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The information in this section regarding Canada's crime rates is sourced from the document "Canadian Crime Statistics 2000", obtained from the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, a division of Statistics Canada.
The definition used for violent crime in Canada differs considerably from the New Zealand definition of violent offences. The Canadian definition used for violent crime includes homicide, attempted murder, assaults total (levels 1, 2, & 3), other assaults, sexual assaults total (levels 1, 2, & 3), other sexual offences, abduction and robbery. A subsection of New Zealand violent and sexual assault offences can be drawn together to provide a comparative statistic to the Canadian definition. The offences included in the Canadian definition of violent crime and the equivalent New Zealand offences are provided in table A4 in the appendix.
The following tables indicate the total recorded number, and rate per 100,000 population for the three categories of violent crime, as according to the Canadian definition.
In 2000, Canada and New Zealand had very similar rates of homicide per capita, yet Canada had more than three times the rate per capita of attempted murder than New Zealand. For 'assaults total', New Zealand's rate per capita was less than two-thirds that of Canada's rate, while Canada had more than five times the rate of 'other assaults' per capita than New Zealand. New Zealand's rate per capita for 'sexual assaults total' was also less than two-thirds that of Canada's rate, yet New Zealand had close to eleven percent more 'other sexual offences' per capita than Canada. Canada's rate of abduction per capita was three times New Zealand's rate, while New Zealand's rate of robbery was close to half that obtained for Canada. New Zealand's total violent crime rate of 551.1 per 100,000 population, according to the Canadian definition, was nearly 44 percent lower than Canada's rate of 981.7 per 100,000 population. Great caution, however, should again be adopted in interpreting these comparative figures, as discussed below.
In relation to the factors discussed in the earlier section "Comparisons between different countries", Canada and New Zealand's jurisdictions use different crime counting rules. Similar to Australia, England and Wales, most of Canada's violent crime rates are counted in terms of the numbers of victims, rather than the number of offences recorded by Police, except for robbery, where one occurrence of robbery is equal to one incident, regardless of the number of victims. These differences in counting rules are likely to inflate the apparent violent crime rates of New Zealand in comparison to Canada. However, due to the many factors that can influence the accurate comparisons of recorded crime figures between the jurisdictions, it remains unknown to what extent the differences in counting rules alone accounts for the difference in the rates between Canada and New Zealand.
