Homicides fell by about half last year in Toronto and Winnipeg, police data show, part of a remarkable downturn in lethal violence across Canada that experts say politicians must consider as they push stiffer sentences for violent offenders.
In 2025, several shocking killings prompted promises by politicians to deter violence by amending the Criminal Code. In April, a mass vehicle attack killed 11 people in Vancouver. In August, an eight-year-old Toronto boy was killed in his bed by a stray bullet.
However, despite an overall rise in violent crime over the past decade, 2025 saw a sharp decline in homicides in several major cities, police forces told The Globe and Mail, after a downward trend in homicides that started a few years ago. Some experts say today’s levels may be heading back toward lows last seen in the early 2010s.
Police in Winnipeg, which consistently has some of Canada’s highest per capita murder rates, said officers launched 21 homicide investigations in 2025, down from 41 the previous year.
The trend was similar in Toronto, where detectives probed 44 cases last year, compared with 84 in 2024. Spokesperson Stephanie Sayer provided data showing the force has seen fewer killings only three times since the mid-1970s: in 1974, 1980 and 1986.
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Ontario’s York Region also saw a decline in homicides, police say, from 21 in 2024 to 10 in 2025. In major cities in Alberta, year-over-year homicides also fell – from 21 to 15 in Calgary, and from 33 to 30 in Edmonton.
The Lapu-Lapu festival attack in Vancouver that left 11 dead contributed to an increase in homicides in that city – to 26 in 2025, up from 11 in 2024. But killings were down elsewhere in the Lower Mainland. The RCMP’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) said it launched 33 homicide case investigations in the region in 2025, compared with 42 the previous year. (One of the 2025 investigations was concluded as non-homicide and two of the cases were double homicides, IHIT said.)
While the number of homicides is a single crime metric, it can be a bellwether indicator that points to emerging trends in violence, community safety and social welfare.
Catherine Latimer, a former federal crime-policy analyst who is now executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, said politicians need to pay attention to the homicide data as they promise harsher punishments for violent offenders.
“Otherwise … they are going to come out with reforms that respond to false perceptions about crime, which end up hurting people’s rights and their liberties,“ she said.
The reasons for the dropping homicide numbers are unclear, experts say. But such statistics are broadly at odds with some of the rationales underpinning tough-on-crime legislation proposed by the Liberal government.
“Canadians are feeling the strain of a justice system that, frankly, has failed to keep up with what they’re feeling and what they’re seeing in their communities,” federal Justice Minister Sean Fraser said in a Parliament Hill news conference in October as he announced a bail-reform bill.
At the time, he and his department were highlighting an “upward trend” in violent crime between 2014 and 2024 – including in homicides – as the Liberal government proposed crime bills to ratchet back access to bail and to lengthen penitentiary terms.
Last fall, the minister told reporters that, as a child growing up in Canada during the early 1990s, “we never worried about safety.”
However, Anthony Doob, a retired criminologist at the University of Toronto, noted that murders were actually more prevalent in the early 1990s.
Homicides have risen compared with a decade ago, when they were at historic lows, he said. But they now appear to be trending back toward those lows.
“When crime goes down, mostly, people ignore it,” he said. “Who’s going to talk about crime not being as high when you’ve got [politicians] … telling us that we’re going to hell in a handbasket?”
In response to questions for this story, spokespeople for the federal Justice Department said that homicide numbers are only part of the picture.
“The minister has commented on the overall increase in violent crimes, which goes well beyond homicide,” Ian McLeod said.
The violent crime severity index – a Statistics Canada indicator that also includes robberies, assaults and sexual assaults – shows a slight increase from 1998 to 2024, Kwame Bonsu added.
Statistics Canada data show murders and manslaughters peaked in Canada in the mid-1970s when the rates at times exceeded three people per 100,000.
In the early 1990s, homicide rates ranged from 2.0 to 2.7 people per 100,000 before entering a period of sustained decline, dropping to lows of about 1.5 between 2012 and 2014.
The homicide rate then began climbing, to a pandemic-era peak of 2.3 per 100,000 people in 2022, but has since fallen, dropping to 1.9 in 2024.
Statscan’s homicide data for 2025 will be published later this year.
In the United States, where homicide rates are about three times higher than in Canada, experts are also observing a downward trend.
“We have data back to 1960. There is no such decline that we have in our data, which reflects just how historic the drop is,” said U.S. crime analyst Jeff Asher, a former intelligence analyst who co-founded a consultancy called AH Datalytics.
Mr. Asher said in an interview that he anticipates that once the 2025 data are officially crunched, they may reveal the lowest U.S. murder rates ever recorded.
Like other experts, he said he does not know the precise reasons why. “To some degree, the pandemic kind of broke us,” Mr. Asher said. Now, “we‘re looking at some of the least crimeful years that we’ve ever had.”