On the morning of Aug. 21, a man walked into Nanaksar Gurdwara in northeast Edmonton during prayers and attacked two worshippers with a screwdriver, one 75, one 51. Police haven’t called it a hate crime. The chief said it was too early to say.

Nanaksar isn’t the first case like this in this province, and the pattern isn’t just in the violence. It’s in how each one gets answered.

In December 2024, 20-year-old Harshandeep Singh was beaten and shot to death in Edmonton; police never classified it as a hate crime. In March 2026, 22-year-old Birinder Singh was shot dead in a drive-by shooting on the Queen Elizabeth II Highway near Leduc. RCMP eventually called that one “not racially motivated” and “a one-off event.” The World Sikh Organization publicly disputed the finding and asked for a hate-crime investigation instead.

Three cases in under two years. Three different official answers: unclassified, ruled out, and now, at Nanaksar, still pending.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Statistics Canada’s newest data show police-reported hate crimes against South Asian people rose 49 per cent in a year, from 324 incidents in 2024 to 483 in 2025, while most other tracked categories held steady or fell. It’s now the fastest-growing category the agency tracks, and Statistics Canada itself flagged the jump as notable. A separate World Sikh Organization survey found 65 per cent of Sikh Canadians report facing hate or harassment. Most never report it to police, and Statistics Canada still files Sikh incidents under a catch-all “other” religion category with faiths that have nothing to do with them.

Police have a real reason to be careful with the words “hate crime;” an unproven motive can sink a prosecution. That’s a fair defence for any one of these cases taken alone. It’s a much harder defence for three of them, especially alongside the Statistics Canada numbers.

Call this what it is. Alberta has a real, accelerating problem with hate directed at South Asians. Every institution positioned to say so is built instead to avoid it: police deciding what counts as a hate crime; a provincial government setting enforcement priorities; a federal agency sorting the data into a catch-all category.

I don’t think that’s a conspiracy. I think it’s what caution looks like when nobody wants to be first to use the word.

All of this is happening in a province whose government spent early August arguing that police shouldn’t be “policing opinions” at all. After Edmonton police deleted a video urging the public to report online hate speech, Premier Danielle Smith responded on video: “Our approach in Alberta is that the federal government does have the power of criminal law. We have the power of non-enforcement.”

Her public safety minister added that officers should focus on “stopping violent crime, not policing opinions or hurt feelings.” I’m not arguing that it caused a stabbing three weeks later. But it’s fair to ask whether a government defending unpopular speech is raising the cost of holding hateful views, or quietly lowering it.

Karl Popper had a name for this in 1945: the paradox of tolerance. A society that extends unconditional tolerance to people working to destroy tolerance eventually loses the capacity to be tolerant of anything. Popper wasn’t arguing for banning unpopular opinions. He was arguing that a functioning society draws a line somewhere before speech turns into harm. It’s worth asking which side of that line Alberta thinks it’s protecting.

The World Sikh Organization’s statement after the Nanaksar attack called it “extremely disappointing.” Restrained language for a screwdriver assault during morning prayer, and not the first time the organization has reached for that exact phrase.

The wedding scheduled at the gurdwara that same morning went ahead anyway, once police cleared the building. Services resumed the following week. Nobody wanted one man with a screwdriver deciding how a community practises its faith.

None of this requires anyone in government to have caused the incident. But at some point, calling it a coincidence stops being caution. It’s a choice, made by people who don’t have to live with what it costs.

Kirat Sandhu is a University of Alberta graduate and member of Edmonton’s Sikh community.