A 2025 Fraser Institute study ranks our city near the top of the country for crime.
When a crime ranking lands Thunder Bay in an uncomfortable spot, the usual move is to repeat the number and move on. We'd rather do what this newspaper was built to do: read the whole thing, work out what it means for the people who actually live here, and resist the urge to panic.
It helps that the study in question was written by one of our own. Livio Di Matteo is a professor of economics at Lakehead University, here in Thunder Bay, and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute. His report, Comparing Recent Crime Trends in Canada and the United States (March 2025), ranks 36 Canadian cities and nearly 300 American ones on violent and property crime. Few people are better placed to tell us where we sit — and he is, quite literally, telling us from down the road.
Where Thunder Bay lands
The blunt version first. Among the 36 Canadian metropolitan areas in the study, Thunder Bay has the second-highest violent crime rate in the country, behind only Winnipeg. On property crime, we rank ninth. There is no soft way to say that, and we won't try.
Now the context, which is where the picture gets more honest.
When Di Matteo throws all the Canadian and American cities into one combined ranking — 334 urban areas in total — Thunder Bay's violent crime rate places 42nd, slotting in just behind Greensboro–High Point, North Carolina and just ahead of Santa Fe, New Mexico. That is high. But it is nowhere near the top. Memphis, the most violent metro area in the study, posts a rate more than double Thunder Bay's. The most dangerous American cities are in a different league entirely: the worst tenth of US metros average a violent crime rate roughly a third higher than the worst tenth of Canadian cities.
Property crime is the category where Canadian cities — Thunder Bay very much included — genuinely punch above their weight. In the cross-border regional grouping that pits Ontario against the American Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic states, Thunder Bay has the single highest property crime rate of all 86 cities in that group. That is the finding residents should sit with. When people downtown say their cars and sheds keep getting hit, the data is on their side.
One more piece of context Di Matteo himself stresses: in a city our size, raw rates swing hard from year to year, and a handful of incidents can move the line sharply. A rate is a useful yardstick. It is not a verdict on a community.
What that rank means in real numbers
Rankings and rates per 100,000 are how researchers compare cities. They are not how any of us experience a year in our own neighbourhood. So we did the arithmetic to turn the study's rates into something concrete.
Applying Di Matteo's figures to a Thunder Bay population of about 123,000, the study's crime rates work out to roughly 670 violent crimes and 4,070 property crimes a year — somewhere around 13 reported crimes a day, of which fewer than two are violent and about eleven involve property.
A necessary footnote, because we promised you accuracy first: those counts are deliberately conservative. To compare Canada and the US fairly, Di Matteo strips out the offence categories the two countries define differently — common assault, threats, and sexual assault on the violent side; fraud, mischief, and arson on the property side. That trimming removes the majority of what Statistics Canada files as violent offences. So the true number of all crimes reported to Thunder Bay Police each year is meaningfully higher than the comparable figure above, especially for violence. The thirteen-a-day number is the cross-border apples-to-apples count, not the full police tally.
The repeat-offender question
In Canada — and especially in high-crime areas like Thunder Bay — there remains substantial scope to reduce overall crime rates by more consistently and durably incapacitating prolific repeat offenders.
One of the most robust findings in criminology is that a small group of chronic offenders drives the majority of crime. Landmark research, such as the Philadelphia birth cohort study tracking nearly 10,000 boys, showed that roughly 6% of the population accounted for over half of all offences — and an even larger share of the most serious violence: most robberies, aggravated assaults, and homicides. This “power few” pattern has replicated across decades, jurisdictions, and countries. In Canada, the same concentration appears in police and correctional data: a relatively small core of repeat violent offenders is responsible for a wildly disproportionate amount of harm, particularly in communities like Thunder Bay that experience persistently elevated rates of violent crime.
The policy implication is straightforward and evidence-based: targeted, sustained incapacitation of these high-rate, high-harm individuals produces real public safety gains. Unlike broad “mass incarceration” approaches that yield diminishing returns, focusing on the small group of prolific offenders who have already demonstrated their danger through repeated serious offences avoids much of the inefficiency. These are not first-time or low-level offenders aging out of minor delinquency; they are the people cycling through the system on multiple prior convictions for violence, weapons, and predation. Keeping them off the streets during their peak offending years directly prevents the crimes they would otherwise commit.
Canada’s current system still leaves considerable room for improvement on this front. Despite the concentration of offending, many repeat violent offenders face relatively lenient or ineffective consequences in practice — short sentences, frequent bail releases, and revolving-door patterns that allow them to reoffend quickly. Police associations and provincial premiers have highlighted this reality for years. Ottawa’s 2024 bail reforms and the late-2025 bail-and-sentencing legislation represent positive steps aimed precisely at this population, prioritizing public safety for repeat and violent cases. Expanding and rigorously enforcing such measures — with clearer presumptions against release for those with established patterns of serious reoffending — would logically reduce the crime rate in places like Thunder Bay without requiring indiscriminate imprisonment.
Critics rightly note potential downsides: risks of Charter challenges, pressure on correctional capacity, and the disproportionate impact on Indigenous offenders, who are overrepresented in custody (a reality that is especially acute in Thunder Bay and northern Ontario). These concerns deserve careful attention. However, they do not erase the core math. The alternative — allowing known high-harm repeaters to remain active in the community — imposes severe, concentrated costs on victims, families, and entire neighbourhoods, including within vulnerable Indigenous communities that suffer the highest victimization rates. Smart, evidence-driven policy can thread this needle: prioritize the worst repeat violent offenders with data-backed risk assessment, support rehabilitation where realistic, and ensure sentences are proportionate to cumulative harm while protecting the public.
In short, the data on offender concentration strongly supports the view that Canada, and Thunder Bay in particular, has meaningful room to lower crime rates by more effectively removing the small core of persistent, serious offenders from the streets. This is not a call for mass incarceration, but for precision incapacitation grounded in the lopsided reality of criminal careers.
The takeaway
Thunder Bay's crime numbers are real, and on property crime in particular they are among the worst in Canada. While the most violent American cities are far more dangerous than Thunder Bay, there is a big opportunity to make the city safer by locking up repeat offenders.
Source: Livio Di Matteo, "Comparing Recent Crime Trends in Canada and the United States," Fraser Institute, March 2025. Absolute-crime estimates are the Superior Sentinel's own calculations applying the study's per-100,000 rates to a Thunder Bay CMA population of approximately 123,000 (2021 Census).
