Exclusive data shows crime rates still well above pre-pandemic levels.
The stabbing was part of a troubling trend affecting several cities across Canada identified in a collaborative investigation between CBC’s visual investigations unit and the IJF.
The last decade has seen a dramatic spike in reports of violent crimes on transit systems in the Toronto area and several other metro regions, out of proportion with overall crime trends, according to exclusive Statistics Canada data. The cumulative number of assaults reported on transit in eight of Canada’s 10 The cumulative number of assaults reported on transit in eight of Canada’s 10 largest census metropolitan areas — regions that encompass about half the country’s population — doubled between 2016 and 2024.
That’s far out of proportion with the 53 per cent increase in assaults across all types of locations in those regions over the same period.
In the Toronto census metropolitan area, the data on physical assaults are particularly striking. The number of reported assaults on Toronto-area transit leapt by 160 per cent in that period, while reports of all violent crimes on the transit system were up by 127 per cent. In Winnipeg, the overall violent crime rate on transit has more than tripled during that time — a 281 per cent jump in the number of transit-related violent crimes.
Meanwhile, rates have more than doubled in the Edmonton and Montreal areas, as well as the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge region of Ontario.
Incident report data from a freedom of information request to the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) show a similar pattern between 2018 and 2024.
Crime statistics like this are a major reason why Toronto Coun. Brad Bradford doesn’t feel comfortable taking his two young daughters on public transit.
“It’s the indiscriminate nature,” he said. “It’s the fact that you have nowhere to go.”
TTC spokesperson Stuart Green acknowledged that concerns about safety on transit have increased since the pandemic, but said “by any objective measure, the TTC is safe.”
“We move millions of trips a day without incident, but we can never and will never take that for granted,” he said in a written statement. “The TTC and most transit agencies in North America are seeing more people with complex challenges seeking shelter on transit, which is why we have increased, enhanced and modified our approach to this issue.”
Signs of a slowdown, but violent crime rates remain high
There are signs the problem is easing in several of the regions covered by the data.
Transit-related violent crime rates hit a peak in 2023 in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, but fell slightly in those regions in 2024.
However, these rates still remain well above those from a decade ago. This is the first in a series of stories about violence on public transit. There are some exceptions to the trend, as well.
The biggest outlier is Vancouver.
The Lower Mainland started the decade with the highest rate of violent crime on transit of any city in the dataset, but that number has yo-yoed up and down since, trending slightly downward. By 2024, the Vancouver region’s transit crime rate was lower than that of both Toronto and Edmonton, and just slightly above Winnipeg.
Murtaza Haider, the executive director of the Cities Institute at the University of Alberta, has studied public transit for decades; his own research also shows a spike in crimes on transit during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic, before beginning to fall somewhat.
The CBC and the IJF’s numbers raise new questions about trends he’s observed, he said. “[Violent crime] hasn’t gone down to pre-pandemic levels in most cases, with the exception of Vancouver. So this tells us that there’s something other than what we know … happening, and there’s a greater need for cities and provinces to co-ordinate on improving safety on transit property and vehicles,” Haider said…
Green, the TTC spokesperson, attributed the continuing high violent crime rates on transit to increased reporting.“We have actively encouraged people to report more incidents, we have more ways to report incidents and we have more staff to address incidents,” he said. “We can’t conclusively say if there are more actual incidents, but we can say we know about more incidents.”
By Bethany Lindsay, Eric Szeto, Mia Sheldon · CBC News ·
Source: cbc.ca/news/canada/transit-crimes
