Quebec is no longer the worst province for theft of vehicles

There has been a big drop in car looting over the past decade, Nadine Filion writes.

The Insurance Bureau of Canada released its list of Canada’s most stolen vehicles from 2018, and it was mostly old heavy-duty Ford pickups, swiped mostly for their parts. But Quebec recently fell from its spot at the top of provinces with the most car thefts per capita.

It’s amazing what Statistics Canada data can reveal when you look at how it’s changed over the past decade.

Back in 2009, when the whole country registered 108,172 stolen vehicles, the highest number of them (27,57 units) disappeared from La Belle Province. Quebec had built a reputation, in fact, as a haven for car thieves.

Ten years ago, Ontario followed Quebec quite closely, with 27,175 units swiped — though of course it had about double the population. In other words, the two provinces were the sites for half of all stolen vehicles in Canada. Just over a quarter (28 per cent) vanished from the Prairies (18,246 in Alberta, 5,326 in Saskatchewan and 6,528 in Manitoba).

Almost one in five of Canada’s stolen vehicles (19,614 or 18 per cent) was taken in British Columbia. That trend hasn’t budged; B.C. manages to represent, year after year, between 15 and 20 per cent of all stolen vehicles of the country.the Maritimes? They were — and still are — hardly even showing up on thieves’ radar, with an annual average of 2,800 stolen vehicles, spread across four provinces.

We are excluding the territories, where the numbers are inconsistent, and so small they don’t even move the statistical needle.

That sort of distribution had been the norm for years — but not anymore. In 2018, just 12,455 cars were stolen in Quebec, a marked decline, and a number lower than in Ontario and Alberta. That figure marks an impressive 55 per cent reduction in thefts in Quebec in the past 10 years.

And it’s all thanks to — well, we don’t know.

“It’s difficult to tell which measure helped more than another,” says Bernard Marchand, an IBC policy analyst based in Montreal. “It’s more a combination of everything.”

The first real signs of this reversal showed up in the 2014 figures. That was the first year

Quebec saw fewer vehicles stolen than Ontario, though just barely. Since then, the gap between Quebec and Ontario has doubled every year, until now twice as many cars are stolen in Ontario (23,952) as in Quebec (12,455).

The number of cars in Canada registered as stolen in 2018 — 86,132 — marked a drop of 25 per cent compared with 10 years ago.

The big question is, with twice the stolen-car cases of Quebec, what’s the problem in Ontario? Again, it seems no one really knows.

“You’re trying to find the answer that prompted conversations with law enforcement and insurances companies — what is Quebec doing and how could this be replicated in Ontario?” says Brian Gast, IBC’S national director of investigative services.

“I think it is undetermined and it will have to be explored, but for now it is extremely difficult to pinpoint any explanations.”

The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) recently announced that it had disrupted two luxury-vehicle theft rings in the Greater Toronto and Ottawa areas, with 20 people arrested and facing a total of 350 charges. Project Shildon, as the OPP called it, may help explain the trends in car-theft stats.

Project Shildon took down two “highly organized operations” that specialized in stealing high-end vehicles by exploiting loopholes in modern vehicle tech. One ring stole directly from dealers’ lots, the other from residential driveways. Both mostly targeted SUVS made by Toyota and Lexus.

Both gangs had the same goal — exporting the stolen vehicles in shipping containers through the Port of Montreal, to Africa or the Middle East, where they could be sold at twice their price. Both gangs were also run by veteran thieves. And all of the suspects arrested were residents of Montreal. It’s not a stretch to say it looks like the thieves that once swiped cars from the streets of Quebec have moved on from their own neighbourhoods to ones outside La Belle Province, says Gast.

“These very organized criminals can figure where there’s more of the vehicles they are looking for,” concurs the IBC’S Gast.

And they just don’t care about the borders.