Think rural communities are crime free? You’re ‘dead wrong’
Rural Canada faces significant challenges in policing and public services because of its geography, limited resources, and distance from major population centres.
“Many Canadians tend to romanticize rural and remote Canada. Fewer than one in five Canadians live outside our cities clustered close to the American border. Those of us who live in the cities may tend to think of rural Canada as relatively crime free. The idea of the cities as crime ridden and rural and remote regions as relatively crime free is, alas, dead wrong in Canada,” Kent Roach writes in his new book, Red Alert: The Future of the RCMP.
An excerpt in The Walrus highlights how rural communities are often treated as relatively safe, even though police-reported crime in rural Canada was 34 per cent higher than in urban areas in 2023.
Rural crime is also more likely to involve violence and guns, while violence against women is reported to police at twice the rate found in cities. Although most homicides occur in urban areas, the per-capita homicide rate is higher in rural communities, particularly in remote northern regions, he writes.
At the same time, rural and remote communities face many of the same drug and mental-health problems as cities but have access to fewer policing and health resources. Roach describes RCMP contract policing as particularly challenging because officers must cover large geographic areas, often with limited local knowledge, technology, and staffing.
There is an “urban bias” in Canadian policymaking, Roach says, referencing the Mass Casualty Commission report, noting that rural communities have not received equivalent attention or resources for essential public services.
Contract policing has traditionally been promoted because of its financial advantages rather than the “quality of policing,” Roach writes, raising concerns about whether rural residents receive services comparable to those available in urban Canada.
“Geography remains a harsh fact of life in rural and remote Canada,” he writes.
