True Patriot Love - June 03, 2026


Is Rural Canada’s Crime Crisis Being Ignored？ [Weekly Crime Update]

Hosted by
Shara Micucci Mike Wixson
Iran Conflict Drags On： Why Canada Could Pay the Price Canada’s Litter Problem Is Out of Control

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

196.7

Word count

2,000

Sentence count

—

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Once upon a time, living in a small town in canada guaranteed you a virtually crime-free lifestyle. There was almost no crime in suburban areas, especially in the outer suburbs, bedroom communities and small towns. But recently stats canada had a shocking number this is actually information from Stats Canada saying that rural residents face violent crime rates nearly 50 percent higher than those in major cities. Upending the myth of that idyllic small town that picturesque postcard canadian lifestyle, we ll talk more about the change in the way crime is affecting everyone in Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 if we're going to see crime rates go up in the rural communities what are the root causes what
00:00:04.400 are the stats what it why exactly is happening is it is it you know domestic abuse is it drugs is
00:00:11.440 it what what is it and what's happening is it gun violence is it so those are the things that we
00:00:16.480 should be breaking down and those are the things that we should be trying to address quicker
00:00:20.720 once upon a time living in a small town in canada figure pretty much guaranteed you a virtually
00:00:30.880 crime-free lifestyle there was almost no crime in suburban areas especially in the outer suburbs
00:00:37.140 bedroom communities and small towns but recently stats canada had a shocking number this is
00:00:42.160 actually information from stats canada saying that rural residents face violent crime rates
00:00:47.880 nearly 50 percent higher than those in major cities upending the myth of that idyllic small
00:00:53.480 town that picturesque postcard canadian lifestyle we'll talk more about the change in the way crime
00:00:59.960 is affecting everyone in canada as always told to be joined by paul macucci paul how are you good
00:01:04.360 jim how are you doing yeah you know what it's an interesting stat i read it too and and uh
00:01:09.800 if you look at small towns and you look at the resources they have for law enforcement
00:01:14.440 you start to understand and as our law enforcement just like you consider all of our trades right now
00:01:19.800 you know whether we talk about plumbers electricians you know you have to look at law
00:01:24.200 enforcement and as law enforcement gets older you know that skill is eroding too so as our
00:01:29.880 as our canadian society um is starting to age and this is all of us unfortunately that's life
00:01:36.040 you know we're having uh rcmp's uh members retiring we're having local police officers
00:01:42.440 retiring while having people deciding that it's time to quit and with everything going on right
00:01:47.640 now whether it be overrun jails overrun um crime spree in different areas listen they probably are
00:01:55.000 thinking this is the right time to go and and you and i talked about it before the show there was a
00:02:00.520 time i guess even in law enforcement that when you went to work you weren't as you were always
00:02:05.960 concerned about your safety but there was an unwritten rule that parts of the communities
00:02:11.240 different communities didn't see a lot of crime that's right right and now you know the people
00:02:17.240 that are farming the people that are moving to the farms the people we're seeing getting involved in
00:02:22.600 rural communities are way different than they were but it was unheard of and and to the point now
00:02:28.280 there's also the whole vibe that um you know reducing the police cut the police we don't need
00:02:34.680 police so for a lot of young people looking at a career as a first responder they're looking at
00:02:39.240 paramedic they're looking at firefighter they're looking at different thing because to be a
00:02:43.800 firefighter to be a paramedic is still well respected right by people of all stripes in
00:02:48.600 the community whereas being a police officer it's not easy and it's not just the physical
00:02:53.160 threat and strain but the mental strain that they go through a lot of them i see why they get out
00:02:59.000 and go to private security or different ways of life because you can only take so much well and
00:03:03.320 and the danger right i think i think for the most part um in rural communities being a police
00:03:09.720 officer or police enforcement quite frankly has a lot of other issues right so yes a lot of times
00:03:15.560 when you arrive on that farm that uh perpetrator that criminal whatever they have a high-powered
00:03:21.560 weapon they're familiar with you know guns quite frankly they they have scopes they're you know
00:03:27.400 they're they know how to shoot a weapon with a lot of open space between the the you know the
00:03:32.360 alleged and the police officer exactly you're approaching you're approaching from a mile or
00:03:37.560 two off so they can see you coming and then you have to get out of your car you have to approach
00:03:41.240 the house and that that's where we hear these horror stories of these people so you know as
00:03:45.880 they get older and they decide they want to retire now you have this void and that void quite frankly
00:03:51.160 on top of that you know criminals that are moving uh contraband guns everything in the rural areas
00:03:59.000 are more sophisticated so they're more sophisticated as far as you know tracking
00:04:04.240 weaponry so here we are you know is it any surprise that we're seeing an increase in crime
00:04:09.940 in rural communities i don't think so once upon a time if a lot of us who maybe were the the child
00:04:17.420 an immigrant you lived in a maybe a small apartment in the inner city of a big city in canada
00:04:23.100 um your family need a little money you move to maybe a house and eventually you move to
00:04:28.700 one of those idyllic suburban communities like a vaughn ontario yes like a surrey bc out of
00:04:34.860 downtown vancouver all across the country and that was thought of safe schools safe neighborhoods
