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.
But amid a dramatic uptick in national violence are trends the country has never really seen before. Police officers are being shot and killed on duty at unprecedented rates. Record numbers of Canadians are being randomly attacked by people they’ve never met, for seemingly no reason.
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.
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.
Stranger attacks
Amid all the violence is a term that was relatively rare prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: “Unprovoked random attack.”
It was during the second summer of the COVID-19 pandemic that Vancouver Police officers first started noticing that a disproportionate number of their calls involved random civilians being punched, pushed or stabbed for no reason.
“Over the last few months, we’ve noticed what appears to be an uptick in unprovoked stranger attacks,” reads a Vancouver Police statement from October 2021. The statement added that, according to their records, 1,705 Vancouverites had been the victim of an “unprovoked stranger assault” in the last year.
It was to be a preview of coming attractions.
Within months, the “stranger attack” phenomenon was in full swing in Toronto, particularly on the city’s buses, streetcars and subway system. At the opening of 2023, John Di Nino, the head of the union representing TTC workers, said the violence was already at “crisis level.”
Just last week In Edmonton, city officials reported a 53 per cent spike in attacks on its transit system, with 70 per cent of those being chalked up to “unprovoked random attacks.”
In an April 3 letter, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police demanded an urgent meeting with the country’s premiers to discuss what they called an “intensive escalation of violence.”
Chief among this escalation was the killing of eight on-duty Canadian police officers in just the last six months. For context, between 1961 and 2009, a grand total of 133 Canadian police officers were murdered in the line of duty – an average of one every four and a half months.
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“The number of murders of police officers has resulted in stark comparisons with countries like the United States, to which we have never before found reason to compare,” wrote the CACP.
Historically, if a Canadian police officer was murdered in the line of duty it was almost always incidental; an officer would be shot and killed while intervening in a domestic dispute or while attempting to apprehend a suspect.
But this latest rash of police killings has consisted disproportionately of targeted attacks. Two Edmonton police constables gunned down as they approached a residence on a domestic disturbance call. An Ontario Provincial Police officer shot in an ambush during a routine traffic stop. A Toronto police officer executed as he took his lunch break at a Mississauga Tim Hortons.
“It’s not just more people dying in the line of the duty, it’s the way they’re dying,” said Christian Leuprecht, a Queen’s University crime policy researcher.
Untreated mental illness
The throughline in much of it is a parallel Canadian crisis of untreated mental illness. When Canada wrapped up the closure of its centralized psychiatric hospitals in the 1990s, the assumption was that mental illness could be treated “in the community” with little more than short hospital visits and courses of anti-psychotic drugs.
One unintended consequence is that when a deeply psychotic patient needs something more than a night in hospital, there’s often nowhere for them to go. Back in October 2019, on the eve of the current crime wave, the British Columbia Schizophrenia Society released a report sounding the alarm on “a serious lack of access to hospital acute psychiatric beds.” As a result, even patients with a “history of extreme violence or current high levels of aggressive behaviours” were often winding up in tent cities or on the street.
Leonard Krog, a former NDP MLA turned mayor of Nanaimo, is one of several progressive politicians who have begun concluding that any meaningful action on homelessness, crime and addiction can’t come without some return to institutionalization. “These are people who are hearing voices all the time, who are paranoid … people who are taking street drugs, people who are threatening people,” Krog said in 2019, just as his city experienced the first signs of urban chaos that would soon become ubiquitous across the country.
But in the more immediate term, the emerging consensus is that crime has risen to crisis levels due in large part to the bail system.
In January, a unanimous letter signed by all 13 premiers called on the federal government to take “immediate action to strengthen Canada’s bail system.” The Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police weighed in the next month, saying the bail system was in “desperate need” of change.
The Toronto Police and many of Ontario’s other major police forces soon followed. “We write to you today to add our voice to the growing chorus across our country calling for legislative reform to the Criminal Code of Canada,” reads a Feb. 22 letter by the London Police Service calling for bail reform.
Only 15 years ago, B.C. Premier David Eby was a street-level activist in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and authored the handbook “How to sue the police.” Now, he’s one of the country’s loudest voices for tougher bail.
Last month, Eby criticized federal inaction on bail by saying that reform was needed “now” and that the issue was “straightforward.”
At issue is Bill C-75, a 2018 suite of amendments to the Criminal Code that, among other things, purported to “modernize” and “clarify” the Canadian bail system.
The bill required judges to view release “without conditions” as the “default position.” Whereas previous bail hearings had mostly considered public safety and the accused’s likelihood to attend court, judges would now be mandated to consider whether the suspect was from a “vulnerable” population.
Prolific offenders
It’s not so much that C-75 resulted in more offenders getting bail; pre-trial detention was always a rare measure for accused offenders. Rather, it’s that C-75 utterly gutted the ability of police to punish an offender who refuses to abide by the usual expectations of conditional release.
When someone is released from custody – either on bail or parole – they’re often handed a suite of “release conditions.” The standard condition is to abstain from drugs, alcohol or the possession of weapons. In the case of domestic abuse charges, they may be hit with an order to avoid a victim’s home or place of work.
In the pre-C-75 era, getting caught in breach of these conditions would often result in an immediate 30 days in jail – particularly if it wasn’t a first offence. But C-75 not only pushes judges to grant release in virtually all cases, it denies them the ability to consider whether the accused has done this before.
“When bail/release is being considered for repeat offenders, it’s hard to establish that they have a significant past history of not respecting the conditions imposed on them, which makes it far more likely they’ll receive bail over and over,” wrote Michael Gendron, spokesperson for the Canadian Police Association, in an email to the National Post.
The result has been the emboldening of a relatively small subset of offenders who are committing crimes every few days with little to no consequence.
“Offenders will effectively laugh at the cops,” said Leuprecht. “The offenders know that, under the new rules, they’re not going back to jail.”
In a 2022 open letter, an amalgam of B.C. mayors called them “prolific offenders,” and identified just 204 of them who were responsible for 11,648 “negative police contacts” in the last calendar year. Per offender, that’s an average of at least one “negative police contact” every single week.
The mayors said their cities had been hit by a “significant increase in the number of offenders routinely breaching conditions without consequence while on bail.” Even when they were charged and handed court dates, the offenders simply refused to show up, also “without consequence.”
“Police work only has value if the rest of the equation is there as well,” Doug LePard, one of two authors of a B.C. report into prolific offenders, said in an October appearance. He added that while law enforcement is relatively good at identifying suspects, the result is that the accused are just “released over and over and over.”
And every once in a while, it’s one of these prolific offenders who winds up committing a crime heinous enough to make national headlines.
Jordan O’Brien-Tobin, the man accused of the unprovoked stabbing of a 16-year-old boy in a Toronto subway station last month, had spent his entire adult life breaching conditions and missing court dates for charges ranging from sexual assault to arson.
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Last October, a poll by the Angus Reid Institute found that more than half of Canadians were losing faith in the justice system to do anything about it.
Said Leupreucht, Canadian’s current crime wave may well the unintended consequence of policymakers who “live fairly sheltered lives” and never have to face the impacts of increased violence.
“I think there’s an overrepresentation of idealists,” said Leuprecht. “People who think they can shape society the way they would like it to be rather than dealing with human nature and society the way it is.”
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