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).

Between October 2020 and May 2024, Canada’s construction, manufacturing, and utilities sectors experienced labour shortages averaging more than 129,000 employees per year—nearly 50,000 more vacancies than the average between 2017 and 2020.

Since 2017, labour demand in Canada’s construction, manufacturing, and utilities sectors—much of which involve skilled trades—has trended upwards each year. Labour demand is a measure of the total of an industry's employed workers and its unfilled jobs. For instance, between 2017 and 2023, “peak season” (July to December) demand for construction, manufacturing, and utilities workers rose by 260,326, from 2.79 million to more than 3 million (9.3 percent).

Demand for workers in general, and skilled tradespeople in particular, spiked with the end of the pandemic and the economies of the world reopening, Bill Ferreira, executive director of the construction industry group Build Force Canada, told The Hub.

“The number of major projects under construction across Canada—from utilities in British Columbia, pipelines in B.C. and Alberta, public transit and manufacturing in Ontario, to health-care projects in nearly every province—underscored the strong demand for labour, particularly in residential construction,” he said. Residential construction, in particular, was supported by low interest rates and national housing demand, he added.

During this period, the number of construction, manufacturing and utilities workers failed to keep pace with growing demand.

Between the peak seasons of 2017 and 2023, actual employment in those sectors rose by 225,947 from 2.7 million to 2.9 million. In 2023, the number of job vacancies—the difference between the sectors’ labour demand and the number of people working in it—in the peak season averaged approximately 107,600. The average vacancy rate in 2017’s peak season was about 73,300.

Another way to understand these trends is to compare vacancies in construction, manufacturing, and utilities before and after the pandemic. Between October 2020 and May 2024, the average number of vacancies in the sectors was 129,520. That’s 49,400 more vacancies than the average between January 2017 and March 2020.

Because of these vacancies, in 2022 over 60 percent of Canadian manufacturers were forced to lose or turn down contracts, resulting in the manufacturing sector losing $13 billion, according to Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters.

From their improved bargaining position, construction workers’ average wages have risen, while the average length of employment before finding more competitively waged work has fallen, both relative to the whole economy, according to a 2023 report from CIBC.

Construction labour’s rising scarcity and the resulting cost is a key challenge in meeting the federal government’s goal of building 22 million housing units by 2030, which is required to make Canadian housing more affordable according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Canada is now on track to build just 18.2 million units by 2030, down from the 18.6 million predicted in 2022.

Of the years between 2017 and 2024, 2022 had, on average, the largest number of vacancies—162,367 workers—in the construction, manufacturing, and utilities sectors. In 2023, the average number of vacancies declined to 118,278 as demand slowed and the labour supply grew.

Between 2022 and 2023, construction, manufacturing, and utilities demand grew only about 11,000, while the supply of workers grew by about 55,700. The vacancy rate in 2023 therefore declined.

In April 2022, the vacancy rate in the construction, manufacturing, and utilities sectors peaked at 6.55 percent. Last December, the rate was back down to 2.57 percent, its lowest since December 2019.

“Rising interest rates have significantly cooled demand for new housing, as well as the home renovation market,” Ferreria explained for 2023’s relatively cool growth in labour demand, allowing workers to catch up somewhat and the rate of vacancy relative to demand to fall.

The completion or near-completion of major projects like the Trans Mountain Expansion, Coastal GasLink, Site C Hydro Development, and LNG Canada—each in British Columbia—and the Gordie Howe Bridge in Ontario, as well as post-pandemic federal programs to increase the number of tradespeople, have likewise eased demand and boosted employment in construction’s non-residential workforce, said Ferreria.

“To improve the current situation and ensure that the construction industry can continue to keep pace with rising demands across Canada, ongoing industry career promotion is essential. There must also be a continued focus on broadening traditional recruitment efforts to include individuals from under-represented groups in the construction workforce,” he said.

“Additionally, faster methods of recognizing the foreign credentials of newcomers, such as competency-based recognition assessments consistent with prevailing Canadian Red Seal standards, and improved pathways for newcomers with skilled trades experience to immigrate to Canada, will be required for the foreseeable future.”