BY CRAIG GILBERT
Jaimie McDonald, 22, is fed up with property crime.
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The city employee was exercising at Curves on Lasalle Boulevard Wednesday when her car was broken into.
She left her window a crack open to avoid turning her car into a furnace.
Now about $50 poorer, frustrated and feeling less secure, McDonald wonders why these Â?punksÂ? feel the need to steal.
Â?All the time I'm hearing about friends who have had things stolen,Â? she said. Â?Sudbury is turning into Toronto.Â?
That may be a stretch, but according to Statistics Canada, crime in Sudbury is on the rise.
Of the 27 cities tracked in the study between 2002 and 2003, Sudbury saw the sixth largest spike in its crime rate with an increase of 8.9 per cent.
The national rate jumped six per cent in that period.
Incidences of violent crime are declining, however, with homicide rates at their lowest level since Expo '67.
University of Toronto professor Rosemary Gartner blames the media for giving the impression Canada is turning into the wild west.
Â?You get the sense the world is a dangerous and unpredictable place,Â? she said.
Daily news stories about violence reinforce the belief that a violent offender is waiting around the corner, when murders in Canada, for example, dropped 6.6 per cent in 2003 to 548.
Reported sexual assaults declined by 5.2 per cent.
The surge in the crime rate was attributed to a 72 per cent increase in counterfeiting and more cases of property and mischief crime.
Ontario and Yukon were the only jurisdictions in the country where the crime rate remained stable. In fact, Ontario now has the lowest crime rate of any province.
The cities with the lowest violent crime rates, further, are all in Quebec and Ontario, while the cities with the highest rates are out west.
The murder rate in Toronto was 1.9 per 100,000 residents, for example, while Saskatoon had a murder rate of 3.3 per 100,000 people last year.
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