress reported Monday that the email also claimed the sender was "well-connected."

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Guladi said his house also has been hit twice by vandals in recent months.

"He said he'd had eggs thrown at his house in the past, and animal bones left on his doorstep, but he just passed it off as the work of kids," RCMP Const. Tammy Hollingsworth told the Progress. "He didn't think anything of it until he received this email."

Hollingsworth said RCMP are actively investigating the emails and are consulting with the Mounties' regional hate-crime unit. Investigators are still working to confirm the email-sender's identification.

"It's too early in the investigation to say where we're going with this yet," she said.

Meanwhile, Chilliwack residents have rallied round the restaurants' owners, who say they've received dozens of calls of support since speaking publicly about the threatening emails, CBC News said.

Chilliwack is among a cluster of growing Fraser Valley cities that includes Abbotsford and Mission. The once bucolic farming-oriented communities have become increasingly urbanized, receiving spillover from Metro Vancouver an hour's drive away.

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According to StatsCan data, the Abbotsford-Mission census metropolitan area ranked ninth in the number of hate crimes reported per 100,000 population in 2010, just behind Toronto. Among racially motivated hate crimes reported to police in Canada, south Asians fall behind black, Arab or west Asian people as favoured targets.

Canadians of Indian origin have lived in the Fraser Valley for generations. But according to the 2011 census, less than one per cent of Chilliwack's population report Punjabi as their monther tongue, behind German, Dutch and Spanish, and well below the provincial average of 4.5 per cent.