What to know
- Toronto ranked the second-most unsafe city in Canada in a new Liaison Strategies public safety perception study, with 57% of respondents viewing it as unsafe.
- Winnipeg ranked as the least safe, while Quebec City was deemed the safest. Toronto’s score has also worsened from the same study conducted in 2017.
- Toronto’s reputation appears worse than its crime data suggests. The study says Toronto had the largest gap between perceived safety and official crime-severity data. Only 12% of Canadians cited crime statistics as the main factor shaping their view, while news coverage and personal experience were more influential.
- Safety perceptions varied by gender and region, with women reporting greater safety concerns in Toronto and several other major cities. Liaison Strategies says the findings show that a city’s reputation can affect residents, visitors and investors, and that rebuilding a damaged safety reputation can take years.
Toronto was just deemed the second most unsafe city in the country, according to a new opinion-based study.
Liaison Strategies conducted a national public safety perception study, surveying 1,500 random Canadians. The data showed that of the participants polled, 57 per cent saw Toronto’s safety in a negative light, just two per cent less than Winnipeg, which took the top spot.
Toronto ranked 14th out of the 15 cities tested.
When compared between those who considered Toronto safe versus those who did not, the city received a net safety score deficit of -18.
Winnipeg had the lowest score in the country at -28, with just 31 per cent of those polled calling the city safe and 59 per cent calling it unsafe. Quebec City was ranked the safest city in Canada, with a net safety score of +57.
A bad reputation despite data saying otherwise
Toronto’s perception shows that Canadians see the city worse than crime data suggests they should, with the study’s gap score ranking the city at the top of the data.
David Valentin, Principal at Liaison Strategies, said in a release that this portion of the data makes the city stand out against Winnipeg.
“Toronto is different. Toronto is perceived as almost as unsafe as Winnipeg, but the official crime-severity data does not put Toronto in the same category,” he explained. “That is why Toronto stands out as the clearest reputational penalty in the report.”
The same study was conducted by Liaison Strategies in 2017, with Toronto having had a net safety score of -12, meaning the city’s perception worsened over the years.
Only 12 per cent said crime statistics are the main factor shaping their impression of a city’s safety, with about 28 per cent of Canadians polled noting that news coverage tends to shape how they view the safety of a city, while another 23 per cent noted that personal experience was their indicator of safety within that city.
“If people are mostly relying on news coverage, personal experience, and word of mouth, then city safety is not just a policing issue. It is also a reputation issue,” Valentin said.
Differences in safety between demographics like gender
The survey also found differences in how safety is perceived by gender and region.
“The lived meaning of safety is not the same for every audience,” Valentin said.
Women reported a sharper safety concern in several major cities, including Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver and Edmonton.
Valentin added that the findings point to the consequences behind perception for the leaders of those municipalities.
“Residents, visitors, and investors react not only to police-reported crime, but to the reputation a city carries,” he said. “That reputation can take years to build, and years to repair.”
Liaison Strategies’ poll was conducted Aug. 30 and Aug. 31 using interactive voice response technology and random digit dialling. Results were weighted to demographic and geographic targets. A margin of error of plus or minus 2.53 percentage points should be considered 19 times out of 20.
