Are Canada's Street Protests Out of Control?

If you’ve lived in or traveled through an urban area and/or university campus over the past few years, then you’ve probably experienced the consequences of political protests. And if you’re like me, you’ve wondered whether all the disruption is, well, normal.

Well perhaps, thanks to data provided by ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data), it may be possible to find out. ACLED data identifies and documents global instances of protests, riots, and violence against citizens. Obviously, events leading to serious violence and mass death are their primary concern. But the data covers peaceful protests as well.

In total, since the earliest records in the dataset from back in late 2020, there have been 9,253 events in Canada. That would come to around 225 events per million Canadians. For comparison, the U.S. experienced 97,311 events over that time, a rate of 285 per million.

So, when expressed as a proportion of our population, we have around 21 percent fewer events than the U.S. That could mean we’re a more peaceable bunch, that we’ve got less to complain about, or that Canadian governments do a better job mercilessly crushing dissent. My guess is that your political predisposition will largely determine which of those you choose.

Fully 93 percent of Canadian protest events went off peacefully, compared with 91 percent in the U.S. There were 172 events involving looting, property destruction, or violence here (4 events per million), compared with 1,662 (5 per million) in the U.S.

While we might have “won” that particular competition with the U.S., visualizing 172 violent events¹ across Canada is still sobering.

Diving down into the data a bit, 34.15 percent of that violent nastiness took place in Ontario. But since Ontario’s population makes up 38.9 percent of the national total, I’ll count that as a plus. The Maritime provinces - along with Alberta and Saskatchewan - also contributed violence and looting at levels below their share of the population.

That would leave Quebec, BC, and Manitoba (literally) punching above their weight. Quebec - the worst offender - contributed 29.3 percent of our collective poor behavior, while only representing 21.8 percent of the population.

The dataset’s population exposure numbers could possibly give us a sense of the impact demonstrations have. Population exposure is a data-derived estimate of the number of people who are potentially exposed to the event by virtue of living nearby. This number would represent the level of general disruption a protest causes.

Overall, the average event in Canada impacted 13,254 people, while protests in the U.S. affected 30,545. This could possibly suggest that American protests are larger and better organized. Although the difference could also be explained by the fact that U.S. cities tend to be more densely populated, which would expose more people to protests no matter how many participants there might be.

In support of that reading of the data, when broken down by province, we see that population exposure visibly drops in low-density provinces. This strongly suggests that, at least in Canada, these numbers have more to do with where demonstrations happen rather than their intensity.

What we already know is that, even what confronted with criminal behavior, Canadian law enforcement agencies will rarely make arrests. And when they do, there’s a vanishingly small chance that those arrested will ever face consequences - or even see the inside of a courtroom.

The violent events highlighted in this dataset represent just one more indicator of the kinds of criminality that’s (fairly) common in the country and, for the most part, left uncontrolled.

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1. Eight of those events happened in the Territories. Is it even possible to hurt someone wearing a parka?