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Quebec City tops Canadian safety-perception poll
Liaison Strategies placed Quebec City first on net safety, one point ahead of Ottawa, after surveying 1,500 Canadian adults about 15 cities.
Quebec City narrowly edged Ottawa as the Canadian city perceived to be safest in a new Liaison Strategies poll, with one point separating the two on the firm’s net safety measure.
The Canadian polling firm asked 1,500 adults how safe or unsafe they believed 15 Canadian cities were, including Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax. Respondents could choose very safe, somewhat safe, somewhat unsafe, very unsafe, or say they did not know enough to answer.
Ottawa had the highest share of respondents calling it very or somewhat safe, at 75 per cent, followed by Quebec City at 74 per cent. Quebec City ranked first once both positive and negative perceptions were considered. Net safety subtracts the share calling a city unsafe from the share calling it safe.
David Valentin, principal at Liaison Strategies, described the result as a two-city story. The gap was very narrow, he said, but Quebec City was first when cities were ranked by net safety.
Saskatoon, Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto and Winnipeg had negative net safety scores. Winnipeg finished last at minus 28. Valentin said it was the clearest safety concern and had the highest official Crime Severity Index among the cities tested, meaning its public perception and official data pointed in the same direction.
He said Toronto was perceived as almost as unsafe as Winnipeg, though official crime-severity data did not put the two cities in the same category. That made Toronto the report’s clearest example of a gap between a city’s safety reputation and its official crime data.
Only 12 per cent of respondents said crime statistics were the main influence on their view of a city’s safety. Valentin said people instead often rely on news coverage, personal experience and word of mouth, making safety a reputation issue as well as a policing issue. He also identified a clear gender gap, with women seeing a sharper safety problem in Winnipeg, Vancouver, Edmonton and Toronto.
Liaison Strategies says it ranked first for accuracy in the 2025 Ontario election and second nationally in the 2025 federal election, and is a member of the Canadian Research Insights Council.