I'm proud to say I've lived in three of them and have visited the other seven! From CTV.ca:
- Regina
- Saskatoon
- Winnipeg
- Prince George, B.C.
- Edmonton
- New Westminster, B.C.
- Chilliwack, B.C.
- Victoria
- Vancouver
- Halifax
My current home of Toronto comes in at a mere number 26. Now, in nearly eight years in the Big Smoke, I've had two bikes stolen.*
* Addendum: However, when I lived in Little Italy, there were at least five fatal shootings and one low-level organized crime bombing within a one-kilometre radius over a 5.5-year period.
In nearly eight years in Regina, I had my truck broken into three times and had a bike stolen. Cathedral, the nabe I lived in, was almost a no-go zone for homeowner's insurance at one point because of the high property crime rates.
When I started living there in the late 1980s, Regina was the per-capita murder capital of Canada. But it was virtually all native-on-native homicide.
I was a courts 'n cops reporter back then, and I'll always remember what one Court of Queen's Bench judge (essentially) said in passing sentence in a manslaughter case: "This case involves a house party, drinking and then one native man stabbing another -- as is the case with 95 per cent of the homicides in this city."
One of my colleagues did a murder map of Regina, and they were mainly clustered in the Core and North-Central nabes -- all poor, and all with high native populations.
You could count the murders in nice, white, middle and upper-class South Regina on one hand.
For all of the talk about Toronto being a big, scary city, I've yet to see even one bar fight here. In the shithole logging and oilpatch towns in Alberta and B.C. of the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s, it was almost impossible to go out for a drink without seeing one in a night -- most often more than one. Lac La Biche, the northeastern Alberta town where I once spent a summer, was just zany. It actually ranked once as the most violent place in Canada at one point in the 1970s (statistically, it doesn't compare because Statistics Canada's numbers are based on populations of 100,000 and LLB is but a fraction of that).
In 1979, I spent a lot of time working out of Lodgepole, Alta., home of the "world famous" Lodgepole Pine Inn. I shot a lot of bar-room pool there. One night, there was a girl named Jane present, just out from Toronto to work on water surveys for Alberta Environment. On this particular night, two drilling rig crews were on the move (at the time, this was one of the world's hottest natural gas plays). Pool cues were swung, pool balls were thrown, voices were raised -- but in a good, clean, fun kind of way (relative to the time and place). "I don't believe it," said a wide-eyed Jane, her back to the wall. "It's just like they told me it would be out here!" I don't think Jane was there some other night when a woman named Bertha walked in. "Bertha, you sleazy slut!" someone yelled out in greeting. "I'm no sleazy slut," Bertha retorted. "I'm a dirty old whore!"
Not wanting to spend my entire life in socially dysfunctional places like those was a big motivator for getting out of forestry. So instead, I went into the news business! :)
When I holidayed up in the Hazelton, B.C. area in late August 2006, I saw a beautiful little house literally a stone's throw from the Skeena River. It got me to thinking thoughts like this: "Hmmm. I could probably pay cash for this place for less than a down payment in Toronto. Hmmmmmmm ..."
But that reverie was broken when I went for a post-fishing beer in the motel's pub. The first two sentences out of peoples' mouths were "boy, I'm gonna get drunk tonight!" followed by "were there any fights last night?"
I worked one summer in Burns Lake, B.C., which lies to the east but is culturally quite similar. And I thought to myself, "You knuckleheads haven't changed a bit, have you?"
Cheap housing isn't everything.