Violent crime has technically been worse in Canada, but never quite like this. As recently as the early 1990s, the rate of knives and bullets being driven into Canadians was far higher than it is now.
Just on Wednesday, a 17-year-old boy was stabbed and killed on a bus in Surrey, B.C. The tragedy occurs just two weeks after a 16-year-old was killed in a similar incident in a Toronto subway station. And in the interim have come a host of transit stabbings which didn’t make national headlines because the blades missed vital organs.
And worst of all, the crime is everywhere.
When Toronto was struck by the so-called “summer of the gun” in 2005, it was a shocking anomaly within a country that was otherwise enjoying another year of dropping crime.
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In the first months of 2023, skyrocketing violent crime is the new reality in basically every Canadian time zone.
In Saskatchewan, First Nations leaders are sounding the alarm on a “crisis” of on-reserve violence. Newfoundland and Labrador is coping with a 20 per cent increase in violent crime severity. In the Yukon territory, politicians and RCMP officials are reporting crime that is both “more intense” and “increasing dramatically.”
A new survey published this week by the Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies found that two thirds of Canadians believe violent crime is visibly worse than it was before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Of respondents, one fifth said they had feared for their safety in the last six months. One in every 20 said they had personally been assaulted.