Stabbing incidents in Ottawa down to 96 so far this year — but criminologist attributes drop to luck, not strategy

Ottawa police have reported 96 stabbing incidents so far this year through August 9, a decrease from 124 incidents during the same period in 2025, 153 in 2024, and 146 in 2023.

But criminologist Irvin Waller, professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, cautioned against crediting the reduction to any deliberate prevention effort. "There's no reason to suppose that there's anything intentional in these reductions," Waller said. "I think Ottawa has probably been lucky."

The national picture tells a different story. Canada has experienced a long-term increase in stabbing-related homicides, with an average of 224 such homicides per year in the last decade — up 14.5% from the previous decade's average of 195 per year, according to Statistics Canada data. In Ottawa specifically, stabbing incidents resulting in injuries averaged 201 per year between 2016 and 2020, then increased to an average of 213 per year between 2021 and 2025.

So far this year in Ottawa, police say there have been six stabbing homicide victims from five different incidents — meaning stabbing was the method for all of Ottawa's homicides this year except one, the death of 19-year-old Majed Al-Ar on February 11, which police classified as a shooting.

Waller pointed to Toronto's anti-violence intervention strategy, funded by Public Safety Canada, which targets young men most involved in violence and attempts to redirect them toward school and employment. "You're basically focusing on the young men most involved in violence, and you're reaching them and trying to get them back into school, into jobs," Waller said. "We know that some of the reductions in Toronto are due to that."

Ottawa's Community Outreach, Response and Engagement (CORE) strategy, developed by police, focuses specifically on reducing violent crime in the ByWard Market and Rideau Street area — a narrower geographic scope than Toronto's intervention. Waller noted that the United Kingdom has also seen declines in violent crime through deliberate knife-crime reduction strategies using social outreach and community violence intervention. "There's a huge difference between only relying on increasing police budgets and actually doing the things that will make people safer," he said.