It didn’t take much of a drop in crime rates for the cadre of experts opposing tighter bail rules and tougher laws to declare that, surprise, tighter bail rules and tougher laws are not needed.
Canadians have been duped into believing that crime is a big problem, and hoodwinked into supporting the federal Liberals’ (kinda) tough-on-crime crackdown. Or so the story goes. The proof? Statistics Canada’s annual release of crime statistics, which found that crime rates dropped in 2025. What’s more, the crime severity index declined, as did the violent crime severity index.
Case closed? Not so fast. Yes, it is indisputably true that, overall, police-reported crime rates declined in 2025. But a more detailed look at those statistics quickly dispels any notion that Canadians’ worries about crime are misplaced or irrational.
According to Statcan, declining homicide rates alone accounted for nearly 30 per cent of the fall in the violent crime severity index in 2025.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Weighty crimes
But first, let’s start with a look at the broad picture outlined by Statcan, with the widest measure of crime, the crime severity index.
The index gives heavier weight to more severe crimes, using what the agency calls the “incarceration rate” for each offence. That is calculated by multiplying the incarceration rate (the percentage of convictions resulting in a jail sentence) for a particular offence by the average prison sentence, in days. That means, for instance, that first-degree murder is heavily weighted, given that the mandatory minimum life sentence requires the offender to spend at least 25 years in prison. One first degree murder conviction carries a weight of over 8,200 in the index, while a property theft has a weight of just 29. Or to put it another way, it takes 280 property thefts to equal the impact on the index of just one first-degree murder.
This first chart is a comforting picture: the index has largely been on the decline since 1998. Sure, there was a modest rise between 2014 and 2023, but the index has fallen back in the last two years. If that was the entire picture, there wouldn’t be much to worry about.
But if the lens is narrowed to include only violent crimes under the Criminal Code, then the picture shifts, as this second chart shows. The violent crime severity index hit a peak in 2023, not in the late 1990s. Rather than a modest rebound from years of decline, the violent crime severity index is hovering near record high levels.
A large part of the decline can be explained by the dramatic decrease in property crimes in the last three decades. In 1998, there were just over 5,696 property crimes per 100,000 Canadians. In 2025, that ratio had declined to 3,140, down 45 per cent from 1998 and 3.8 per cent from 2024.
Even the absolute number of such offences have fallen since the late 1990s. (A long-term drop in offences under the Youth Justice Criminal Act is also a factor.)
To be clear, that is a good thing. Vehicle theft, breaking and entering and fraud are all serious offences. They are not victimless crimes. But the magnitude of the drop in property crimes obscures what is going on with violent offences.
StatCan data reported a notable decline in the homicide rate in 2025. The way its crime severity index is constructed means the drop in such severe charges exerts an outsized downward pull on the index as a whole.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Obscured by murder
There is a similar dynamic hidden inside the violent-crime severity index as well. The homicide rate fell by 16 per cent in 2025, five times greater than the 3.2-per-cent drop for the violent crime rate as a whole. The sharpest decline was in first-degree murder; the incident rate for that crime dropped by more than 23 per cent in 2025, while the overall homicide rate fell by more than 16 per cent.
Again, that is a welcome development. But there are two obvious conclusions, one obvious and one less so, to draw from that fact.
The first, and obvious, point is this: a lower first degree murder rate has little bearing on the debate over bail reform, and none at all on the debate over tougher laws. Most of the debate over bail reform centres on less serious charges than first-degree murder, although there are exceedingly rare exceptions.
The central critique on bail rules is that people accused of crimes are too easily released, only to reoffend, even while the original charge is still pending. That scenario is, to put it mildly, improbable in the case of first-degree murder.
And the charge of first-degree murder carries with it a mandatory and minimum prison term of 25 years (as part of a life sentence). The debate over toughening laws is focused mostly on mandatory minimums for lesser crimes, with courts periodically striking down such restrictions.
The less obvious point is what the sharp decline in homicides, particularly first-degree murder, is concealing. Because of the way that the crime severity index is constructed, every first-degree murder conviction is given heavy weight. As a consequence, a decline in such charges exerts an outsized downward pull on the index.
Statcan says that declining homicide rates, alone, accounted for nearly 30 per cent of the fall in the violent crime severity index in 2025.
A hidden crime wave
There are, however, serious crimes whose incidence has risen substantially over the last decade, a worrying trend masked by the overall decline in the violent crime severity index.
Assaults under the Criminal Code are one striking example, illustrated in this third chart. The data show the incident rates per 100,000, indexed to the rate in 1998. The numbers are presented that way in order to be able to easily compare the trends in the various types of assault offences, which vary wildly in the number of incidents. There were, for instance, 9.76 aggravated assaults last year for every 100,000 people. For the less serious charge of assault, however, there were 528.07 incidents for every 100,000 people, more than 54 times as much.
The most worrying trend is that of assaults with weapon, or causing bodily harm, an offence that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. The incident rate of such assault has risen more than 70 per cent since 1998. Last year, the incident for that crime was only fractionally lower than in 2024, a record high. Every one of those offences are serious crimes; the upward trend is not something to be dismissed.
There’s a similar pattern with the incident rate for assaults against peace officers, which has risen substantially since 2014.
There is some good news, of a sort. The incident rate for aggravated assault fell in 2024 and 2025, although it is still higher than in the late 1990s. Just as worrying (and just as concealed by the overall decline in the severity indices) is the trend in sexual crimes, as shown in this last chart.
First, the good news: The incident rate for aggravated sexual assaults is close to a three-decade low. But that is not the case for other types of sexual crimes.
The incident rate for sexual assault fell marginally in 2025, but is still substantially higher than for most of the past 27 years. Much worse, the incident rate for sexual assault with a weapon or causing bodily harm rose in 2025, to the highest level in the data, dating back to 1998.
There is an even starker trend in sexual crimes against children, the incidence of which have more than doubled since 2015. (Changes in the Criminal Code make comparisons previous to 2015 problematic.)
Part of the increase in sexual crimes is likely due to greater diligence by police; the proportion of cases deemed “unfounded” have fallen since 2018. Unfounded cases are not included in the severity indices. There may also be an increased propensity to report such crimes to police.
And for sexual crimes against children, stepped-up enforcement looks to be a factor. The number of charges of luring a child via a computer nearly doubled from 2023 to 2025. Statcan noted that much of that increase came from efforts by RCMP detachments in British Columbia, in cooperation with the British Columbia Integrated Child Exploitation Unit and the National Child Exploitation Crime Centre.
There are caveats, to be sure, but the overall pattern is clear: the prevalance of some categoris of serious sexual crimes is on the rise.
So what does this all mean for the debate over crime and justice in Canada? Stiffer bail terms is not the answer in all cases, but the argument that such changes aren’t needed because of falling crime rates falls apart under scrutiny.
Longer prison terms and mandatory sentences may not be the answer, although they are certainly merited in some instances. But the argument that mandatory minimums aren’t needed because of falling crime rates, again, crumbles when the fine details of crime rates are examined.
The debate over bail and sentencing should be founded on the facts, and a detailed understanding of trends in crime in Canada – not just a headline.