I have nothing against Americans wanting to move to Canada following the election; there’s a long tradition of people moving — even within the democratic world — to find a place where they feel more in sync with local values. I’m glad that some Canadians move here because they prefer our more enterpreneurial spirit; I certainly understand why those Americans who prefer the social programs and cultural attitudes of Canada can move there, and I hope the Canadians welcome them.
On the other hand, don’t move there thinking the violent crime rate is vastly lower in Canada than in the U.S. — 10 times lower, according to the Spokane Spokesman-Review (Sept. 5, 2004) and a Slate article last Friday. It’s always hard to do international comparisons, but it appears that the violent crime rate in both countries is quite similar, though the Canadian homicide rate is much lower (by about a factor of 3.8 to 4).
The best data we have on crime comes from victim surveys — these are flawed, but at least they try to measure the same thing (rather than relying on legal definitions that may differ from country to country), and they ask about actual crimes, not crimes reported to the police (since the reporting rate may vary from country to country).
According to the International Crime Victimization Survey (1999 data), the “contact crime” rate (robbery, sexual assault, and assault with force) is over 1.5 times higher in Canada than in the U.S.; 3.4% of all respondents were victimized once or more in Canada, 1.9% in the U.S. (fig. 5, p. 33). If one goes by respondent-reported seriousness (fig. 7, p. 48), the result is more favorable for Canada, though this category includes some nonviolent crimes that were felt to be serious, and excludes some violent ones that were felt not to be serious — from the graphic, it looks like Canada had about 11 or so “very serious” incidents per 100 inhabitants in 1999, while the U.S. had about 13 or so. If we combine “very serious” and “fairly serious,” the result is a tie. So far, then, it seems that the U.S. and Canadian violent crime rates looks similar. (This excludes homicide, which the ICVS doesn’t measure.)
The other possible source of data is crimes reported to the police, available from Statistics Canada in Canada and the DoJ’s Uniform Crime Reports in the U.S. The 2003 robbery rate in Canada does seem lower than that in the U.S. (also 2003, see p. 31), by about a factor of 1.6 (89.6 per 100,000 in Canada and 142.2 per 100,000 in the U.S.).
The 2003 sexual assault rate in Canada seems higher than the 2003 forcible rape rate in the U.S. (which includes attempted forcible rape) in the U.S. (89.6 vs. 32.1, see p. 27), but of course sexual assault might be defined differently and more broadly in Canada, which is one reason that ICVS data, for all its possible flaws, is probably better than the Statistics Canada / UCR data.
As to aggravated assaults, unfortunately the Canada report that I found doesn’t seem to separate serious assaults from less serious ones — the 2003 rate for all assaults in Canada is 746.5 per 100,000 in Canada, and the 2003 rate for aggravated assaults is 295.0 per 100,000 in the U.S. is 295.0 per 100,000, but I can’t really tell how to compare these.
I suspect that in Canada, as in the U.S., the important questions are where in the country you live, and also what you do and who you are (for instance, the homicide rate for U.S. black males is over 7 times higher than for white males, and about 20 times greater than for white females). Among other things, I’ve heard that the homicide rate in Canada’s largest city, Toronto, is considerably lower than the national norm, which may well make Toronto a much lower-crime city than the biggest cities in the U.S.
Nonetheless, there’s no reason at all to think — as best I can tell from the data — that the violent crime rate in Canada is anywhere near 10 times lower than in the U.S.
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