Thirty Years After VIOLENCE IN CANADA
By Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D.
Canada is often portrayed, by Canadians and outsiders alike, as a peaceable kingdom. A safe, polite, largely nonviolent country. Aside from a handful of gritty television series that have made their way out of Canada, the True North is generally depicted as an exceptional place to live, work, or vacation.
But thirty years ago, I set out to challenge one of those myths. At the time, I was living outside of Canada, in the United States, and I was struck by how pervasive the news coverage of violence was, and the adaptations people made as a response. I began to wonder: Why do Canadians behave as if they’re immune to the same dynamics? There’s plenty of violence in Canada, too.
That question became the seed for Violence in Canada: Sociopolitical Perspectives, a book I edited at the beginning of my academic career. Now, three decades later, it seems worth reflecting on the origins of the project, what it accomplished, and how the landscape has shifted since its publication.
What I Set Out to Do
At the time, I had several goals. Like many early-career academics, I was trying to build my academic street cred. But this wasn’t some cynical résumé-padding exercise. Violence in Canada was also a personal homage to my primary mentor, Ted Robert Gurr, who had co-edited the classic Violence in America with Hugh Graham. That book lasted through three editions, each expanding and evolving with new material. Gurr and Graham’s Violence in America didn’t just map patterns; it helped shape scholarly and national conversations about crime, protest, and power. I hoped Violence in Canada could do something similar. Gurr, graciously, agreed to write the foreword to Violence in Canada.
I also saw the book as a necessary intervention. The popular image of Canada as a haven from violence, not just physical violence, but structural and state violence, struck me as dangerously incomplete and disengenuous. I wanted to compile a volume that would push back against that complacency.
Building the Book
All books begin as a proposal, and Violence in Canada was no different. I shopped the idea around and received the most promising feedback from Oxford University Press Canada. I also invited academics whose work I respected to contribute chapters. Although I had a lot of energy, I was still ABD (all but dissertation) at the time, which probably didn’t help. I’m sure some contributors wondered who the hell I was. Nevertheless, I was truly blessed by having so many respected scholars who specialized in facets of violence in Canada agree to write chapters for the book.
In retrospect, I might advise early-career scholars to wait until after finishing their dissertations before writing a book or editing a volume. But what did I know? I was impatient and, as it turns out, fortunate.
Violence in Canada, and another project I was working on at the same time, Controlling State Crime, formed the foundation of my early publishing experience. Editing Violence in Canada taught me a lot about how edited scholarly books come together, and later, I would reflect on that process in a newsletter article and two peer-reviewed pieces.
Reception and Legacy
Originally published by Oxford, the book had a solid run. It received mostly positive reviews, was relatively well cited, and eventually went into a second edition.
Still, it wasn’t without criticism. Some activists argued that the book failed to address structural violence, a critique that I think would’ve been answered more clearly had they read both Gurr’s and my forewords. But the feedback was instructive, and I don’t dismiss it. Structural violence in Canada deserved more sustained engagement then, and it certainly does now.
One of the central arguments of the book was that much of the violence in Canada happens out of sight behind closed doors. And since the book’s publication, research has continued to validate that claim. Peer-reviewed articles, government reports, and NGO investigations have all helped uncover the less visible but deeply embedded patterns of violence in Canadian life.
Canada Today
In the three decades since the book’s release, the level of violence in Canada has fluctuated, much like in the United States. But overall, Canada still experiences less violence per capita. This isn’t accidental.
A combination of factors — stricter gun control laws, lower levels of poverty and inequality, and universal healthcare (including mental health services), have all played a role. That doesn’t mean we’re anywhere close to utopia. Ask a First Nations woman living on or near a reservation, or a street cop patrolling the inner city of Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal, whether Canada is nonviolent. They’ll either laugh at you or stare at you in disbelief.
The myth of the peaceable kingdom isn’t dead and may never die.
But treating Canada as immune to the forces that produce violence elsewhere is more than naïve. It’s dangerous.
Looking Ahead
Violence in Canada was never intended to be the final word. It was a starting point, a provocation, and an attempt to push the conversation forward. Thirty years later, the book feels both dated and oddly prescient. Much has changed in terms of policies, practices, and laws, but arguably not enough.
Violence in Canada as a process didn’t begin with colonization, and it didn’t end with a book (even one that made its way into a second edition). The challenge remains: to ask hard questions about who gets hurt, how, and why, and to confront the myths some people cling to in the name of national exceptionalism.
