In 2025, Canada saw its biggest year-over-year drop in the murder rate in 40 years, a trend driven by a sharp decline in lethal violence within the Greater Toronto Area that contributed to a countrywide downturn in deaths attributed to handguns and gangs.

According to recently released Statistics Canada data, the overall number of Canadians killed in homicides dropped from 797 in 2024 to 672 in 2025. Expressed as a rate, that represents a decline from 1.93 murders per 100,000 Canadians to 1.61 – among the lowest rates the country has seen in 40 years.

The statistics further show the fall-off was particularly stark in the Toronto region, where homicide rates were in line with the national average in 2024. Yet in 2025, the GTA’s rate declined to 0.91 – or less than one person per 100,000.

Canada’s murder rates have now seen three consecutive years of decline. Homicides are nearing the record lows seen in the early 2010s. And the per capita attempted murder rate is at its absolute lowest point statistically in the past 40 years.

Concerns about shootings and other violent crimes, however, continue to run high. Several politicians are calling upon Prime Minister Mark Carney‘s government to continue passing legislation to reform bail rules and toughen sentences.

Some law-enforcement leaders are also pressing for tougher new laws, though some acknowledge they are doing so amid falling murder rates.

“I’ve stood at this podium and done interviews many times around statistics,” Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw said last Friday at a press conference. “And I do it with great trepidation.”

He said Toronto’s 2026 murder rates are so far in line with last year’s lows. “Our homicides are down. Our shootings are down dramatically,” Chief Demkiw said. He added that “there’s no one single thing that drives them up and there’s no one single thing that drives them down.”

But he made the remarks while announcing his police force had just arrested two suspected teenaged gunmen on multiple murder and attempted murder charges. This was after seven people were shot – two of them fatally – at Toronto’s Salsa on St. Clair festival in July.

The city is contending with several loosely affiliated groups of young gunmen, some of whom allegedly shoot at buildings and businesses in exchange for payments. In June, a Toronto Police tactical officer was shot dead in a raid targeting one such suspected shooter-for-hire network.

Given heinous crimes like these, Chief Demkiw said he will continue to demand new laws. What is most outrageous, he said, is the “disproportionate harm” caused by some young gunmen.

Some such Toronto crime suspects, he said, have committed homicides even after being convicted on past firearms charges where they were allowed to serve sentences in the community.

“They go out and commit more crimes – sometimes killing people,” Chief Demkiw said. “We have a growing concern around the brazen behaviour we are seeing.”

In January, The Globe and Mail canvassed several Canadian police forces and reported that in 2025, homicide dropped in many jurisdictions – most remarkably in the city of Toronto, which saw about half as many murder cases as the previous year.

The new Statscan data are more comprehensive. In reporting 2025’s homicide rate, the agency said in a July news release that “it was the largest year-over-year decline since 1986.”

According to the data, last year’s homicide decline was stark in the census metropolitan area that includes Toronto and also such municipalities as Mississauga, Brampton and Vaughan.

The Toronto CMA saw 133 homicides in 2024, but just 64 in 2025. This shift greatly affected the national rate. “The decline was driven largely by fewer gang related homicides involving a handgun,” Statscan analyst Roxane Brulin said in an e-mailed reply to The Globe.

Over all, in 2025 homicides declined in seven of Canada’s 10 provinces and in 19 of 42 census metropolitan areas. The data show a near 50-per-cent reduction in murders in the Winnipeg area.

Significant regional differences remain. Manitoba’s murder rate remains high, for example, with per capita rates being double the Canadian average. Saskatchewan’s rates are triple. Indigenous Canadians remain eight times more likely to be slain in homicides than other Canadians.

Legal observers say policy-makers need to take note of murder rates, because they represent a bellwether crime category that can help reconcile public perceptions of crime with verifiable trends.

Catherine Latimer, executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, said homicide statistics are “particularly significant when the fear of crime and violent crime is increasing.”

The latest data, she said, indicate that crime “is not as bad as it has been, and the need for more regressive measures to try and stop it is probably overblown.”

Murder rates are also rapidly dropping in the United States, where President Donald Trump has lately cited the trend and said his administration deserves the credit for making the country safer.

Observers in the U.S. say they don’t really know why murder rates are falling, but they do know the 2025 fall-off is likely unprecedented.

“We have data back to 1960. There is no such decline that we have in our data, which reflects just how historic the drop is,” U.S.-based crime analyst Jeff Asher told The Globe earlier this year.

The Globe reached out to the offices of several politicians, including Ontario Premier Doug Ford, for comment about Canada’s falling murder rates.

Hannah Jensen, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ford, said in a statement that Ontario will continue to seek stricter punishments for violent lawbreakers. “Our government will not apologize for cracking down on dangerous criminals, driving down crime, fixing the broken bail system, and advocating to the federal government to protect families,” she wrote.