Transit violence rising across Canada — in some cities, by nearly 300%
CBC
This story is a collaboration between CBC News and the Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF).
The video made the rounds on social media in the summer of 2023. It shows two men fighting inside a Toronto subway car before one of them suddenly starts running away, screaming for help.
An instant later, another passenger yells: "He’s stabbing him up," and a flood of onlookers flee the violence. As the person recording the scene joins the rush, they point the camera at the floor to capture what looks like a trail of blood.
Derek Dyckhoff was stabbed at least 10 times in the attack.
"I died on the operating table once and I'm pretty sure I was this close to dying on the subway floor," Dyckhoff told CBC News and the Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF).
The stabbing was part of a troubling trend affecting several cities across Canada identified in a collaborative investigation between CBC’s visual investigations unit and the IJF.
The last decade has seen a dramatic spike in reports of violent crimes on transit systems in the Toronto area and several other metro regions, out of proportion with overall crime trends, according to exclusive Statistics Canada data.
The cumulative number of assaults reported on transit in eight of Canada’s 10 largest census metropolitan areas — regions that encompass about half the country’s population — doubled between 2016 and 2024.
That's far out of proportion with the 53 per cent increase in assaults across all types of locations in those regions over the same period.
In the Toronto census metropolitan area, the data on physical assaults are particularly striking. The number of reported assaults on Toronto-area transit leapt by 160 per cent in that period, while reports of all violent crimes on the transit system were up by 127 per cent.
In Winnipeg, the overall violent crime rate on transit has more than tripled during that time — a 281 per cent jump in the number of transit-related violent crimes.
Meanwhile, rates have more than doubled in the Edmonton and Montreal areas, as well as the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge region of Ontario.
Incident report data from a freedom of information request to the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) show a similar pattern between 2018 and 2024.
Crime statistics like this are a major reason why Toronto Coun. Brad Bradford doesn’t feel comfortable taking his two young daughters on public transit.
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