A poll commissioned for CSIS last January found that 57 per cent of respondents felt that Canada is a more dangerous place than it was five years earlier.Arlyn McAdorey/The Canadian Press
I am one of those people who suffers from an acute, yet ephemeral, fear of flying, which washes over me the precise moment I feel the plane’s wheels lift off the tarmac. “What type of idiot risks her life in a metal box flying 30,000 feet above the ground?,” I think to myself as I look around the cabin, seeking comfort in the seemingly calm faces of the imputed idiots around me. I forget about this fear right around the moment the plane completes its ascent, only to be suffused with it yet again when the pilot announces he is ready to steer the flying metal box back down to Earth.
This type of anxiety is an example of the risk-fear paradox, which describes an incongruence between a statistical risk of harm, and fear about that harm. Everyone knows you are much more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the airport than in a plane crash, but your feelings – to borrow and invert a phrase – generally don’t care about facts.
Canadians, particularly those living in urban centres, may be experiencing something of a risk-fear paradox when it comes to crime. A poll commissioned for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in January, 2025, found that 57 per cent of respondents felt that Canada is a more dangerous place than it was five years earlier. An Abacus poll conducted in September, 2025, reported that 44 per cent of respondents believed crime had gotten worse over the past year.
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But the statistics on actual police-reported crimes tell a different story. For 2024, the police-reported crime rate was down 3.6 per cent nationally, and the violent crime rate was down 1 per cent. In Toronto, the total number of homicides for 2025 (44) was the lowest it’s been in decades; in fact, major crimes in the city were down nearly across the board from 2024, including auto theft (down 25 per cent), break and enter (down nearly 11 per cent) and robbery (down 19 per cent). The homicide rate in Calgary dropped to a 10-year low in 2025, and Ottawa police reported a significant drop in homicides and shootings (down 24 per cent and 27 per cent respectively), and fewer break and enters (down 8 per cent) and auto thefts (down 13 per cent) compared with 2024.
But Canadians nevertheless feel like crime is getting worse. So what gives?
The first explanation is that our impressions are formed over time; our brains don’t care about when year-end data resets. The homicide rate in Canada, for example, had been steadily climbing from 2013 to 2022. Auto thefts were at record highs in 2022. Home invasions and auto thefts in Toronto had risen so dramatically in 2023 that one Toronto cop suggested residents leave their car keys by their front doors to avoid violent confrontations with intruders. These figures and anecdotes form an impression that can’t be scrubbed by a single year’s worth of data, and certainly not when signs of lawlessness seem to speckle our daily lives.
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Which brings us to the second explanation: visible signs of social disorder. The homicide rate might be down dramatically in some cities, but most of us are fortunate to not encounter this type of violent crime firsthand. What we do see, however, is open drug use on public transit, homeless encampments in public parks, drug paraphernalia littering public spaces, and so on: The type of disorder that isn’t reflected in police or national crime data, but which nevertheless has a much more persuasive effect (compared with lines on a graph) on how we view law and order in our cities. If we see, with our own eyes, how the rules are being broken, our trust in law enforcement will erode, which invariably makes us feel unsafe.
That lack of trust in law enforcement, as well as the justice system more broadly, points to a third explanation: The view that our system is incapable of dealing with suspects or offenders, even after they are apprehended. Canadians routinely hear of horrific crimes – of a man charged with sexual assault of a minor, or of another arrested for allegedly attempting to kidnap Toronto women, in particular Jewish women – and then of the suspects being released into the community on bail.
Late last year, the federal government introduced legislation to toughen bail regulations, but the bill is still making its way through Parliament. Indeed, these changes take time, and changing Canadians’ impressions of the way our justice system functions (or doesn’t function) will take even longer. It is not so irrational, then, that we would feel unsafe despite the data, and that we would demand more enforcement and stricter bail conditions to deal with crime in our communities. It’s more rational than my fear of flying in any case, since, as we all know, the real risk to my safety is in the streets.