About an hour and a half into Pierre Poilievre’s sit-down with Jordan Peterson two weeks ago, the Conservative leader turned his attention to his plan for crime in Canada.
“We will have rapid introduction of the biggest crackdown on crime in Canadian history,” Poilievre said. When Peterson asked what that would look like, Poilievre said, “Basically, habitual offenders will not get out of jail anymore.”
This slice of the conversation revived a common line of attack Poilievre has taken against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government — that they’ve “created a crime wave with their reckless catch-and-release policies.”
It’s a well-worn message that compares people being processed through Canada’s criminal justice system to fish.
While Trudeau has since announced he will be stepping down as prime minister, these attack lines on policies will likely continue until the federal election becomes more imminent.
Crime, in addition to critiques of the carbon tax and housing affordability, forms one of the core aspects of the Conservative Party of Canada’s messaging.
Poilievre has argued that crime — in particular violent crime — has risen in the nine years that Trudeau has been prime minister and that Canadians have never been less safe. The blame, they say, lies in Trudeau’s “catch-and-release policies.”
But is this true? Does the data really show that “crime is rampant” in Canada? And is Trudeau really to blame?
Let’s take a closer look.

THE CLAIM: Trudeau’s attorney general said rising crime “was all in your head.”
FACT CHECK: Not true. While Justice Minister Arif Virani appeared to downplay concerns about crime in a 2023 interview, he never said rising crime “was all in your head,” nor did he say “Canada is safer,” as Poilievre claims in his July 2024 Instagram post.
“Only a wacko would say Canada is safer with a 50 per cent rise in violent crime,” said the Instagram post from Poilievre, in reference to the justice minister.
The quote Poilievre is referencing comes from a 2023 Reuters interview in which Virani, days after being appointed as justice minister, spoke about his new file and a “perceived lack of safety from crime”:
“I think that empirically it’s unlikely” Canada is becoming less safe, Virani told Reuters in an interview on Monday.“But I think there’s a sense coming out of the pandemic that people’s safety is more in jeopardy.”
It is unclear what data Virani was referring to when he said “empirically it’s unlikely,” and the Liberal Party of Canada did not respond to a request for comment. But looking at perceptions of safety, particularly as captured in Statistics Canada victimization surveys in 2014 and more recently in 2019, most Canadians generally tended to be satisfied with their personal safety from crime and tended to feel like the level of crime in their neighbourhood was unchanged or stable.
A sense of personal safety can be linked to a sense of well-being, and vice versa, said a Statistics Canada statement. “Fear of crime or a perceived lack of safety can lead to withdrawal from community life, reduced social cohesion, and can lead some people to adopt restrictive behaviours, such as avoiding certain places or not going out after a certain time,” the statement said.
Statistics Canada has included questions on perceptions of personal safety in its General Social Survey on Victimization since 1993, and responses have been “largely consistent” in that time frame.
The government agency has also asked questions dealing with perceptions of personal safety in other surveys, including one in the early pandemic and in the Canadian Social Survey. A survey that includes this question is forthcoming in 2025.
The measure is not a substitute for accurate data on crime trends though, Statistics Canada says. While there is a relationship between crime data and people’s perceptions around safety, “perceptions are based on more than just levels of police-reported or self-reported victimization,” the agency says. Other factors include people’s confidence in their communities and their confidence in the ability of their local police forces to adequately and appropriately respond to crime.
THE CLAIM: The latest Statistics Canada report on crime shows crime is rampant in our streets after nine years of Trudeau.
FACT CHECK: Misleading — but partially true. While various measures of crime do suggest an increase in reported crime over the last decade, these crime statistics began to rise between 2014 and 2015, while Conservative leader Stephen Harper was prime minister. Trudeau took office in November 2015.
The Conservatives’ Instagram post juxtaposes a portion of Virani’s quote — “‘I think that empirically it’s unlikely’ Canada is becoming less safe, [Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada] told Reuters in an interview on Monday” — against a column of figures.
The numbers claim a 50 per cent increase in violent crime, a 357 per cent increase in extortion, a 116 per cent increase in violent firearm offences, a 46 per cent increase in auto thefts and a 75 per cent increase in sexual assaults. It isn’t clear from the graphic or the rest of the post which periods these statistics are comparing. The Conservative party did not answer The Tyee’s queries asking for clarification.
Our best guess? Poilievre seems to be citing Statistics Canada’s “Police-Reported Crime Statistics in Canada, 2023,” which was released on July 25, 2024, the day the Instagram post was published.
This report focuses on the crime severity index, which measures both the volume and relative seriousness of police-reported crime in Canada and gives a higher weight to crimes more likely to result in prison time and longer sentences.
The most recent report shows a two per cent increase in the CSI between 2022 and 2023. The non-violent crime CSI — which includes crimes such as property offences, drug offences, child pornography, fraud, shoplifting, motor vehicle theft and breaking and entering — increased by three per cent while the violent crime CSI “remained virtually unchanged” from the previous year, according to Statistics Canada.
