Another Pandemic Effect: Falling Crime Rates

 

As analysis of the pandemic and its effects continues, here is another result: falling crime rates.  The police reported crime statistics for 2020 were released today and they show that in 2020 crime in Canada fell substantially after being on an upward trend since 2014.  As the accompanying Figure 1 shows, as measured by the crime severity index, crime rates fell from 2000 to 2014 and then began to increase to 2019.  

 

 

 

However, 2020 as a result of people being more at home saw a fall in crime.  For example, there were significantly lower rates of breaking and entering, robbery, shoplifting and theft which is not surprising given that people were largely at home safeguarding their property and retail access was severely limited by assorted pandemic restrictions.

 

Police-reported crime in Canada, as measured by the Crime Severity Index (CSI), decreased 8% in the first year of the pandemic—falling from 79.8 in 2019 to 73.4 in 2020. The CSI was 11% lower than a decade earlier in 2010.  One exception was an increase in police reported hate crimes which saw a 37 percent increase in 2020.  Homicide rates also increased as well as police-reported opioid offenses.

 

 

 

More interesting is a ranking of the change in CSI by Canadian CMA as shown in Figure 2.  The largest declines in crime severity were in Regina, Calgary, Ottawa, Barrie and Toronto and ranged from -20 percent to – 15 percent.  However, some cities nevertheless saw increases in crime severity even during the pandemic with the largest increases in Kingston (4%), Greater Sudbury (7%) and Peterborough (14%).  

 

 The two northern Ontario CMAs had quite different profiles this time with Thunder Bay mirroring the national trend coming in with a decline of 8 percent whereas Sudbury saw an increase. Nonetheless, crime severity is still higher in Thunder Bay relative to Sudbury though the gap closed considerably in 2020.   Sudbury saw increases in identity fraud, homicide and breaking and entering.  Thunder Bay saw decreases in breaking and entering, shoplifting and theft though homicides were up.

 

However, the crime severity index is different from police reported crime rates.  One is a weighted index with 2006 set at 100 while the other is the number of actual police reported crimes per 100,000 population. Here both Sudbury and Thunder Bay saw a decline in the number of police reported crimes per 100,000 population with Thunder Bay reporting a 16 percent drop and Greater Sudbury a 6 percent drop.  The crime rate (as opposed to crime severity index) in 2020 was down in all the Canadian CMAs except one - Peterborough - which saw a 5 percent increase. 

Of course, you are probably keenly interested in which CMA was number one for homicides in 2020 as measured by the homicide rate.   Thunder Bay had 8 homicides in 2020 for a rate per 100,000 of 6.35 - putting it once again in the top spot for CMA homicide rates in Canada.

Income Growth in Canada: The Regional Results May or May Not Surprise You

Statistics Canada has just released its data on the income of families and individuals in sub-provincial areas for 2019.  There are two aspects to any comparison of census metropolitan areas in Canada - the level of income and the growth in that income.  The first figure below plots median after tax income of census families and persons not in census families by CMA for 2019 and the results show that higher incomes are a feature of western cities and also smaller centres.  Calgary and Edmonton are in first place followed by the Ontario part of Ottawa-Gatineau but Saskatoon, Guelph, and Regina are also up there with median incomes above $60,000.  Thunder Bay and Sudbury fare quite well also and are at the top of of the list at $57,510 and $54,780 respectively.  Canada's major metropolitan centres - Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal - do not fare as well coming in the bottom third of this list.  The five lowest median incomes are mainly in Quebec with the addition of St. Catharines-Niagara in Ontario.  In many respects this is not that big of a surprise.  Smaller cities especially in resource based regions tend to have higher incomes. The big cities have a lot of very high income people but also a lot of low incomes bringing down the average.

 

What is more interesting is where the growth has been over the last five years.  The next figure presents the percentage growth in median after-tax income of census families and persons not in census families by CMA between 2014 and 2019.  Vancouver and Montreal saw the largest growth at 6.8 and 6.4 percent respectively.  Indeed, cities in Quebec and BC dominate the top rungs in terms of median income growth with an Ontario city - Toronto - coming in 9th place.  Sudbury comes in the middle of the pack at 1.4 percent and Thunder Bay is in the bottom third with its median income growing barely one percent over the course of five years.  Cities in the west - hard hit by the resource sector downturn - see negative income growth along with St. John's in Newfoundland and Labrador which is at the bottom at -4.9 percent.  However, the high tech Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo area also saw negative income growth during this five year period. 

