Rising Crime Eroding Trust

MLI’s Fourth Justice Report Card

OTTAWA, ON (March 5, 2026):

Canada’s criminal justice system is failing its most basic test: keeping the public safe.

A new report from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute reveals rising crime, falling clearance rates, and a bail system widely seen as broken. The result is a struggling justice system increasingly derailed by delays and struggling to deliver safety or accountability – eroding the trust of the Canadians it is meant to protect.

Rising Crime, Eroding Trust: Report on the Criminal Justice System, vol.4, assesses 13 provincial and territorial systems against five core objectives of the criminal justice system – Public Safety, Support for Victims, Cost and Resources, Fairness and Access to Justice, and Efficiency..

Using data collected by Statistics Canada and the federal Department of Justice, MLI Senior Fellow Dave Snow and co-author Richard Audas find that the criminal justice system continues to perform poorly. While some provinces – notably Quebec and Nova Scotia – have improved their rankings, troubling trends persist: rising crime and crime severity, mounting delays and withdrawn cases, plummeting clearance rates, and a revolving-door bail system.

Highlights:

●      Violent crime, violent crime severity, and property crime have continued to increase in most provinces and territories.

●      Median case lengths have risen across the country, with every jurisdiction less efficient than it was two years ago.

●      Crime rates in the territories remain dramatically higher than in the provinces.

●      Rankings favour eastern provinces, with three of the four highest-performing provinces in Atlantic Canada, and the three lowest-performing provinces in Western Canada.

●      Alberta led the country on cost and resources, earning top marks for both average daily inmate cost and per capita public safety spending.

●     Indigenous overrepresentation persists, with Indigenous peoples admitted to custody at more than twice their share of the population in every province.

●      Quebecers reported the highest levels of confidence in police services, in contrast, British Columbians expressed the lowest confidence in police services.

●      Canadians are losing faith in the justice system as communities feel increasingly less safe.

Despite the justice system’s poor performance, Snow and Audas say improvement is possible. The data provides a roadmap for reforms that will strengthen public safety, improve efficiency, and restore trust in the system, including:

●      Focusing bail and sentencing reform on serious and repeat violent offenders.

●      Investing in court capacity and procedural reform to reduce delays.

●      Improving national data collection on recidivism, bail compliance, and victimization.

●      Placing victims at the centre of justice reform.

Media are invited to contact:

Skander Belouizdad
Communications Officer
613-482-8327 x111
skander.belouizdad@macdonaldlaurier.ca