Chatelaine
April 1999

Canada's safest cities

How safe is your home town? Are you more likely to be killed in St. John's, Nfld., or Saskatoon? Chatelaine asked those questions, and many more, in this exclusive cross-Canada survey. The results will surprise you. They might even move you to action.

It's 10 o'clock on a Friday night in downtown Toronto. A cold drizzle begins to fall, making the roads lustrous and slick, as packs of teenagers shuffle along the sidewalk. Two young girls huddle with their hands tucked inside their jacket sleeves. A scruffy man carrying a sleeping bag asks them for change or a cigarette. Nearby, four guys in droopy jeans, tuques and hooded sweatshirts move toward the girls. Around them, pedestrians hurry to shops, restaurants and the city's subway system.

Sound safe? You might not think so, but in fact it's a snapshot of a city at its safest. The kids are waiting for one of Toronto's Friday night teenage rites to commence: Citytv's Electric Circus, a giant dance party/TV show that shoots inside and on the street outside the downtown studio. And while the mass of people might look like pandemonium waiting to happen, violence is much less likely here than on the desolate empty streets at the core of many other cities, large and small.

The importance of a vibrant downtown has been observed by urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs. But that's just one of many factors at work in a safe city. What really makes a city a secure healthy place to live? That's the question that prompted Chatelaine's Safe Cities study, conducted by Dr. Evelyn Vingilis of the Population and Community Health Unit at the University of Western Ontario in London. We asked Vingilis to study Canadian cities and tell us how safe they are and how to make them safer.

The results are surprising, challenging our assumptions and toppling myths. The first one to fall? That crime is the biggest threat to our safety. In fact, crime rates have declined over the past 30 years - while fears about crime have risen. Car crashes, suicides and falls - that's right, falls - are all more likely to cause death due to injuries than homicide. And it's not the biggest cities that have the highest crime rates. You're more likely to be murdered in Saskatoon than Toronto, and may be more at risk of a property crime in Winnipeg than Montreal.

We looked at 24 Canadian census metropolitan areas; which are cities with a population of at least 100,000 including adjacent rural areas (Oshawa, Ont., was left out because some data required were unavailable), and asked Vingilis to rank them from safest to least safe. Because of inconsistencies in the reporting of crime and injury stats, Vingilis chose the indicator most likely to be reported: death. Using rates of death due to injuries (as a result of violence, falls, suicides, accidents and poisonings) gathered by Statistics Canada and averaged over three years (1994 to 1996), she ranked the cities according to their per capita premature death rate. These numbers also shed light on the cities' rates of assault, which show a correlation with the number of homicides.

Next step? To determine why cities ranked where they did. Vingilis looked for links to income levels and unemployment rates: U.S. studies have found correlations between lower levels of community safety and a greater percentage of lower-income unemployed residents. But these relationships didn't emerge in Canadian data. Vingilis suggests this may be because Canada provides more support to the poor and unemployed. Instead of the generalizations she'd expected, Vingilis discovered a complex picture of safety factors.

Topping the list ...

Why is St. John's, Nfld., ranked as the "safest city" among the 24 we studied? Because it has the lowest rate of suicide and near the lowest rates of falls and motor vehicle deaths. And the city's number 1 position holds despite a homicide rate that's actually higher than that in several other cities.

Among the cities at the top of our ranking (Toronto is in second place, followed by Kitchener, Ont., Ottawa-Hull and Halifax), size is not a determining factor, with populations that range from 174,051 in St. John's to 4,263,757 in Toronto. What these communities share are relatively low rates of injury-related death, whether intentional (suicide and homicide) or due to injuries from traffic or other causes. But it's difficult to isolate common factors behind these statistics. If there's one consistent element shared by the top five cities, it's a low or moderately low population of seniors - the group most prone to falls. Rates of reported crime vary, although none of these five cities ranks among the most crimeprone on our list. Number of police also vary, with Kitchener having almost the smallest number of police relative to population, while Halifax's police contingent is moderately high. But there may be another factor at work in these safer cities that couldn't be measured by our research: the overall vibrancy of the downtown core. Simply put, more people on the streets means safer streets. This holds true for all five of the top cities; Halifax, for example, has transformed its downtown into a walking area by turning empty warehouses into trendy restaurants, boutiques and cafes.

