Two types of violent crimes rising at troubling rate in major Canadian cities

Violent crime rates for two types of crimes are rising in most major Canadian cities, according to a new report.

The MacDonald-Laurier Institute released its Urban Violent Crime Report, and the findings are troubling.

“In recent years, there has been a surge in violent crime across Canada as a whole.
However, not much is known about short- and long-term violent crime trends in specific
urban areas,” wrote authors Dave Snow and Richard Audas.

“Because most Canadians interact with crime in their local communities, there needs to be more focus on violent crime at the local level.”

The report analyzes 10 years of police-reported data on violent crimes (from 2014 to 2023) like homicide, aggravated assault, sexual assault, and robbery.

They explored violent crime trends in nine major cities that comprise one-third of the Canadian population: Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Peel Region, Toronto, York Region, Ottawa, and Montreal.

One of the three main conclusions the authors came to is that rates for certain crimes like sexual assault and robbery are rising nearly everywhere.

“Between 2022 and 2023, the three-year rolling average for sexual assault rates increased in all nine cities included in this study, while robbery rates increased in eight of the nine cities during the same period,” reads the report.

The report added that over the long term, sexual assault is the one violent crime that has been consistently trending upward over the last decade, with rates increasing in every city except Ottawa.

MacDonald-Laurier Institute

“The increase in the sexual assault rate in York is perhaps the starkest; since 2016, its rate has nearly doubled, from 28.0 to 55.2 per 100,000,” reads the report.

While Peel now has the lowest sexual assault rate of the nine cities, it has still seen an increase of nearly 30% in its rate, up from 38 per 100,000 people in 2016 to 52 per 100,000 in 2023.

“The increase has been similar in Montreal since 2020, with its rolling average moving from 71 to 92 per 100,000 people,” reads the report.

MacDonald-Laurier Institute

It does note that the Major Cities Chiefs Association’s (MCCA) violent crimes report says that the “Canadian definition of sexual assault [is] used to determine rape numbers for Canadian agencies except Vancouver PD.”

“Our correspondence with the Vancouver Police Department confirmed that Vancouver’s MCCA-reported data counts a crime as a sexual assault when it corresponds to the definition of rape used by many American cities rather than the Canadian definition of sexual assault,” wrote the authors.

Because the Canadian definition includes level one, level two and level three sexual assault in the Criminal Code (which is what other police services use for their data), Vancouver’s MCCA-reported sexual assault data isn’t compatible with data from other Canadian cities. This is why Vancouver has been excluded from the figures above.

When it comes to robbery, the report found that rates have increased in recent years, particularly in the short term.

Winnipeg’s 2023 rate of 305 per 100,000 is nearly triple every major city and has consistently risen.

“At the other end of the spectrum, York’s robbery rate is consistently the lowest, although it has increased over the last decade,” reads the report.

“While Edmonton has had the second-highest robbery rate for the duration of the dataset (2016 to 2023), it has experienced a considerable long-term decrease since 2016, as has Toronto.”

According to the authors, Vancouver is the only city where robberies are down in all three periods.

MacDonald-Laurier Institute

You can read the full report here.

What do you think of violent crime rates in your city? Let us know in the comments.