The overall CSI has increased significantly over the past decade, up 17 per cent from 2013 to 2023. The violent crime CSI increased 34 per cent, while the non-violent crime CSI increased 10 per cent.

According to the report, the CSI “is best understood in a broad context with other information on community safety and crime, as well as other characteristics, such as population and demographics, labour market conditions and activities, employment and income, and housing and families.”
The CSI also does not include “crimes that go unreported (often referred to as the ‘dark figure of crime’),” according to a Statistics Canada statement.
Self-reported victimization data, such as what’s captured in the General Social Survey on Canadians’ Safety, “provide an important complement” to statistics like the police-reported crime statistics, the agency said.
But given the police-reported crime data, self-reported victimization surveys and homicide data we do have, it is reasonable for Poilievre to suggest that there has been an increase in crime since the tail end of the Harper years and the beginning of the Trudeau years, said University of Ottawa emeritus professor Irvin Waller.
Waller has studied and researched crime for decades and has worked on crime task forces on various levels of government as well as at the United Nations. He wrote a book called Science and Secrets of Ending Violent Crime, published in 2019.
While all of the crime indicators are important, they tell different stories, Waller said. “One reason for reporting crime is because you’re insured against it,” he notes. “And in order to get your insurance, you have to make a police report.” Whereas victimization surveys might capture things you might not go to the police for, such as a stolen cellphone.
Assigning an increase in crime to Trudeau and his policies is different, though. “I don’t think that’s a fair phrase,” he said.
We’ll get into that next.
THE CLAIM: The increase in crime is because of “Trudeau’s catch-and-release system.”
FACT CHECK: Hard to say. Without deeply researched evidence evaluating links to specific policies, it’s impossible to make this claim confidently.
It takes time to change policies and for new policies to take effect, Waller said. And there can be multiple reasons why crime goes up or down.
“One would want to know which [Trudeau] policies and which Harper policies might have led to this turnaround,” Waller said.
In his January conversation with Jordan Peterson, Poilievre had much praise for Harper-era policies. “When we did this last time in the Harper government, we actually reduced crime by 25 per cent.”
“But interesting, this is a very big surprise, incarcerations went down. Because the people that we kept in prison were in and out anyway,” Poilievre said. “It was like the Hotel California. They were checking out but they were never really leaving, so we had to basically save them a bed. But secondly, the small-time offenders were actually deterred.”
During the second half of Harper’s tenure as prime minister, as data on crime showed it trending downwards, the Conservative federal government introduced many controversial “tough-on-crime” bills.
Many of those laws, particularly with regards to mandatory minimum sentences, were still in place by the end of the 2010s, years after Harper had left office.
In other words: crime trended up again despite them.
The Liberal laws the Conservatives regularly take aim at are 2019’s Bill C-75, which aimed to “modernize and streamline” Canada’s bail system, and 2022’s Bill C-5, which dropped mandatory minimum penalties for certain offences.
The government argued these bills aimed to address systemic discrimination and overrepresentation in incarceration of Indigenous, Black and other marginalized communities.
Also criticized by the Conservatives is 2023’s Bill C-48, a bail reform bill the Liberals claimed was supposed to make it harder for repeat offenders to go on bail. The federal government said it introduced the bill following calls from police and provinces.
These policies, the Conservatives allege, have allowed for the proliferation of “repeat and violent offenders” who, after being arrested and charged, are let loose while on bail to commit more crimes due to weak laws and gaps in Canada’s bail system.
Two high-profile cases intensified arguments for “tougher” laws and the Conservative refrain “jail, not bail.” In one case, an Ontario police officer was killed in December 2022, allegedly by a man who had been previously denied bail while waiting on assault and weapons charges. In another, a Surrey, B.C., woman was killed in June 2024 by a man who was already facing a previous aggravated assault charge.
The tenor of the criticism rose as Canadian premiers, including B.C. Premier David Eby, sent a letter to the federal government calling for a review of Bill C-48.
In response to the letter from the premiers, Justice Minister Virani and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc wrote: “We listened to the provinces and territories when they asked for changes to the Criminal Code — now they need to step up and enforce the law. Provinces are responsible for the administration of bail, and more needs to be done to make sure police and prosecutors have the tools they need for effective monitoring and enforcement.”
A joint response from Minister LeBlanc and I to the Premiers’ recent letter on bail: pic.twitter.com/xjhcG1UwWL
— Arif Virani (@viraniarif) July 24, 2024
Waller said that when evaluating these allegations, it’s important to come from a victim perspective.
“I think the public is right to say, ‘What’s going on here?’” he said.
“The law is federal,” Waller said. “But the courts are provincial. So there’s clearly something going wrong, and I don’t think they’re getting to the root of it.”
Waller said that if someone has been repeatedly convicted in a criminal court of violent behaviours, the use of already existing dangerous offender legislation could be considered, but preventive measures like these should be used sparingly.