... and bottoming out

The good news for the Canadian cities that fall at the bottom of our rankings is that an unsafe city doesn't mean a city with a lot of crime. Indeed, three of the four cities at the bottom of the safety ranking (Trois-Rivieres, Chicoutimi and Sherbrooke, all in Quebec) have among the lowest crime rates of all the cities studied. (The city with the most reported crime, Vancouver, lands only halfway down the safety ranking, in 11th place out of 24.)

But what the cities at the bottom of the list share is another severe safety issue - usually either car crashes or suicides. Sudbury, Ont., the city ranked as least safe in our study, has the highest number of unintentional deaths due to injuries, suggesting that traffic safety or falls may be an issue there. Chicoutimi, second lowest on the list, has the highest number of suicides among the 24 cities studied. In fact, relatively high suicide rates are also seen in the three other Quebec communities that fall in the last one-third of the safety ranking (Trois-Rivieres, Sherbrooke and Quebec City), reflecting the province's rising suicide rate, even while rates are falling in Ontario and British Columbia. It's a trend that puzzles experts, as Quebec has what many consider the best network of community suicide prevention services in Canada.

The youth factor is also seen in the three cities lowest on the safety ranking: they share a high or moderately high proportion of residents between the ages of 10 and 24. Our data show a correlation between this group and higher rates of motor vehicle crashes.

Clear sidewalks or crime crackdown? Mandatory driver-safety training or tougher young-offender laws? You can guess which are likely to garner more headlines, attract more politicians and mobilize more advocates. But our focus on problems we think others cause - such as crime - and our persistence in calling falls and car crashes "accidents" may lead us to abdicate our own responsibilities in making our cities safer.

Consider this: there are about 500 homicides in Canada each year, compared to 13,500 premature deaths due to car crashes, falls, suicide and other causes. And we spend more than $14.3 billion annually on health care, disability and premature death associated with preventable injuries. The key is "preventable." They aren't accidents, say the safety pros: many car crashes, suicides, falls and other life-threatening occurrences can be avoided. And smart cities are figuring out how.

"What's a party?" asks Joanne Banfield cheerily as she leads a group of high school students up five flights of stairs at Toronto's Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre, the regional trauma hospital. There are elevators, but Banfield, a nurse and former manager of the trauma ward, wants to remind them of the importance of their legs.

"Drinking," one student says with a coy smile.

"I want names. What do you drink?" asks Banfield.

The students begin to call out the names of their favourite alcohol: "Beer." "Vodka." "Rum." "Wine."

"How long did it take you to get dressed today?" Banfield continues. "Fifteen minutes? Does anybody here need their parents to dress them, feed them or toilet them?"

One boy snickers aloud.

"You'll meet people today who once again have to rely on others for those things," she says. "It's like being an infant, except now you know what's going on with your body."

The snickering stops.

"We want you to go out and live life to the fullest. What we're hoping to show you today is that if you make smart choices you'll be able to make your good times last."

Banfield is coordinator of the Prevent Alcohol and Risk-related Trauma in Youth - or PARTY - program, an injury-prevention program aimed at the biggest risk-takers in our communities: teenagers. Designed to show teens how to take smart risks, programs like PARTY (which also operates in at least 18 hospitals across Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and the Northwest Territories) are one of the tools some smart communities use to keep safe at home, work and play.

While young people drive fewer kilometres than older drivers, when they are on the road, they are at much greater risk of death and injury than virtually any other group of motorists, says Herb Simpson, a behavioural scientist and president and CEO of the Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF) in Ottawa. Peer pressure, immaturity and a lack of driving experience all contribute to risky driving. That means that teen drivers are three times more likely to have a collision than the general driving population. Today, car crashes are the leading cause of death among young people, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all deaths of 16- to 19-year-olds.

Statistics like these prompted Simpson to promote a graduated licensing program to give young drivers time to gain the necessary experience before certain driving restrictions would be lifted. The program was first introduced in Ontario and then Nova Scotia in 1994 and is now gaining acceptance across the country. Following the introduction of graduated licensing in Ontario, the TIRF reported collision rates for novice drivers has been reduced by about one-third.

