Canada’s crime landscape brightened considerably in 2025, according to new figures released Wednesday by Statistics Canada, with both the frequency and seriousness of criminal activity falling in nearly every corner of the country.
The national Crime Severity Index, a benchmark that weighs both how often crimes occur and how serious they are, fell five percent last year to settle at 75.01. It’s the second consecutive annual drop for the index, which had climbed steadily to 81.27 over the prior eight years before reversing course.
Nearly every province and territory shared in the improvement. Only New Brunswick and Nunavut bucked the national trend with rises in their severity scores, and most large Canadian cities also saw their numbers move in a positive direction.
The broader conventional crime rate a simpler measure that counts raw incidents without weighing their severity slipped two percent over the same period, landing at 5,585 incidents for every 100,000 Canadians.
A major driver behind the improved severity numbers was a continued fall in break-and-enter offences, which have now declined for three straight years. The 11 percent drop recorded in 2025 pushed the break-in rate down to 264 incidents per 100,000 residents.
Perhaps the most striking figure in the report involves homicide. Police recorded 125 fewer killings across the country in 2025 compared with the previous year, pulling the national homicide rate down to its lowest point since 2014. The 16 percent year-over-year decline marks the sharpest single-year drop Canada has logged since 1986 nearly four decades.
Not every trend line pointed downward, however. Shoplifting has now risen for five consecutive years, with police logging 208,941 incidents in 2025 a rate of 502 per 100,000 people, up 11 percent from the year before. The persistent climb in retail theft stands as one of the more notable counterpoints to an otherwise improving picture.
Fraud cases also eased somewhat in 2025, but Statistics Canada noted the rate remains 61 percent above where it stood in 2015, underscoring how dramatically fraud has grown over the past ten years. A related offence, extortion, fell for a second straight year, yet its rate is still triple what it was a decade ago.
Vehicle theft offered better news, dropping for a second year running after three consecutive years of increases. The agency reported the 2025 rate sat nine percent below where it was in 2015, and a full 64 percent under the peak reached in 2023 suggesting the recent surge in car thefts may be substantially behind the country now.
Statistics Canada reported that incidents of child sexual abuse and exploitation material fell 21 percent, to a rate of 36 per 100,000 people. The agency cautioned, though, that such crimes are notoriously underreported and likely undercounted in official statistics.
Notably, the report pointed to generative artificial intelligence as a contributing factor behind a growing volume of these cases, adding that police services sometimes lack sufficient resources to keep pace with the material being generated and circulated.
Reported hate crimes edged lower in 2025, falling from 4,841 incidents in 2024 to 4,708 a three percent decrease. That decline follows a period of dramatic growth between 2018 and 2024, when hate crime reports more than doubled nationwide.
Statistics Canada attributed the recent dip mainly to fewer hate crimes targeting religion and sexual orientation. At the same time, the agency noted upticks in hate-motivated incidents targeting other groups, including people with disabilities, individuals targeted based on sex or gender, and newcomers to Canada.
