Canada’s hot spot for crime – climbing 90 per cent higher than the national average – is a northern B.C. city whose population doesn’t even break 100,000.
Prince George topped the list of Canadian cities with the highest crime rates, according to an annual survey released Thursday by Maclean’s magazine.
The magazine said a 77,000-person city claiming the top spot is a “shameful reflection” of the fact that Canada’s most violent cities are located in the country’s North and West.
The survey’s top 10 worst crime offenders – as measured in part by incidents of homicide, sexual assault, aggravated assault, robbery, breaking and entering, and auto theft – are all west of Winnipeg.
The third annual survey by the weekly magazine used Statistics Canada data to tabulate the results – both through the agency’s Crime Severity Index and six key groupings of crime stats.
“(The) survey shows an epidemic of violence in the North, gang-plagued cities in the West and relative safety in Ontario and Quebec,” the magazine said.
Victoria ranked a close second, with a crime rate 81 per cent higher than the national average, followed by Saskatchewan’s major metropolitan centres, Regina and Saskatoon, with 73 and 69 per cent scores, respectively. Rounding out the Top 5 was Alberta’s oil boomtown, Fort McMurray, at 68 per cent above average.
Meanwhile, the cities with the lowest crime rates were all located in Ontario and Quebec.
For the third year running, Caledon, Ont., a community 40 kilometres northwest of Toronto, took the title of Canada’s safest city, with a crime rate 70 per cent below the national average.
It was followed by Ontario’s Wellington County and Halton Region, both at 58 per cent below the national average, then the Quebec City suburb of Levis (51 per cent), and Nottawasaga, Ont. (50 per cent).
A Maclean’s statement says a "complex combination of social problems, unemployment, sexual and physical abuse, and drug and alcohol abuse" are the likely contributors to high urban crime rates. It added that the Canadian West’s crime problem appears to be “entrenched”; while the North’s was “extreme.”
The survey found half of the Top 14 most crime-ridden cities were located in B.C. despite of the fact the province recorded a nine per cent drop in crime severity overall.
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