But teens aren't the only risks on the road. A dangerous minority of hardcore drinking drivers accounts for almost one-third of all the carnage. As the label implies, they are excessive drinkers who repeatedly drive after drinking and are likely to have a history of convictions. Now, Simpson says, a number of provinces are recognizing the importance of getting offenders into some form of treatment. As of 1989, all drivers in Manitoba who have had their licences suspended for driving with blood-alcohol levels over the legal limit are required to complete an alcohol-assessment program, which determines the type of problems (alcohol, anger control, drugs) and finds the appropriate treatment.

It's only a first step: neither a suspended licence nor enrolment in a treatment program guarantees these drivers stay off the road the next time they've been drinking.

What else can be done? Rather than targeting the driver, new programs are trying to restrict an offender's mobility by targeting the vehicle. One innovative solution is the Alcohol Ignition Interlock Program. It is legal in 39 states in the U.S. and has become wall-established in Alberta and Quebec. A small breath-testing unit linked to the car's ignition system prevents the car from starting if the driver's blood-alcohol concentration is too high. It allows the offenders, once they get their licence back, to drive and to get treatment - but only if they're sober.

It began with a tragedy: a student at Vancouver's Prince of Wales Secondary School committed suicide. And while there had been real signs the teen was troubled - he'd written notes to friends about suicide and spent time sitting on a bridge - none of his peers took him seriously and no one told an adult what was going on.

Parents, teachers and students wanted to make sure no warning signs were missed again, and an innovative peer counseling program was adopted. "We needed to give kids the skills and wisdom to take a cry for help seriously," says Donna Pearson, a teacher and coordinator of the program. Each year, about 80 Grade 11 students at the Vancouver school apply for training to become peer counselors, and 28 are selected to participate in the program in exchange for a school credit.

In a recent survey, more than 600 Canadian parents were asked to identify the single most worrisome risk to their children. Not one cited suicide. But almost 4,000 Canadians commit suicide each year, and suicide is the second-leading cause of death for 15- to 24-year-olds, after car accidents. The problem is especially acute among gay and lesbian youth, who account for 30 percent of completed teenage suicides.

"Suicide is very much a community safety issue," says David Masecar, a psychometrist at the Algoma Child and Youth Services in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. "It's about emotional and psychological safety," he says. "When a suicide happens, it affects your sense of community, people feel unsafe - like something insidious is happening in their community."

Until recently, though, preventing suicides focused primarily on intervening through crisis lines at the point at which someone was actually ready to make a suicide attempt. Today, that focus is shifting to earlier, "before-the-fact" approaches that prevent the risk of becoming suicidal.

It was these kinds of strategies that Jennifer White, director of B.C.'s new Suicide Prevention, Information and Resource Centre, was looking for when she set out to compile a manual of youth suicide prevention programs in the province. The strategies she found include support groups for families and youth, peer training, restricting access to lethal suicide means (e.g., firearms, potent medications), and developing a healthy community by encouraging young people to participate in decision making. The manual is filled with inspiring examples of initiatives across B.C., including the Prince of wales peer counseling program and Breaking Barriers & Building Bridges, a workshop created by youth at the McCreary Centre Society in Burnaby, B.C., that brings together a diverse group of young people (those with disabilities, who are gay/lesbian, aboriginal or live on the street) to learn about each other's health needs and develop leadership, communication and project skills.

"No single strategy can work by itself," explains James Musgrave, a youth suicide-prevention counselor in Surrey, B.C. "We want to create a stronger and more tightly woven net to catch more people from falling."

When a Grade 8 class at Lord Lansdowne Public School in Toronto was asked what safety problems they saw in their area, they pointed to speeding cars on a road near the school. They conducted their own roadside research - clocking cars as they sped past - and put together a presentation, complete with slides, charts and graphs, that convinced local government to lower the speed limit from 50 kilometres an hour to 40. When a group of seniors said they felt uncomfortable because vagrants were loitering in their apartment building, they came up with a novel way to solve the problem. They moved their bridge game down to the lobby. The vagrants moved on.