There’s also a key followup question to ask: Would being “tougher on crime” actually reverse crime trends?
“The United States is the heaviest user of incarceration in the world, bar none,” Waller said. “Its cities are nowhere near as safe as us. The idea that you can actually reduce violent crime through making the penalties more severe doesn’t stand up to a lot of very strong evidence.”
“There are two ways to reduce crime,” Waller said. “One is to tackle the roots, which are basically poverty and racism and lack of access to education, and those trend over very long periods of time. Trudeau has introduced child care — when will it have an impact on violent crime rates?”
“The other group are what are known as tackling risk factors. And these are things where you’re helping a small group of young men in very disadvantaged circumstances overcome their disadvantage,” Waller said.
“They’re helping them control their emotions, they’re helping them complete school, get jobs, helping with parenting. And with those things, you can achieve within a very short period of time, like four or five years, a 50 per cent reduction in violent crimes, including homicides.”
On the other hand, sending more people to jail and giving police more money don’t have demonstrably positive effects on crime rates.
During Poilievre’s conversation with Peterson, he repeated a claim he’s made in the past, that “in Vancouver, they arrested 40 offenders 6,000 times in one year,” which isn’t true.
THE CLAIM: Canadians have never been less safe.
FACT CHECK: Inaccurate.
Poilievre has said we are experiencing “one of the worst crime waves in Canadian history.”
But available police-reported crime statistics for Canada have the 1990s as the highest point for crime.
Police-reported crime data via Statistics Canada’s Uniform Crime Reporting Survey goes back to 1962. According to the agency, the overall crime rate peaked in 1991 at 10,342 incidents per 100,000 and fell 51 per cent over a decade, and across governments, to 5,062 incidents in 2014. In 2023, the crime rate was 5,843 incidents per 100,000.

CSI data was first made available in 1998, and the overall CSI that year was 118.8. It trended downwards across Canada and most provinces to an all-time low in 2014 at 66.9.
The CSI had risen back to 80.5 by 2023.
The current rhetoric around crime could be partly linked to the increased visibility of poverty, drug use and mental health crises in cities, Waller said.
“Today, we don’t know what to do about the homeless group or the mentally ill group,” Waller said. “We are beginning to have a more efficient way of linking the mentally ill with services from the police arresting them. But generally we don’t know what to do about this. I mean, drug overdoses — these are incredible numbers. And the public is seeing this.
“A lot of these people have experienced trauma in various forms, which accumulates and leads to addiction, which leads to overdoses. So yeah, we haven’t really gotten around to thinking about what to do, and we do sort of expect the police to clean this up and to keep our cities neat.”
A very small proportion of people who are mentally ill actually engage in violence, Waller said. But mix in the likelihood of finding a person acting strangely with “sensational and exceptional” news coverage of random attacks, and suddenly a person looks scary. Plus, if the sensational and exceptional aligns with something that you do in your everyday life, like going on public transit, it generates fear, and fear changes behaviour, Waller said.
“Random attacks create fear because people are worried about it happening to them,” Waller added.
“Some of these stranger attacks are clearly associated with mental illness, and some of them are people who’ve been released from mental hospitals. So there is an issue as to whether those mental hospitals are exercising their discretion adequately in terms of public safety. Are these just exceptional when this happens? Is there something we can do to tighten that?”
But a part of addressing risk factors to reduce violence is more and better mental health services, Waller said.
“In Canada, we’ve chosen to pay police more and more — which actually doesn’t get you more police, it just gets you more expensive police — and they’re clearly not the best people to respond to mental illness. Deterrence is not the best way to deal with it, either.”
Specialized mental health professionals responding to mental health cases saves police costs — and the further traumatization of mentally unwell Canadians, who are statistically more likely than the general population to be victims of violence.
“It should lead to those people being referred to mental health services that can help them. But you’ve also got to look at how the mental health professionals exercise their discretion in relation to public safety,” Waller said.
One positive step forward, which hasn’t gotten much visibility, is the movement to develop community safety and well-being plans, Waller said.
Victoria is developing one. Edmonton and Calgary want one too. In 2019, Ontario, as it overhauled its police act, added a section called community safety and well-being.
Rather than reaction, community safety and well-being plans present an opportunity to build a safer community with a plan that will actually reduce crime and victimization, reduce addictions and generally improve safety, Waller said.
The way we approach safety, whether with emergency services, more specialized services or police, doesn’t seem to be working, Waller said, and community safety plans are a good place to figure out what’s next.
“If you actually put the money into the things that work, and we’re talking about maybe the equivalent of five to 10 per cent of what we’re spending on reaction, we would be able to reduce the violent crime that Poilievre is worried about by at least 50 per cent in the next five years. And in my view, by more, because we have examples of where other countries have reduced them by 50 per cent.
“We can build on their knowledge and skills, and we’re not doing that.”
Read more: Rights + Justice, Federal Politics
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