Rising rates of shoplifting, much of which is organised crime, are costing Canadian retail businesses billions

Between 2019 and 2023, most provinces and all territories saw shoplifting rates rise significantly, costing Canadian retail billions of dollars, with Nova Scotia and the Yukon leading with the fastest growth across the country.

Each year, Statistics Canada’s Uniform Crime Reporting Survey collects crime data of incidents reported to regional police. The shoplifting data used in this article are presented as the number of incidents per 100,000 residents in order to account for differences in population across the provinces and territories.

In 2023, the Yukon and Nova Scotia topped the provinces and territories for the most shoplifting incidents with 1,042 and 676 per 100,000 residents, respectively. British Columbia had the third-highest rate of shoplifting with 568 incidents per 100,000 residents.

Nova Scotia and the Yukon have also seen their shoplifting rates grow the fastest in the country over the past four years. Between 2019 and 2023, their numbers of shoplifting incidents grew by 568 and 445 per 100,000 residents, respectively. This growth was followed by Newfoundland and Labrador, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, and Ontario.

Over this four-year period, Alberta and Manitoba were exceptions to the trend of increasing shoplifting rates. They saw the number of shoplifting incidents decline by 214 and 146 per 100,000 residents, respectively. Still, in 2023, the two provinces had the fourth- and fifth-highest rates of shoplifting across the provinces and territories, with 541 and 483 incidents per 100,000 residents, respectively.

Nova Scotia’s increase in shoplifting incidents from 109 in 2019 to 676 per 100,000 residents in 2023 represents an increase of 532 percent. Among the other provinces and territories the average change in the shoplifting rate was just 16 percent.

“We are hearing repeatedly from retail members of ours across the province, and across [Halifax], that retail crime is up,” Jim Cormier, Atlantic director of the Retail Council of Canada, told The Hub. The cost to Canadian retail businesses is as much as several billion dollars every year, he said.

Over the last three years, organised retail crime has surged as in-person shopping has returned. “An organised group of people come in, be it two people, three people, (or) more than that, that… are specifically targeting certain products. Maybe they’re even more brazen: They’re not necessarily targeting a product, they’re just coming in groups to grab whatever they want,” said Cormier.

“[Online] resale markets make it very easy for somebody to go in, steal certain products, and have them up for sale online within minutes. That’s what we’re finding,” he said. In the Atlantic provinces, thieves are arriving from as far as central Canada to “work a number of cities and towns…and make the [Atlantic] loop.”

“It’s obviously very profitable,” said Cormier, and the state of Nova Scotia’s already stretched police and judicial resources has prohibited a commensurate response.

Another probable contributing factor is Canada’s cost of living. Between 2019 and 2023, inflation and the rising cost of goods caused Canadian food bank visits to increase 79 percent, according to Food Banks Canada.

In 2022, advances in online crime reporting may partially explain a spike across all recorded shoplifting incidents, according to Statistics Canada. Likewise, Nova Scotia’s dramatic increase in shoplifting was also due, in part, to a change in how the Halifax Regional Police designated shoplifting.

Prior to 2021, the police designated shoplifting under a separate classification, “theft under $5,000,” according to Halifax police public information officer Martin Cromwell. That year, Halifax Regional Police began recording shoplifting as “shoplifting under $5,000,” the statistic used in the chart above. Notably, though, between 2020 and 2021, Nova Scotia’s “theft under $5,000” grew from 679 to 726 incidents per 100,000 residents.

Shoplifting growth extends to nearly every city with its province’s highest rate of shoplifting in 2023. The chart below shows the number of shoplifting incidents per 100,000 residents in Canada’s top three offending cities, the top offending major city of each central province, and Toronto.

In 2023, Red Deer, Halifax, and Kamloops had the highest rates of shoplifting among Canadian cities, with the first two seeing at least one incident for every 100 residents.

Between 2021 (the earliest year of available data) and 2023, shoplifting rates in Red Deer and Kamloops grew by 41 and 66 percent. Over the same timeframe, Halifax (due, in part, to the same changes in record keeping described above) saw rates rise by 1,838 percent, from a national low of just 52 to 1,017 per 100,000 residents.

In several of the other cities with their province's highest rate of shoplifting in 2023, shoplifting rates actually declined relative to 2019. Edmonton and Winnipeg are the most prominent examples–despite their relatively high 2023 rankings for shoplifting rates across all cities. This tracks with their provinces’ decline in shoplifting rates since 2019.

In Ontario meanwhile, Toronto’s decline in shoplifting rates between 2019 and 2023, by nearly 400 per 100,000 people, indicates that the rise in the province’s shoplifting rate is being driven by occurrences in smaller cities like London, Peterborough, and Hamilton (in that order).