Both initiatives were the result of an innovative approach to improving community safety: the safety audit. A safety audit gathers a group of people in a workplace or neighbourhood to identify safety concerns and determine what changes are needed.

The template for audits grew out of the work of Toronto's Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children (METRAC). It was initially established to address the safety concerns of women. As Connie Guberman, coordinator of urban safety initiatives at METRAC, points out, 56 percent of Canadian women are afraid to walk in their own neighbourhood after dark (only 18 percent of men feel this way) and that fear keeps them from participating fully in public spaces and in community life.

METRAC wanted to develop a tool that would allow women to identify which factors in their physical environment made them feel unsafe and then provide strategies on how they could make their areas safer. They came up with an audit that includes a checklist of questions (When and why do I feel uncomfortable here?) and guidelines (What changes would make me feel safer?) that can be easily adapted for a variety of public spaces to assess an individual sense of safety.

Before long, the audit was being used by all kinds of community groups, including women, men, children and seniors. Safety audits have been organized on university campuses (Queen's University, University of Toronto and McGill University) as well as in parks, office buildings and schoolyards.

Another at-risk group - the elderly - are the focus of efforts by the office for injury prevention at Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. Their program teaches seniors about the risk and consequences of falling (in Toronto alone, almost 5,000 seniors annually are admitted to hospital as a result of injuries sustained in a fall) and how to protect themselves from falls and injuries. One strategy for injury prevention that is simple and cheap: reflective arm bands to ensure that seniors are clearly visible to drivers when crossing the street. Like any other strategies for making our cities safer, it's about seeing risks clearly and taking safety into our own hands.

How can you improve the safety in your community? Here's our list of safety boosters:

At home ...

* Call them what they are: most road crashes aren't accidents. They can be prevented with smart driving. Call them crashes or collisions - and learn-how to avoid them. Buckle up. Adjust seat belts, car seats and air bags for child passengers.

* Participate in a bicycle training program.

* If someone you know drives drunk, explain your concerns. Ask a doctor,

employer or family member to intervene.

* Impulsiveness plays a role in youth suicide. Prevent access to lethal suicide means such as guns and prescription medications.

* Encourage seniors to wear reflective arm bands when walking along city streets.

* Wear all required protective gear (helmets, knee pads, seat belts, safety goggles) at work or at play.

* Sign a parent/teenager contract that transportation will be provided for the teen at any time if he or she becomes impaired, no questions asked. Likewise, parents would pledge to find safe transportation home if they're drinking.

... and in your community

* Promote public transportation, especially on evenings and weekends when people are traveling to drinking establishments.

* Lobby to implement a graduated licensing system in your province.

* Lobby to have your schools incorporate suicide awareness education into health programs.

* Keep your community vibrant. Ensure parks are well lit and easily accessible to everyone. Encourage participation by organizing activities, building ice rinks, skate parks, etc.

* Conduct a safety audit in your neighbourhood, workplace, school or shopping centre. Initiate changes to reduce fears.

* Support the use of speed cameras at city intersections to crack down on red-light runners.

* Encourage the development of programs aimed at teaching teenagers to take smart risks.

* Find or build safe environments for risky sports such as skateboarding and inline skating.

It's an idea that seems to make sense. You want to slow down cars driving too quickly through residential areas, so you put up stop signs, narrow the streets and install "traffic-calming" devices such as cement barriers and speed bumps.

What do you get? Stop-sign runners and slalom-like driving, say some traffic experts. Stop signs that drivers perceive as unnecessary are the traffic equivalent to "crying wolf," says Raynald Marchand, manager of traffic safety and training for the Canada Safety Council. He wonders if people might ignore an important red light after making a frustrating series of stops they think are a nuisance.

Other opponents of traffic calming argue that it turns roads into obstacle courses, creating frustration, which leads to more dangerous driving. In fact, studies are beginning to reveal that traffic-calming techniques may actually make roads more risky for pedestrians, says the president of the Canada Safety Council, Emile Therien. For one thing, more starting and and stopping at intersections on slipper winter roads creates more dangerous icy areas where people cross the streets. Others argue that the barriers only serve to slow down vital public services such as fire, ambulance, police and snow-clearing vehicles.

