TORONTO – A city that prides itself as one of the safest in North America is bewildered by a surge in violence that has produced a record number of shooting deaths this year, the latest a 15-year-old girl on a street filled with holiday shoppers.
Canada’s prime minister and Toronto’s mayor blame weapons smuggled from the United States, but others point to a growing gang problem.
A gun battle Monday in Toronto left the teenage bystander dead and six other people wounded in a street near a popular shopping mall.
It was the 52nd death inflicted by a firearm this year in Canada’s biggest city – nearly twice as many as last year. It raised the overall homicide toll to 78, not far below the record 88 homicides in 1991.
Prime Minister Paul Martin said he was horrified.
“What we saw yesterday is a stark reminder of the challenge that governments, police forces and communities face to ensure that Canadian cities do not descend into the kind of rampant gun violence we have seen elsewhere,” Martin said.
By elsewhere, he meant the United States. Martin, other politicians and police contend illegal guns flowing across the border are behind the spike in firearm violence.
Martin vowed earlier this month to ban handguns if his Liberal Party wins re-election in the Jan. 15 parliamentary elections. But ownership of such weapons is already tightly restricted, and critics accused him of playing politics with the violence spree.
Even with the jump in killings, this city of 3 million people is relatively safe. New York, which has a little more than double Toronto’s population, has recorded 515 homicides this year.
But many Canadians have long taken comfort in the peacefulness of their communities and are nervous about anything that might indicate they are moving closer to their American counterparts.
“What happened yesterday was appalling. You just don’t expect it in a Canadian city,” Toronto Mayor David Miller said.
Miller said that while almost every other type of crime is down in Toronto, the supply of guns has increased, and half of them come from the United States.
“The U.S. is exporting its problem of violence to the streets of Toronto,” he said.
John Thompson, a security analyst with the Toronto-based Mackenzie Institute, disagreed.
He said Canada has a gang problem – not a gun problem – and the country should stop pointing the finger at the United States.
Martin and Miller conceded the smuggled guns aren’t the only factor in the increase of violence. The mayor said poverty is an important element.
“There are neighborhoods in Toronto where young people face barriers of poverty, discrimination, and don’t have real hope and opportunity,” Miller said. “The kind of programs that we once took for granted in Canada, that would reach out to young people, have systematically disappeared over the past decade, and I think that gun violence is a symptom of a much bigger problem.”
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