 

 

British Columbia and Quebec have seen the best growth over the last five years with cities in western Canada experiencing the worst growth and everyone else somewhere in between.  The broader GTA from Oshawa to Niagara Falls and is not doing as well as Quebec or British Columbia and of course these numbers are all from before the pandemic.

The Long Saga of Arrested Development in Northern Ontario

 

Ontario has suffered from slowing economic growth over the course of the late 20^th and early 21st century but nowhere in the province has the problem been as severe as in northern Ontario.  From 1990 to 2005, total employment in Ontario grew 23 percent and real per capita GDP grew by 17 percent.  However, even omitting the pandemic year, going from 2005 to 2019, Ontario’s total employment grew only 15 percent while real per capita GDP grew by 8 percent.  There is a similar trend of slowing employment growth after 2005 on a regional basis but some regions - especially the north - have fared worse than others.

 

The most alarming picture comes from a glance at the overall employment growth picture from 1990 to 2019 (we need to omit 2020 because it is the pandemic year and makes things look even worse). As the accompanying figure shows, from 1990 to 2019, total employment in Ontario grew by 42 percent.  The fastest growing regions were Kitchener-Waterloo-Barrie, Toronto/GTA and Ottawa.  This triangle region has indeed become the new core of the Ontario economy with the rest of the province increasingly being relegated to more peripheral status with the peripheral nature worsening the farther out from this core.  In Ontario, being out of sight of Toronto in the end also means being out of mind.    Indeed, the most distant regions from this core – Stratford-Bruce, Windsor-Sarnia and the North have done the worse.  But it is only the North that has seen long-term employment decline over the course of thirty years with the Northeast shrinking by 1 percent and the Northwest by 7 percent.

 

 

 

 

Of course, the first response of most members of northern Ontario’s mover and shaker elite will be to rear up on their hind legs, shake a finger at government and bemoan their failure to promote northern economic development and argue we need a new program to address northern needs.  The fact is, it is not that there has been insufficient attention by government.  Indeed, the most significant growth industry of the last thirty years has been in government funded studies, reports and programs designed to kick start the northern Ontario economy and help engineer a new golden age of growth.   Here is a quick list of major initiatives at both the federal and provincial level that show the last 50 years has seen a plethora of plans, programs and policies.  Here they are:

 

Federal

 

1969-1987 Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE)

1987 to Present FEDNOR (1987 – present)

2018 to Present Prosperity and Growth Strategy for Northern Ontario

 

Provincial

 

1966 Regional Development Councils established (NWORDC & NORDC).

1970s Design for Development: Designation of “Primate Growth Centers.”

1970 Creation of Northern Affairs Branch within Department of Mines

1977 Ministry of Northern Affairs Created

1977-85 Royal Commission on the Northern Environment

1985: Ministry of Northern Development & Mines established

1985: Advisory Committee on Resource Dependent Communities: Rosehart Report

July 1986 Northern Ontario Relocation Program (1,600 public servants to North).

1987 Northern Ontario Heritage Fund

1999 Regional Development Teams

2002 Smart Growth Panels

2004 Northern Prosperity Plan

2005 Northern Development Councils & GO North Investor Program

2008 Northwestern Ontario Report: Rosehart as Facilitator

2010 Far North Act

2011: Northern Ontario Growth Plan – a “25-year plan” to strengthen Northern Economy

2011 to Present: Highway Four-Laning/Ring of Fire promotion/Northern Policy Institute

 

It is not that there have not been enough government attempts to save the north, it is that they have all been ultimately unsuccessful or at best a short-term holding action because they have not addressed the fundamental core economic problem of the region.  The three major engines of northern Ontario economic development are natural resources, transportation and indeed government.  During northern Ontario’s development, economic growth was most robust during eras where all three engines came together to provide the impetus for economic growth and employment creation. 

