VANCOUVER, January 25, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Former NDP Member of Parliament, Svend Robinson, made his first public appearance since his grand theft conviction last year. Robinson is currently protesting what he considers to have been an oversight by the BC attorney general who did not label the murder of a man in a park as a homosexual hate crime.
Robinson wants an additional hate-crimes charge to be added to the convictions of four men on trial for the beating death of Aaron Webster, a 41 year-old Vancouver man found dead in an area of Stanley Park frequented by homosexuals.
Robinson, addressing protestors outside a Vancouver Courthouse, claimed that 62 per cent of violent hate crimes in Vancouver in 2000 were motivated by hatred against homosexuals. An earlier statistics Canada report, in contrast, revealed that only 11 percent of hate crimes perpetrated in Canada were motivated by hatred towards homosexuals, whereas 61 percent were committed against racial minorities.
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