Car theft defined Canadian crime headlines for three years. The complete 2025 picture, from Statistics Canada data covering all 280 municipal police services in our dataset, is more interesting than the headlines: the theft wave has broken, rates are back below where they started the decade, and the hardest number in the file is not how many cars are taken. It is how few cases are ever solved.
Every dot is a place scored in the MkaeSense Safety Index for 2025, plotted on a real map of Canada and the United States. Drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom, and select any dot to open its full city profile.
If the map does not load, browse every place in the City Safety Rankings. Data: MkaeSense Safety Index, Data Release 2025.1 (Statistics Canada; FBI Crime Data Explorer).
The arc: up, sharply, then down
Canada's motor vehicle theft rate sat in a narrow band for years, between 205 and 233 per 100,000 people from 2015 through 2021. Then it climbed fast, to 272.0 in 2022 and a peak of 287.5 in 2023. The fall since has been just as steep: 240.2 in 2024 and 200.8 in 2025, the lowest rate in the eleven years we publish, and below the 2015 figure of 220.7.
| Year | Motor vehicle thefts per 100,000 | Break-ins per 100,000 |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 220.7 | 447.1 |
| 2019 | 231.4 | 429.4 |
| 2021 | 218.1 | 329.3 |
| 2022 | 272.0 | 342.3 |
| 2023 | 287.5 | 328.1 |
| 2024 | 240.2 | 294.6 |
| 2025 | 200.8 | 263.5 |
Break-ins, the other half of the property crime story, never spiked at all. Canada's break-in rate has fallen almost every year for a decade, from 447.1 per 100,000 in 2015 to 263.5 in 2025, a drop of 41 percent. The full national series is on our Canada break-ins and car theft page.
The clearance problem
Getting a car back, or seeing anyone charged, is the exception. Nationally, police cleared just 11.2 percent of motor vehicle thefts in 2025. Break-ins were cleared 19.9 percent of the time. The bleakest figure in the dataset belongs to theft from vehicles, things taken from inside cars rather than the cars themselves: cleared just 2.8 percent of the time, against a national rate of 270.7 incidents per 100,000 people, which makes it one of the most common and least solved crimes in the country.
The practical conclusion is uncomfortable but clear. For vehicle crime in Canada, prevention does nearly all the work, because the system catches roughly one case in nine after the fact.
Where theft is worst
The national average hides sharp local differences. Among police services covering 100,000 or more people, these recorded the highest car theft rates in 2025.
| Police service | Province | Thefts per 100,000 | Thefts in 2025 | Solved |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Red Deer | AB | 361.3 | 417 | 24 |
| Winnipeg | MB | 360.0 | 3,061 | 189 |
| Edmonton | AB | 348.1 | 4,311 | 325 |
| Peel Region (Mississauga and Brampton) | ON | 346.1 | 5,338 | 157 |
| Codiac Regional (Moncton) | NB | 340.4 | 548 | 45 |
| Montreal | QC | 309.9 | 6,731 | 379 |
Peel Region stands out for the wrong combination: the largest theft count on this list outside Montreal, 5,338 vehicles, with just 157 solved, about 3 percent. Toronto recorded 7,846 thefts at a rate of 239.8 per 100,000, with 480 solved, about 6 percent. Together, the Toronto and Peel services alone account for more than 13,000 stolen vehicles in a single year, which is why the Greater Toronto Area sat at the centre of the national story. Toronto's own neighbourhood level detail, including its fall from a 2023 peak of 12,636 thefts to 7,404 in 2025, is on our Toronto vehicle crime page.
One comparison underlines where the everyday risk sits. In 2025, theft from vehicles was reported at a rate of 270.7 per 100,000 people, higher than break-ins themselves at 263.5. The crime Canadians are statistically most exposed to on the property side is not the stolen car or the broken door. It is the smashed window and the missing bag, a category police clear less than three times in a hundred.
What the 2025 picture means
Three things are true at once. The theft wave was real, peaking in 2023 at levels a third above the decade's starting point. It is genuinely over at the national level, with the 2025 rate the lowest in eleven years. And the underlying vulnerability has not changed: clearance rates near one in nine mean a stolen car is usually gone for good, and theft from vehicles is close to unsolved as a category.
To follow your own city, the break-in tracker carries every Canadian police service from 2015 to 2025, and our Safest Cities 2025 ranking shows how vehicle crime feeds into each place's overall Safety Index. How the index is built is explained on the methodology page.
Source: Statistics Canada incident-based crime statistics by police service, as compiled in MkaeSense Data Release 2025.1. Clearance means an incident cleared by charge or otherwise resolved, as reported by the service.