 

The most robust periods of economic growth and development occurred during the eras from 1867 to 1913 and 1946 to 1969.  Both of these eras coincided with good global economic conditions which fostered a demand for resource products and led to private capital investment flowing to production facilities and transportation networks.  Both of these eras also saw a large spending and policy role for government particularly in infrastructure which facilitated resource development.  However, the institutional environment of a region dependent on external decision making both in terms of public and private sector decisions  resulted in an inability of the region to retain maximum benefits from resource development. The fundamental problem is one of arrested economic development rooted in the long-term inability of the economy to diversify beyond the industries that powered its original takeoff because of the inability to substantially retain the economic linkages generated by those industries. 

 

Successful development and diversification via linkage retention requires retaining a greater share of the income through local entrepreneurs and government institutional policies to allow for local decision making in the development of the natural resource export base – the region’s comparative advantage.  Aside from wages to labour during the labour-intensive phases of development, the vast majority of the income flows from northern development went to external owners of investment capital in the railway, mining and transportation sectors who also made the investment decisions.  Absence of such flows reduces the opportunities that exercise and promote local entrepreneurial talent and development.  It is not that were no successful local entrepreneurs in forestry, mining and transportation.  It is just that there were not that many and they did not persist.

 

The failure of persistence of local entrepreneurial magnates was partly a function of being able to make more money elsewhere and partly the result of government policy at the federal and provincial level.  Government institutional decisions regarding taxation and natural resource policy were external as they were made at Queen’s Park or Ottawa.  Moreover, during the first 50 years of northern development, the private income flows out of the region were complemented by the resource rents going to Queen's Park from forestry and mining - that on average provided about 20 percent of provincial government revenues.  In northern Ontario’s case, it was bereft of its own institutional capacity for promoting linkage retention by being part of Ontario rather than a separate province such as Saskatchewan or New Brunswick. Government decisions were made more to promote provincial or national development strategies rather than the long-term economic success of the region.   In the end, the north was useful in driving economic opportunities for Ontario and Canada but ultimately expendable.

 

All those plans and programs?  They were not designed to actually really do anything that mattered.  They were short term political bones thrown to placate the locals and secure elections by providing evidence that government did indeed care.  And, in the short run they did create a few temporary jobs and allow some people to make money before moving on, while all the while professing how much they loved the north.  The long run implications are now evident.  Arrested regional economic development.

Moving Beyond the Pandemic in Ontario

 

With each passing day, the new COVID-19 case count has been diminishing in Ontario.  Today’s tally was 114 and there were zero deaths.  Indeed, the number of daily deaths has been in the single digits since July 1^st.  For Thunder Bay District, the last while has  seen a zero daily case count more often than not  There are only two active cases in the District and the hospital has no COVID cases.  And vaccination rates continue to grow with 69 percent of all people in Ontario having received at least one dose and 47 percent being fully vaccinated with two doses.  For the time being, the pandemic is practically over, and the province is slowly reopening its economy with the third stage set to begin this Friday.

 

 

 

Moving forward, the challenge is many-fold.  First, the damage done to the economy is significant.  Ontario had the most protracted lock down in Canada and indeed in much of the developed world.  There are many businesses that after such a protracted lock down will not reopen.  The implications for business formation and investment is serious.  Moreover, the reopening is proceeding at such a slow pace that it may indeed be too late for many businesses.  Employment is rebounding but we are still not where we were before the pandemic.  In 2019, total employment in Ontario stood at 7.377 million employed persons.  In 2020 it fell to an annualized 7.022 million. As of June 2021, the most recent numbers suggest that at 7.273 million, we are still not there yet.

 

And, try getting anything done.  Employment and labour force participation have both shrunk.  The labour shortage which has been underway due to the aging of the population has been made worse with the shutdown and withdrawal of labour not to mention the reduced immigration of the last year.  Indeed, if Thunder Bay is any indicator, trying to get anything done in terms of household repairs and services is very difficult. Everyone is booked and prices have gone up.  Thunder Bay was always a difficult place to get things done without a bevy of personal connections often acquired in high school and the problems seem to have become worse in the wake of the pandemic. 

