Drugs, crime surges in small-town Ont. since 2000

TORONTO - Drugs, guns and violent crime charges, traditionally considered the scourge of the big city, are seeping steadily into small-town Ontario, where the number of serious criminal charges is outpacing even major urban centres, an analysis by The Canadian Press has found.

Violent crime charges - everything from criminal harassment and assault to robbery and murder - have largely stagnated in Ontario's major cities, but the opposite appears to be the case in the less populated centres, where the number of serious charges laid between 2000 and 2007 spiked last year by nearly 25 per cent.

The number of weapons charges shot up in all but four Ontario communities during the seven years covered by the provincewide statistics, which are compiled according to courthouse location and provided online by the Ministry of the Attorney General.

But it was in the towns and cities with fewer than 100,000 residents where weapons charges doubled during the same period, rising at a dramatically faster pace than in the province's larger cities.

As drug possession charges only nudged higher in downtown Ontario, they shot up almost 20 per cent in smaller centres. And while impaired driving charges have plunged across the province, in those small cities and towns, they declined much more slowly.

Criminal charges do not necessarily result in convictions, and some point to unemployment and a loss of community togetherness as possible reasons for the spike in charges. Others blame the Ontario government's "Toronto-centric" crackdown on guns and gangs, which they say has done little besides push criminal activity down the highway.

With that political spotlight trained squarely on guns and violent crime, still others argue the charges say more about where police are focusing their attention than they do about crime rates.

Dave Ross, spokesman for OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino, said Fantino couldn't comment on the spike in charges because the force needed more than a month to crunch its own numbers.

Attorney General Chris Bentley said he would leave it to police to explain the increase in charges, but said the spike makes sense.

"When you put more police on the streets, when you have specific initiatives designed to go after specific types of offences, those are two of many circumstances that result in increased numbers," said Bentley, noting that the overall crime rate in Ontario has continued to fall.

Whatever the explanation, the phenomenon is posing a challenge to local police and unnerving long-time residents who are coming to grips with the fact their homes aren't immune to traditional "downtown" crimes like robbery, drugs and even murder.

"At one time, you would never hear of a robbery - a daylight robbery at a bank was unheard of," said Don MacNeil, a retired provincial police officer in Orillia, which saw the largest spike in weapons charges in the province during the seven years since 2000.

"Now, nobody gets too excited about it. Knocking off a Mac's Milk store, that's more common today than it was years ago."

These days, the community north of Toronto - home, ironically, to the province's provincial police headquarters - is considering following the example of larger cities by installing cameras in the downtown core to monitor criminal activity.

Weapons charges in the Orillia area jumped more than 500 per cent, rising from 14 counts in 2000 to nearly 90 last year. Violent crime charges also increased - almost 850 last year, compared with just over 550 in 2000.

Orillia's population has increased, but not on pace with the provincial average. The community is still safe, but it's not immune to the changes that are sweeping the province, MacNeil said.

"People do move here to get away from the city because they feel when they're in the city, you've got more violence, more crimes and more of a chance of getting hurt," said MacNeil, chairman of the community's police services board.

"Times have changed and we're trying to keep up with them."

Crime appears to be moving more and more beyond the borders of large cities and into small-town Canada. A Statistics Canada study released last year found small urban communities across the country had higher overall crime rates than big cities.

The study found the overall crime rate for small communities with fewer than 100,000 residents was 43 per cent higher than large cities and about 58 per cent higher than rural communities.

Smaller communities also had the highest rates for total violent crime, surpassing large cities, the study found.

"It challenges the myth that cities are violent and rural areas are not," said Voula Marinos, criminology professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont.

In Goderich, a community of just over 7,500 on Lake Huron, town residents were shaken last July when 72-year-old William Regier and his 73-year-old wife Helene were found dead in their farmhouse just down the road, said Mayor Delbert Shewfelt.

Some residents near the tight-knit southwestern Ontario community chose to flee their homes while police searched for a suspect.

The case was featured on the popular fugitive-finding U.S. TV show America's Most Wanted. Eventually, 22-year-old Jesse Imeson was captured after an intense manhunt and charged with three counts of first-degree murder, including the slaying of a Windsor bartender.

"In Huron county, they were totally outraged because the people were such fine, upstanding citizens. They didn't deserve a death like that," Shewfelt said.

"People feel like they've really been intruded upon because it's not the way of life up here."

Although Goderich's population has declined slightly since 2001, weapons charges in the area have tripled since 2000. Violent crime charges virtually doubled to almost 600 charges last year.

While some "drastic things" have happened in the county, Shewfelt said people in Goderich still feel safe. Local police are still more likely to get calls about minor break-ins and domestic arguments than weapons busts and murders, he said.

"It's pretty laid-back," he said. "It's really a country feeling. We have people come here because they want out of the rat race and a slower pace."

The new reality facing local police officers, however, is that the pace outside of Ontario's big cities is anything but relaxed.

Dan Parkinson, chief of police in Cornwall and vice-president of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, said there is no doubt that violence is on the rise, especially among the province's youth.

Although a weapon can be anything from a stick to a gun, Parkinson said young people seem to be better armed than they were years ago.

"It's almost like an arms war. At one point in time, a good old-fashioned fist fight may have been the way differences were sorted out," said Parkinson, whose community has seen weapons charges more than double since 2000.

"The increase in violence goes hand in hand with the need to arm oneself to have the advantage . . . If you want to have the upper hand, you go with the biggest gun. Guns are in the hands of young people and that's because they are actively seeking them."

But small communities are learning from the experience of their big-city counterparts and realizing police can't just treat the symptom of increasing crime, but the root causes as well, Parkinson said.

Young people in small communities need jobs and free basketball courts as much as their peers in big cities, he said - "healthy" options to keep them from the temptations of guns and gangs.

Although police say the spike in charges is being fuelled by increasingly well-armed young people, some say there may be other factors at work.

Rising unemployment and the dissolution of community togetherness can all contribute to growing crime, Marinos said.

Young people who are idle and don't see much hope for the future are more likely to become disconnected from their community and be more tempted by criminal behaviour, she said.

But Marinos said criminal charges by themselves aren't necessarily a direct reflection of the crime rate.

"All kinds of crime is going on, but it only becomes officially crime when police charge someone," she said. "It does depend upon the focus of police . . . With weapons charges, it might relate to a concentrated focus of police activity."

Critics, however, say the provincial Liberals bear some responsibility for pushing criminal activity into small-town Ontario with their increased emphasis on guns and gangs in big cities.

Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory said if the system was working, criminal charges would eventually start dropping off.

"Instead, what we're seeing is a steady trend-line up," Tory said.

"What we've done is moved the crime up along various highways, out of the GTA and we've moved it into some of these communities where they've never heard of anybody being arrested with a gun. Now it's routine. It's had a devastating impact."

If it's important to keep a school open all year round for Toronto's youth and boost funding to big city police forces to target violent crime, Tory said it's equally vital in smaller communities.

New Democrat Peter Kormos said the spike in weapons charges and violent crime in small-town Ontario should be a wake-up call for the governing Liberals.

"We need a guns-and-gangs initiative that's pan-provincial, that really understands that handgun and gang activity is as dangerous in small town and rural Ontario as it is in Toronto," Kormos said.

"There has been a failure to understand that."