Canadian Crime Rates in 2025 and Beyond

Violent crime has re-emerged as a defining political issue in Canada. Poll after poll shows that Canadians feel less safe in their communities and that crime is a growing concern. After years of rising violence, the federal government has introduced legislation designed to toughen sentencing and protect victims.

At the same time, a counter-narrative has developed. The John Howard Society has written that “Crime is down in Canada … but you’d never know it” and that “a lot of what is classified as ‘violent crime’ does not involve what most of us would think of as significant violence.” A recent Globe and Mail article cited “false perceptions about crime,” and polling about rising public concern was accompanied by headlines that Canadians “feel unsafe despite crime rates dropping” and “feel more unsafe, despite data saying otherwise.” One criminologist quoted by CTV News surmised that “Most people aren’t checking out Statistics Canada to find out what’s actually happening.”

This DeepDive checks Statistics Canada to find out what’s actually happening. To do so, it explores an oft-ignored metric: the violent crime severity index, which accounts for both the amount and relative seriousness of crime.

The analysis shows the naysayers are wrong: Violent crime severity increased considerably in every province and nearly every major city over the last decade. In most provinces, the past few years have produced the highest levels of violent crime severity recorded at any point since the index began in 1998.

Dave Snow, Macdonald Laurier Institute (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Guelph

 

Canada's Crime Severity Index out of Statistics Canada serves as a gauge of public safety in Canada. Overall, it would appear that crimes in general are subsiding, particularly police-reported property crimes. This, despite the growing incidents of violent home invasions in the last several years. In 2014, Canadian crime dropped to record lows on almost every metric. Then a steady rise began, continuing to the present. Coincidentally the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau took office in 2015. A decade on, with the Liberal government remaining in power, now under the administration of Mark Carney, violent crimes have risen dramatically.

 

Among those crimes are those targeting children. "Sexual violations against children" soared between the years 2015 and 2025, according to police statistics, by 121 percent. Offences for child pornography rose by 195 percent. The homicide rate for 2025 dropped 10 percent from its 2000 position, while police reported robberies also dropped by 45 percent from its height in 2001. Extortion appears to be an altogether other matter. Its rate surged 354 percent in comparison to 2000 when there were 15 crimes of extortion for every 100,000 Canadians. By 2025 by comparison, there were 29 such crimes per 100,000.

 

 

 

Extortion crimes have been linked to a few Canadian cities where the crime is rampant. Extortion-related arson and shootings had become so common in Surrey, British Columbia that the city council requested Ottawa to place them under a state of emergency. It quickly became obvious that all these extortions had a root; the presence of an extortion gang from India called the Bishnoi Gang, most of whose members entered Canada on temporary visas, to prey on Indo-Canadian owners of small businesses.

 

As for the violent Crime Severity Index, following a dip in 2025, violent crime still sits at one of the  highest levels recorded since Statistics Canada began maintaining an index in the late 1990s. The average Canadian in 2025, according to the index, still experienced a level of violent crime steeper than at any year between 2008 and 2021. Add to that the fact that under the decade-old-and-growing Liberal government the Canadian population soared. 

 

A loose immigration system, an intake of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa escaping conflict, and migrants from the same source geographies, along with youth on student visas served to swell the Canadian population by up to a million people annually for several years. During which time Canada's population soared from 37 million to almost 42 million people. Security clearances for those entering Canada was relaxed. As were the criteria for applying for status which once depended on age, education level, professional status and health.

 

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Toronto hold signs protesting the war in Gaza, on Oct. 10, 2026. (Emma Paidra/JTA)

 

Hate crimes in Canada went to an all-time high in 2024 with 4,882 recorded incidents. These crimes began rising for the most part in the fall of 2023 following the 7 October invasion by Palestinian terrorists across the border from Gaza into Israel on a planned group mission of sustained sadistic savagery, destroying, looting, raping, mutilating, hostage-taking and murdering Israeli Jews. Almost overnight, from among the substantial-sized Muslim population of fairly recent vintage, Canada saw Palestinian agitators assembling large groups of anti-Israel mobs protesting in the streets, calling for a global 'Intifada', a 'Final Solution' and chanting 'From the river to the sea Palestine will be free'.

 

For three years the Canadian Jewish population was literally under siege by these groups. Palestinians and their sympathizers had infiltrated Canadian academia, unions, social institutions, government employment and political offices and from there gave their full support to the 'liberation' of Palestine from 'Apartheid' Israel whose response to the terrorist slaughter of Israelis was to enter Gaza to hunt out the terrorists, interpreted by the Palestinian-centric protesters as 'genocide'.

While Statistics Canada and various arms of the Canadian government, from federal, down to provincial and municipal, state their support for Canadian Jewish life in Canada without harassment and threats -- even while synagogues, Jewish community centers, Jewish day schools and Jewish-owned businesses are vandalized, shot at, and fire-bombed -- there has been no reaction from them that would stem the tide of Jew-hate. Instead, they deplore both antisemitism and 'Islamophobia'.

 

While the news media, the police and government agencies had no problem identifying the source of the violent spike in extortion, attributed to thuggish gangs from the Indian subcontinent, not the merest murmur of acknowledgement has been heard that it has been members of the Muslim population in Canada led by Palestinian students, supported by foreign funding and the malign plans of the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar that have threatened Jewish life in Canada to the extent that many Jews find no option but to leave the country.

 

Police-reported anti-Jewish hate crimes totalled 331 in 2020. By 2024, that number was 920, and that was reported hate crimes. Life in Canada is fast becoming totally untenable for Canadian Jews.