OPINION: Meet Canada’s crime capitals -

Which country—Canada or the United States—has the most crime?

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Most Canadians would likely say the U.S. by a wide margin. But as noted in my new study published by the Fraser Institute, while overall crime rates in Canada are below rates in the U.S., when you look at individual cities it’s a different story.

For example, for the violent crime rate (assaults, homicides, etc.), from 2019 to 2022 (the latest year of available comparable data), Winnipeg had the highest annual average in Canada at 675 violent crimes per 100,000 people and 18th-highest out of 334 urban areas in both countries. Thunder Bay, Ontario (546 per 100,000) is the next highest Canadian jurisdiction and 42nd-highest overall, ahead of U.S. jurisdictions such as Santa Fe, New Mexico and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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This mean both Winnipeg and Thunder Bay ranked in the top one-fifth of violent crime rates among urban areas in Canada and the U.S. Perhaps surprisingly to some Canadians, larger Canadian urban areas such as Vancouver (ranked 214th with 257 violent crimes per 100,000), Montreal (ranked 229th with 238 per 100,000) and Toronto (ranked 261 with 203 per 100,000) have a much lower violent crime rate. At the bottom of the violent crime rankings, we find Ontario jurisdictions St. Catharines-Niagara, Guelph and Barrie, and Quebec jurisdictions Quebec City and Sherbrooke.

The rankings are even more stark for property crime (burglary, break and enter, car theft, etc.), where Lethbridge, Alberta (5,521 property crimes per 100,000 people) and Kelowna, British Columbia (4,932 per 100,000) ranked first and second among all 334 Canadian and U.S.urban centres, ahead of U.S. areas such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas(ranked 168 with 2,187 per 100,000) and Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, California (ranked 181 with 2,141 per 100,000). Once again, for this type of crime, Quebec City and Sherbrooke had some of the lowest rates among the two countries.

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There are several takeaways from these crime rate rankings across North America.

First, while violent crime rates were higher in the U.S. than in Canada, property crime rates were more similar. Second, while the highest violent crime rates were in U.S. urban areas, some of the highest property crime rates were in Canadian areas. Many U.S. urban areas are as safe—if not safer—than Canadian areas when it comes to both violent and property crime rates. And urban areas in Quebec often ranked at the bottom of crime rankings, demonstrating once again Quebec’s distinctiveness within the Canadian federation.

The big question is why. Why do some urban areas in North America have higher crimes rates than others? My study does not answer that question. But if anything, these data should cause us to question our usual comfortable self-assurance that Canada is safer and less violent than the U.S. And if policymakers at all levels of government want to reduce crime across Canada, they should understand crime rates before proposing solutions.

Livio Di Matteo is a professor of economics at Lakehead University, a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute and the author of Ranking Crime in Canada and the United States.

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