But cities continued to install them. Why? Public pressure. The City of Vancouver has received such an overwhelming number of requests from individuals and neighbourhood associations to install traffic-calming devices that it has had to rank requests according to criteria such as traffic volume. "People love their traffic calming - they're lining up to get it," says Jim Hall, a Vancouver neighbourhood transportation engineer. And local governments seem willing to bend to that voter pressure - even when some believe there's little evidence to suggest traffic calming works.

Where do you feel the safest: walking alone on the street at night or in your own living room? While worries about crime focus our fears at street level, in fact, the numbers tell us home is where the real risk is. A 1997 StatsCan study found that 61 percent of victims of adult crime were victimized at home. (Interestingly, youth violence occurs more frequently in a public area.)

And when it comes to sexual assaults and homicides, it's not a matter of "stranger means danger": a woman is far more likely to be killed by her spouse than by a stranger. In 1997, 12 women were killed by a stranger while 73 were killed by a current or ex-partner. In the same year, 62 children were killed by a parent. Another 49 murders were committed by a son, daughter, sibling or other relative.

RELATED ARTICLE: one town's great leap forward

"Nike had it right in their commercial that declared skateboarding is not a crime," says community crusader Corinne Davies, English professor and mother of a 14-year-old dedicated skateboarder in London, Ont. Yet boarders in the city were sometimes being ticketed $105 for skateboarding outside a downtown building. "I could not fathom how a city could fine young athletes for engaging in the sport they love, when there were no facilities for them anywhere," says Davies. The boarders were just kids looking for something to do.

And so Davies picked up the phone and contacted city officials to discuss the need for a safe place for kids to skateboard. Two 16- and 15-year-old skateboarders, Paxton Wood and Stephen Henderson, had beaten her to the punch. The city's community and protective services committee was sold on the idea but wouldn't commit the cash until it saw a detailed business plan.

Davies gave them one: she put together the London Committee for Community Skateboarding (LCCS). They raised money from the community, 21-year-old boarder Rob Hall designed the park and the Labourers' International Union of North America, Local 1059, offered about $180,000 worth of free labour (mostly through the union's training program and volunteers) to build it. Local skateboarding shops collected 3,000 signatures on petitions and helped convince the city to chip in $45,000 for landscaping, building materials and fees.

Since its inauguration last September, the $250,000 skate park, built on a former military base, has become so popular that the LCCS has approached city council to propose more skate areas in other city neighbourhoods. "It's been a phenomenal success," says Davies.

RELATED ARTICLE: where to find out more

* Traffic Injury Research Foundation, 171 Nepean St., Suite 200, Ottawa K2P 0B4; 613/23-5235

* Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention, c/o The Support Network 301-11456 Jasper Ave., Edmonton T5K 0M1; 780/482-0198

* Suicide Prevention Information and Resource Centre of British Columbia, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia, 2250 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver V6T 1W6; 904/822-0740

* METRAC, 158 Spadina Rd., Toronto M5R 2T8; 416/392-3135; www.metrac.org

* Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre, Office for Injury Prevention, PARTY (Prevent Alcohol and Risk-related Trauma in Youth), 2075 Bayview Ave., Toronto M4N 3M5; 416/480-5912

* Canada Safety Council, 1020 Thomas Spratt Pl., Ottawa K1G 5L5; 613/739-1535; www.safety-council.org

* SmartRisk, 658 Danforth Ave., Suite 301, Toronto M4J 5B9; 416/463-9878; www.smartrisk,ca

* Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, 75 Albert St., Suite 300, Ottawa K1P 5E7; 613/235-4048; www.ccsa.ca

* Youthquest! Lesbian and Gay Youth Society of B.C., 1959 Langan Ave., Port Coquitlam, B.C. V3C 1L1; 604/944-6293; www.youthquest.bc.ca

* Suicide Information and Education Centre, 1615-10th Ave. S.W., Suite 201, Calgary T3C 0J7; 403/245-3900; www.siec.ca

* Kids Help Phone, 1/00/668-6868; //kidshelp.sympatico.ca

< return to portfolio