The safest—and maybe most honest—places to live in Canada

Despite being adjacent to a landmass called Fighting Island in the Detroit River, LaSalle, Ont. was ranked as the overall safest place to live in Canada when Statistics Canada put out its crime rankings in July.

Well, apparently it could be in the running for the most honest place in Canada, too. Mayor Marc Bondy, who phoned Maclean’s from Florida on Wednesday, where he was on vacation and  reported it is 82 degrees Fahrenheit, said LaSalle’s local police department called the statistics agency to make a few corrections after the rankings came out, thinking that it might not deserve that top spot.

As it turns out, the “bedroom community,” as Bondy put it, is only the 10th-safest place to live in this country. But it’s still a good example of a community with very little crime. About a 20-minute drive from downtown Windsor, LaSalle has French settlement roots, a population of 32,889, a new state-of-the-art civic centre and a strawberry festival every June. It has an active community and “a lot of trails,” Bondy said.

What makes crime such an unappealing venture here? It could be the neighbourhood watch mentality. “Take my son, he’s 33, has three young boys, they’re always active, they’re on the road, they see things and because of that if something happens they’ll say, ‘Hey, this doesn’t look right,’” Bondy said. “The ones who have been around a long time, like my neighbour who’s 85 years old, he’ll see a car in the neighbourhood that’s not regular in the neighbourhood and he’ll say, ‘Marc, there’s this car.’”

READ MORE: Canada’s worst violent crime problem is in Thompson, Man.

It could also be that crooks are more likely to hang out in downtown Windsor than at the LaSalle rec centre, or that it’s a relatively high-income, very residential area. Bondy, whose franco-Ontarian roots are obvious when he replies “oui” to some of our questions, waxed poetic about the difference it makes to have a truly local police unit. “I would say 80 per cent, 85 per cent of our police officers live within town. And they know who the good people are.”

After conversations with the LaSalle Police Service, Statistics Canada decided to wait until next year to update its data tables accordingly, said a spokesperson for StatsCan, Fabrice Mosseray. Online, LaSalle is still displayed as having the lowest crime severity index in the country—a metric the federal government uses to measure the frequency and severity of crime against a national average—at 15, compared to the national index of 75. An updated table provided by Mosseray shows its CSI actually turned out to be a little higher, at 26.

This means the top two safest places to hang your hat, with CSIs of 17, are Petawawa, Ont., where a military base is located—keep in mind that these statistics do not reflect incidents governed by the military police—and Rothesay and Quispamsis, N.B., which we also ranked as Canada’s safest place last year. Rounding out the top three, taking LaSalle out of the mix, is Peterborough, Ont., with a CSI of 20.

A majority of the sleepiest crime spots, 29 out of the top 50, are in Ontario. Another eight are in Quebec. The safest place in Quebec ranks eighth and is just about adjacent to Ontario — the Collines-de-l’Outaouais Regional County Municipality, with a CSI of 27. Featuring Gatineau Park and picturesque communities like Chelsea and Wakefield, this is the cottage-country area that surrounds Gatineau, Que., the city across the river from Ottawa.

Seven of the top 50 are in British Columbia. The safest B.C. spot, in ninth place, is Oak Bay, a community at the southern tip of Vancouver Island. Its index is also 27. You can walk to Victoria from there in less than an hour.

Saskatchewan has one spot in the top 50 safest places, Langham and Warman (the two towns north of Saskatoon count as one community in the ranking), while Alberta has two, Beaumont and Okotoks, though both barely squeaked in with a CSI of 40. Looking at violent crime, Beaumont is in worse shape, ranking 151st out of 237 communities included in our analysis.

By that metric, it’s Thames Centre, Ont. that takes the prize for the least violent crime, although that community of 14,165 saw roughly five breaking-and-entering incidents per month in 2018, so you might want to lock your windows. It’s also one of two communities in Canada—the other North Saanich on Vancouver Island—that saw the lowest levels of sexual assault reported to police, with one incident apiece.

Although there was breaking-and-entering in every population centre used for this analysis —we looked at communities with 10,000 people or more—nearly 30 communities had no robberies to speak of. About 75 places saw no offences under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. And nearly 140 communities avoided murder altogether. Nice job, Canadians!