Caledon residents, guess what? You live in the safest community in Canada.
That's according to Maclean's magazine, which just released its annual survey of the country's safest and most dangerous cities. This is the second year the magazine has put out the list, and the second year in a row Caledon has topped it. Residents weren't surprised.
"The schools are really good. The people are nice," Wendy told
CityNews. "When you're walking down the street, people say hi to you, strangers even."
Others pointed to the strong relationship between the community of 57,000 people and police.
"There's a number of factors why we're the safest city," explained OPP Acting Insp. Greg Sweeney. "Our close relationship with the town council in the Town of Caledon, for delivering police programming. The residents in this town really take ownership of this community."
Halton Region also made the top five for safe communities - following Oromocto, N.B., Levis, Que., and Maskoutains MRC, Que.
On the flip side, Saskatoon has the dubious distinction of being the country's most dangerous city according to the magazine. Rounding out the top five: Winnipeg, Regina, Prince George and Edmonton. Where does Toronto rank? Would you believe Canada's largest city doesn't even make the top 10? In fact Toronto is all the way down at 29th, an improvement from the 2008 survey, when the metropolis ranked 26th.
According to Statistics Canada, the overall crime rate was the lowest it's been in 30 years in 2007. Thirty-four areas including Quebec City, Cape Breton, N.S., and North Vancouver, B.C. didn't have a single murder, while Montreal and Toronto both improved over the previous year's results. While Toronto ranked 29 out of 100 cities, Montreal ranked 24th in the high crime cities list, bettering last year's position of 19th.
The rankings were culled from 2007 per-capita crime rates, provided by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics.
For the full list of safest areas and top crime cities,
click here.
To see the stats broken down by category,
click here.