 

Yet the recovery continues, but much depends on what happens next with the pandemic.  The summer is a golden time and for the post-pandemic recovery to continue beyond September vaccination rates must continue to rise.  With new variants percolating around the world and travel resuming, getting total double vaccination rates above 80 percent is crucial.  September and the return to more indoor activity will be an important test as to whether or not we really have got things under control.

 

While it is important to relax restrictions as normalcy returns there is one restriction that should be maintained for the remainder of the summer and into the fall and it should be a very simple one – if you are in an indoor public space, you must wear a mask.  It is true other provinces are already moving away from this but in my opinion this is premature.  I think you can probably open everything up for indoor activity – gyms, theaters, dining etc… with fairly generous capacity constraints but the one thing that should be maintained is a face mask particularly this fall. Even in a restaurant, except at your table with your designated dining partner or party, there needs to be a face mask on the way in and as soon as you leave your table with servers always masked.  It’s a simple rule and one with the greatest benefits in preventing a resurgence until the vaccination rates are much higher.  

 

Whether we are up to this final task or plan to throw this modest caution to the winds remains to be seen.

 

A Pandemic of Poorly Prepped Puppies

 

One of the many interesting features of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the increase in people seeking the solace of pets of all types.  Adoptions and sales of dogs for example have soared in Canada and indeed in other countries.  The buying frenzy is reminiscent of other frenzies at different points in the pandemic ranging from toilet paper to outdoor space heaters to bicycles and exercise equipment.  In the United States, pet industry sales grew by nearly 7  percent in 2020 and associated food, treats and supplies grew 10 percent.  However, buying a living thing is not quite the same as an inanimate object and any subsequent buyer’s remorse a more serious issue.  Indeed, around the world, animal shelters are apparently starting to see an upsurge in older puppies with “behavioural issues.”

 

An increase in the supply of canines across a wide spectrum of owners who might not normally have acquired one means that there are a lot of first time dog buyers who think the natural and proper relationship between a person and a dog is somewhere between that of a Disney cartoon and your best friend from high school.  Indeed, the tendency to treat dogs and pets as members of the family has grown and just as many parents are indulgent with their children, so too are many dog owners.  The result is a pandemic of poorly trained and undisciplined dogs who essentially own their owners rather than vice versa.  Indeed, there are so many dogs that one is surprised that government have not decided to tax their ownership as a way of paying down post pandemic debt.

 

The pandemic has aggravated what is a canine behavioural problem sometime in the making.  It has come to a head during the pandemic and nowhere more so than during the last few weeks whether sitting on my deck or going for a walk.  The standard young couple today is no longer two people and a couple of kids but two people and at least one or more dogs and sometimes a cat or two for good measure.  And when they walk their family members, the dogs are not always well behaved on their leash.  Indeed, we have now come across several who are not on their leash or even if on a leash dart right out at you and begin to paw you supposedly because they want to be your friend.  Of course, if I behaved in a similar way towards the pedestrians I came across on my local walking trail, I imagine I would soon be a featured on the local newscast in a most unflattering manner and soon after would have to spend some time in forcible confinement.

 

The fact is that many dogs are not being properly trained and they are becoming a hazard to other pet owners as well as people who do not own pets.  Today, an off-leash dog barked and chased after us in a nearby park while its owner was off ruminating thoughtfully in the distance.  Later in the day, while driving, we saw another off-leash dog scamper across the street pursued by an arm flailing owner entreating it to please come back.  Yesterday, a person with two rather large German shepherds paused to check their phone as we walked by and barely prevented one of the dogs from successfully lunging as I walked by.  And the coup de grace, several weeks ago a rather large and ill-tempered dog actually got off its leash and attacked another two small dogs out for a walk with their owner. 

 

It is probably only a matter of time before more serious incidents start to emerge in greater numbers as playful puppies turn into more hellish hounds.  Needless to say, while your friendly neighbourhood spider man might say, with great power comes great responsibility I would add that great responsibility also comes with dog ownership.