Kitchener makes list of safest cities in Canada

A list of Canada’s safest places to live was released and the tri-cities made the top 20. The list compiles data from the Canadian Crime Index for 2022. It takes the number of criminal offenses for things like robberies or arson and calculates how many of them happen for every 100,000 people in a particular city.

The list was created with the intent to inform homeowners of safe cities to live in by separating crimes into categories such as breaking and entering or impaired driving. It was created by people working for money.ca.

According to the list, the top five safest cities in Canada to live in are:

1. Toronto: 286.9 offenses per 100,000 people.
2. Quebec: 301 offenses per 100,000 people.
3. Ottawa-Gatineau, QC: 318.8 offenses per 100,000 people.
4. Sherbrooke: 327.4 offenses per 100,000 people.
5. Ottawa-Gatineau, ON: 333.9 offenses per 100,000 people.

The safest cities are determined based on the number of crimes compared with the size of the population.

Guelph made the list at number 15 with 500.6 offenses for every 100,000 people.

Kitchener-Waterloo and Cambridge were further down on the list, sitting at number 19. The tri-cities had 596.2 criminal offenses for every 100,000 people. Breaking and entering criminal offenses made up the largest part of that number with 458.9 offenses for every 100,000 people in the area. It was followed by impaired driving which had 72.8 offenses. Arson was the smallest number with 18.2 offenses recorded.  

The tri-cities was followed by Victoria, BC, which had 604.9 offenses per 100,000 people listed.

London, Ontario ranked number 25 on the list with 679.7 offenses per 100,000 people. It had a high number of breaking and entering offenses listed at 470.5 for every 100,000.

The list ended with Lethbridge in Alberta which had the largest number of criminal offenses at 1,190 for every 100,000 people in that city.