International students shaken up after hate speech incident on Sydney bus

A white man who swore and yelled racially charged insults at people of colour on a bus last month has been banned from Transit Cape Breton.

Transit officials were able to identify the man using security video after the incident.

Anklesh Swaroop was one of the international students on the bus, which was heading to Sydney River. He is a 26-year-old from New Delhi studying supply chain management at Cape Breton University in Sydney, N.S. He said the incident made him feel unsafe.

"This guy just started rambling and screaming on the phone that he was the only white guy on the bus and then if this continues to be, he's going to blow it up," Swaroop told CBC in an interview.

"And he just started screaming and shouting that you're all cockroaches, you don't belong here, you should go back to your country."

Swaroop said that when he looked back at the man, "He looked quite hostile, like he might get up and hit somebody."

Swaroop reported what happened to the police, but said he heard nothing in response.

Police told CBC that it was not reported.

"I was quite sad about [it], like we international students, we come here to study and to work and then we get all sorts of hate speech from people," he said.

Transit Cape Breton asked Swaroop to help identify the man by using CCTV footage and learned that this wasn't the first time this happened.

"So not only this happened, but this guy was also on another bus, the Sydney Mines bus, and he did the exact same thing," Swaroop said.

A Transit Cape Breton supervisor told Swaroop to call him directly if something like this happens again.

Christina Lamey speaks for the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, which runs the community's buses.

"That person's language, their choice of words, and everything that they were saying and doing was not at all in character of this community or should reflect at all on the people of the region because that would be very inaccurate," Lamey said in an interview.

The ban is indefinite, according to Lamey, and drivers are expected to reject the man from entering their buses.

"There are very strong code of conduct policies around our transit system. How people behave on the bus is definitely something that we take very seriously," she said.