There’s bad news for Manitoba in Statistics Canada’s Juristat report on crime in Canada’s provincial north and territories for 2013, but at least there’s a silver lining.
The bad news is that the crime rate in our province’s north is five times that of the south. Northern Manitoba also had the highest homicide rate amongst all regions – northern our southern – covered by the report.
But crime is also significantly higher in the northern regions of most provinces apart from Ontario and Quebec, though Northern Manitoba – along with northern Saskatchewan, Northwest Territories and Nunavut – has one of the highest discrepancies, with a crime rate more than four times the national average and a Crime Severity Index (CSI) more than four times the national CSI.
The police reported crime rate per 100,000 people is 7,967 incidents for Manitoba as a whole and 6,062 incidents per 100,000 people in the province’s south, compared to 31,225 incidents per 100,000 people in Manitoba’s north. The violent crime rate in Northern Manitoba is 7,746 incidents per 100,000 people, while it is 1,836 incidents per 100,000 people for the province as a whole and 1,352 incidents per 100,000 people in the province’s south. Property crimes are also about three times greater in Manitoba’s north than the south, while the number of other Criminal Code offences in Northern Manitoba is 10 times what it is in the south.
Although Northern Manitoba had fewer than half as many homicides in 2013 as the province’s south, Manitoba’s uneven population distribution – only eight per cent of Manitobans live in the north – means that Northern Manitoba’s rate of 14.6 homicides per 100,000 people is more than four times as high as the rate of 3.5 homicides per 100,000 people in the south. Common assault is nearly eight times more common in the province’s north, with a rate of 3,975 incidents per 100,000 people compared to 516 per 100,000 in Manitoba’s south.
As in other provinces with a large discrepancy between the northern and southern crime rates like Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador, the rates of disturbing the peace and mischief are much higher in Northern Manitoba. The 2013 rates per 100,000 population were 8,045 for disturbing the peace and 7,671 for mischief in Manitoba’s north compared to 1,280 and 251, respectively, in the south.
