Canadians becoming downright peaceable

Stats Can has released Canada's crime statistics for 2012 and the country continues to look increasingly like the peaceable kingdom. Crime overall continued the decline it began in 1992, with the overall rate dropping three per cent from 2011. The murder rate dropped nine per cent, reaching its lowest level since 1962.

The crime rate began a long climb in the 1960s as the baby boomers started reaching maturity and a flood of young people appeared in the population, crime being largely a young man's game. The rate peaked in 1991 and has declined ever since as the population ages.

My city, Calgary, I was pleased to see, had both a Crime Severity Index and a Violent Crime Severity Index well below the national averages.

Canada as a whole doesn't do as well as some of the remarkably law-abiding Asian nations. Our murder rate of 1.6 per 100,000 population per year is four times that of Japan's, five times Singapore's and eight times Hong Kong's. It is also higher but in the same ballpark as Western European nations. We fare much better than our gun-happy North American neighbour which has a murder rate three times ours, and we are certainly not in the terrifying world of the most murderous country in the world, Honduras, which has a murder rate almost 60 times higher than ours.

We are a relatively safe country and we are becoming safer every day. The stats clearly tell us that crime is, or ought to be, of diminishing concern.