ARE WE REALLY IN A VIOLENT SOCIETY?

STATISTICS CANADA’S CRIME SEVERITY INDEX SHOWS TORONTO BELOW NATIONAL AVERAGE

Following a mass shooting that killed a 10-year-old girl and an 18-year-old woman, both the federal government and Toronto Mayor John Tory are promising a crackdown on handgun ownership and illegal firearms. “There are far too many people carrying around guns in our city and our region who should not have them,” Tory told city council on Monday. And Tory has a point: Even before Sunday’s shooting, Toronto was already counting more shootings and shooting victims in the first seven months of 2018 than in all of 2017. But is the uptick in Toronto gun tragedies a sign of the country as a whole?

CANADIAN MURDER RATE TRENDS DOWN

Although murders have been on the upswing over the past few years, Canada’s murder rate still remains lower than at any time since the late 1960s. The 2016 homicide rate was 1.68 murders for every 100,000 people. For context, Canada spent the entire 1980s with a rate of more than two murders per 100,000. In 2016, 611 people were murdered in a country of 35 million. In 1975, 700 people were murdered in a Canada with a population of only 23 million.

OTHER KINDS OF MURDERS ALSO DOWN

Canada marked a dubious milestone in 2016. That year, shootings pulled past stabbings as the No. 1 method of killing someone in Canada: 223 people were shot to death, 175 were stabbed and the remaining 213 were killed by other means, include beating and strangulation. If one were to look exclusively at the data on gun murders, it would seem like Canadian homicides were spiralling out of control. The gun homicide average of the prior five years was only 160 — 28 per cent lower than the 2016 number of 223. However, the average total murders for the prior five years was only 559 — just 8.5 per cent lower than the 2016 total of 611. The reason for this is that while Canadian gun murders were going up, stabbings and beatings both went down. There are good arguments to be made that guns make it easier to murder people, but the point is that gun crime alone is not necessarily a good gauge of how many Canadians are being murdered.

MOST VIOLENT CITIES ARE IN THE PRAIRIES

When it comes to raw numbers, the country’s largest city is still one of its safest urban areas. Statistics Canada maintains a measure called the “Crime Severity Index,” which counts crimes and then ranks them by severity in order to gauge the relative violence taking place across the country. According to numbers released just this week, Toronto’s crime severity index is 48.7 — well below the Canadian average of 72.9. The only major cities with a lower rate, in fact, were Barrie and Quebec City. Meanwhile, the prairie cities of Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg and Regina all have Crime Severity Indices well above 100. Edmonton alone suffered 45 murders in 2017 compared to Toronto’s 61 — a particularly notable gap considering that Toronto is more than three times the size.

VIOLENT CRIME MOSTLY GUN-FREE

Police keep track of every time a criminal pulls a gun, points a gun or shoots a gun that misses. It’s essentially a running tally of every time that a gun is used for a crime without anybody getting hurt. And this number has been jumping precipitously ever since 2005. In 2017 there were 2,734 instances of someone “using, pointing or discharging” a firearm. Across the first decade of the 2000s, by contrast, the yearly average was only 1,946. While some of this may be due to differences in police reporting of gun crimes, it certainly seems to show that criminals are waving guns around much more. However, when it comes to overall violent crime in Canada, most of that is happening without a gun. In 2012 Statistics Canada reported that only two per cent of Canadian violent crimes involved a gun, and only 19 per cent involved a weapon of any kind.