From a peak reached in the early 1990s, police reported
crimes rates in Canada have been on a downward trend. This is also the case for homicide rates, which have been on
a downward trend nationally since the early 1980s. There is of course variation from year to year in homicide
rates so some type of regression smoothing procedure is helpful in establishing
what the longer-term trends over time are. What quickly emerges from an examination of long-term trends
is that Thunder Bay followed national trends in homicide rates until the early
21st century but that since then there has been a substantial
divergence. It is not a “northern
Ontario” thing because the Greater Sudbury CMA tracks provincial and national
homicide rates quite closely.
Figure 1 presents LOWESS Smoothed homicide rates for Canada
and major regions from 1981 to 2015. LOWESS is a particularly useful smoothing tool because it
helps deal with “outliers” – that is extreme observations that can often distort
averages taken over time. The data source is from Statistics Canada (Table 2530004 - Homicide survey, number and rates (per
100,000 population) of homicide victims, by census metropolitan area (CMA),
annually). Canada as a whole has
seen a steady decline in homicide rates going from smoothed values of 2.74 per
100,000 in 1981 to 1.51 by 2015 – a drop of 45 percent. This decline is a feature of the West,
Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada though Atlantic Canada sees a sight upturn
after 2006. In terms of regional
rankings, homicide rates are now the highest in the West, followed by Atlantic
Canada, then Ontario and finally Quebec.