00:04:40.940 maybe a few speeding tickets maybe a drunk driving but no major crime to worry about
00:04:45.580 and that has changed in such a huge way in the last 10 years that we're seeing these what we
00:04:50.940 thought was the ultimate safe community to raise their family there's all these gun violence crimes
00:04:56.460 being taking place on a regular basis paul well you know it's interesting i went i just got back
00:05:01.340 and i i mentioned a little bit before the show to you i actually just got back from a wedding in
00:05:05.580 windsor you know i was involved in the farming community years ago down in that area and uh
00:05:10.940 nice part of the province nice part of the country it was you know right over the ambassador bridge
00:05:15.180 you know and and i enjoyed it quite frankly had a very uh interesting experience learned a lot
00:05:21.100 about something i didn't know and that was farming at the time and you know it was nothing to go to
00:05:26.060 sleep at night and not lock your doors he's still in the truck well i was shocked so after you know
00:05:32.700 when uh got up in the morning made my way up boulette street to go to the the wedding and i
00:05:38.380 was just shocked that the community has changed that much the boarded up buildings the homeless
00:05:43.500 people on the street the the basically apartments were just dilapidated and i was like wow this is
00:05:49.660 crazy how this this community has changed and you know i was there in a time when a million
00:05:55.900 americans used to come over because of the drinking age it has a party city and the exchange
00:06:01.180 and the exchange and it was very vibrant now it was kind of an eroded rundown city which quite
00:06:07.180 frankly you know has lots of these rural issues going on and i was like oh this is yeah it was
00:06:14.060 funny because you know it was there and i was with an old friend and i was enjoying and you know i was
00:06:21.260 happy for him and his daughter and everything else but when i was leaving i was thinking to myself
00:06:25.420 is this the right place for him to retire now like is this a really a nice place you know and
00:06:31.020 i'm not i'm not picking on windsor but i'm i'm just saying this is kind of one of those uh case
00:06:36.940 studies that we're seeing across the nation where to your point you know as people slow down they
00:06:41.580 would go to their retirement community in a smaller town well if smaller towns are going
00:06:46.140 to see higher crime rates you know where do where do we you know our elderly go to kind of slow down
00:06:52.460 retire have a nice segue you know into uh the latter years of their life i think about mike
00:06:59.260 and brady on their cross canada trip and some of the communities they're going through through
00:07:03.260 northern ontario across the prairies and for a lot of years a lot of those communities were
00:07:08.300 like it's a good place raise a family have a career have a job the big big crime the big issues
00:07:13.980 are in vancouver montreal toronto the big city but not there but now you have fentanyl and crime
00:07:21.020 and gangs and violence that has spread to parts of the country that didn't exist before and you
00:07:26.460 have a great it's a great point paul where do you go in this country now that you think truly is safe
00:07:31.740 so i'm running a triathlon this is a crazy story i'm running a triathlon uh years ago this is a
00:07:37.260 few years ago and i'm training so i'm doing my bike training in the morning yeah of course at
00:07:42.460 four in the morning you know way out about uh 40 minutes outside of toronto because the rolling
00:07:47.900 hills you know towards highway six and all that and i go and i do like 50 to 100 kilometers in
00:07:53.900 morning yeah i was doing a lot of biking because getting ready and i'm biking along i got my head
00:07:59.100 down i'm on my last leg because i had to go to work after i'm in my last leg to finish off i'm
00:08:04.300 trying to paling hard i got my head down i'm going downhill and i'm flying down i'm feeling really
00:08:08.780 good i'm about to finish all of a sudden i look up and it's the drug enforcement guys in the middle
00:08:15.340 of the road pulling me off my bike into the ditch and so i'm like holy cow like you know and they're
00:08:21.820 they're like you know hands up and they're pulling me off and then i'm actually being brought down
00:08:26.460 the ditch they're about to do a raid on a farm adjacent to where i'm right right so i got my bike
00:08:34.300 i'm all sweaty i'm laying in the weeds right wow one of them because he's he's left behind to
00:08:39.660 protect me now because you know they yeah yeah they pulled a civilian out and they don't want
00:08:43.420 him to be harmed right and so he's like you know i can't talk i gotta so i had to i had to lay there
00:08:48.540 for like 40 minutes until they had actually made the race like something in the movies paul it was
00:08:53.020 it felt like it i was like wow you know this is my favorite riding spot but nowadays what was not
00:08:58.860 the norm is actually the norm because when you're driving along and you're looking at that farm and
00:09:03.500 what people are storing on that farm it's not crops anymore right and so quite frankly you
00:09:10.460 know there's a lot of uh as people are moving things across the nation now things that we
00:09:15.580 never thought about before and and so now that's what we're incurring but but you know unfortunately
00:09:20.940 that's that's starting to change the composition of these cities and also the crime rates so
00:09:26.300 you know as we always do jim you know now's the time that we need to start talking about
00:09:31.660 how to mitigate that so i have a serious conversation as a nation as a nation of if
00:09:37.420 we're going to see crime rates go up in the rural communities what are the root causes what are the
00:09:41.980 stats what it why exactly is happening is it is it you know domestic abuse is it drugs is it what 0.89
00:09:49.260 what is it and what's happening is it gun violence is it so those are the things that we should be
00:09:54.140 breaking down and those are the things that we should be trying to address quicker