Canadian Police Are Solving Fewer Crimes. Almost Half of Violent Offences Now Go Unpunished.

In 1980, Canadian police cleared 95% of homicides. By the 2020s, that figure had fallen to 72%. Homicide is the most resourced, most prioritized crime category in any policing system — and Canada is now solving roughly one in four murders fewer than it did a generation ago. The trend is not isolated to homicide. According to Statistics Canada’s most recent data, the country’s violent crime clearance rate has dropped from 63% between 2014 and 2018 to 55% in 2024. The non-violent rate has fallen to 25% — the lowest since weighted tracking began in 1998.¹

A weighted clearance rate measures the share of reported, founded criminal incidents that police solve in a given year, with more serious offences carrying greater weight. The methodology was developed by Statistics Canada and is the federal government’s primary measure of police effectiveness. By that measure, nearly half of all violent crimes in Canada now go unpunished.

The provincial picture is worse than the national average. The Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s 2026 Justice System Report Card found that British Columbia’s violent crime clearance rate has fallen to roughly 37%. That means police in B.C. solve approximately one out of every three violent crimes reported. Two out of three assaults, robberies, sexual assaults, and other violent offences remain unsolved — those cases simply sit in the system without a suspect being charged.²

Statistically, if someone commits a violent crime in British Columbia, there is roughly a two-thirds chance the police will never identify the offender. That is not a partisan claim. It is the arithmetic of the clearance rate.

The decline is widespread. Statistics Canada data shows clearance rates have steadily fallen across nearly every province and territory between 2020 and 2024. The trend is not unique to one police service or one region. It is a national pattern that has persisted across changes in government, changes in police leadership, and shifts in how crime is reported.³

The pattern in Canada also mirrors the United States, where homicide clearance rates fell from 72% in 1980 to 61% in 2024 according to FBI data. American clearance rates for rape dropped from 49% to 27% over the same period; aggravated assault from 59% to 49%. Canada and the U.S. are both experiencing declining police effectiveness on serious crime, despite different criminal justice systems and different policing traditions.⁴

Several factors are driving the Canadian decline. The first is straightforward: police per capita is falling. Canada has fewer officers serving a growing population than it did a decade ago. When officers are stretched, investigative work is the first thing to suffer — patrol and emergency response take priority over the painstaking, evidence-based work that solves crimes weeks or months after they happen.⁵

Tingey Injury Law Firm / Unsplash — The Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s 2026 justice report examined 27 indicators across Canada’s criminal justice system. The findings: rising crime, falling clearance rates, slower courts, and more than half of cases collapsing before a verdict.

The second is a methodological shift. In 2018, Statistics Canada implemented a new definition of “founded” crime under the Uniform Crime Reporting survey. Under the new standard, police must record an incident as founded — meaning it occurred — unless there is credible evidence demonstrating it did not. Previously, more incidents were classified as “unfounded” and excluded from clearance statistics entirely. The change was a victim-centred reform, particularly important for sexual assault cases, where the unfounded rate dropped from 14% in 2017 to 7% in 2022. But it also means that more cases now stay in the system as “founded but not cleared” — appearing in the clearance rate denominator without contributing to the numerator.⁶

The third is structural. The criminal justice system as a whole is under strain. The MLI report found that more than half of criminal cases now collapse before reaching a verdict — they are stayed, withdrawn, or dismissed for delay under the Supreme Court’s Jordan ruling. Court backlogs have grown. Bail has become a flashpoint in every province. Conditional sentences have more than doubled as a share of guilty cases between 2019 and 2022. Police, prosecutors, and courts are all carrying more weight than the system was designed to bear.⁷

The trust gap that follows is measurable. The MLI report found that 63% of Canadians say they trust police, but only 42% express confidence in the courts and the broader justice system. Quebecers report the highest confidence in police services. British Columbians report the lowest. The gap between trust in frontline policing and trust in what comes after is the gap between the system Canadians believe they have and the system the data describes.⁸

Public confidence in the system also varies by where the system actually delivers results. Provinces with high clearance rates and faster courts tend to maintain higher confidence. Provinces with collapsing clearance rates and longer delays do not. The pattern is not surprising. People who experience crime — or whose neighbours experience crime — notice when the perpetrator is identified, charged, and prosecuted. They also notice when none of that happens.

Research has long established that the likelihood of being caught is one of the strongest deterrents to committing a crime. It is more important than the severity of the eventual sentence. A criminal justice system that solves 95% of homicides produces different behaviour from one that solves 72%. A system that clears 63% of violent crimes produces different behaviour from one that clears 55%. A province where two out of three violent offences go unsolved produces a different deterrent effect from a province where most are cleared.⁹

The implications are not theoretical. The MLI report notes that a relatively small number of repeat offenders are responsible for a disproportionate share of criminal activity in Canada. When clearance rates fall, repeat offenders remain at large for longer. Each unsolved crime is also a missed opportunity to interrupt a pattern. The decline in clearance is therefore not just a statistic about police performance — it is a feedback loop that sustains the very crime trends it fails to address.¹⁰

The federal government has discretion over national policing through the RCMP, criminal law through the Criminal Code, and bail policy through legislative reform. Provinces have discretion over court funding, Crown prosecution, and most municipal police services. Both levels of government have presided over the decade-long decline. Neither has produced a strategy that has reversed it. The 2026 federal budget did not contain a comprehensive plan to restore clearance rates, fund investigative capacity, or address the police-per-capita gap. The provincial budgets that fund Crown prosecutors and courts have not closed the backlog gap either.¹¹

In the 1960s, Canadian police solved 95% of homicides. They now solve 72%. The violent crime clearance rate has fallen from 63% to 55% in a decade. The non-violent rate has hit 25% — the lowest since tracking began. In British Columbia, two out of three violent crimes go unsolved. The decline is national. The decline is documented. Police per capita is falling. The Statistics Canada data shows it. The Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s 2026 report shows it. The FBI data from the United States shows the same pattern. And the deterrent effect that depends on the likelihood of being caught is weakening across the country, year after year, in every province, with no government plan that has stopped it. The clearance rate is the most basic measure of whether a justice system works. By that measure, Canada’s is working less well than it did a decade ago. And the people most affected are the victims whose cases sit in the system without a suspect — half of all violent crimes, every year, with no resolution and no plan to change it.