Logan LaFreniere woke up one morning in October 2022 to find the driveway where he normally parks his car was empty.
His new Ram Rebel pickup truck was gone.
Her security camera captured two hooded men breaking into her truck in the middle of the night outside her home in Milton, Ontario, and driving her away with ease.
Months later, that same truck appeared on a vehicle sales website in Ghanaon the other side of the ocean and some 8,500 kilometers away.
“The most eye-opening thing was seeing the laptop holder that we had installed on the back of the driver’s seat for my son, and inside there was trash that he had put in there,” LaFreniere told the BBC.
The same disarray was visible in photographs of the car’s listing, he added.
“I had no doubt that it was my vehicle.”
LaFreniere’s story is not unique.
In 2022, more than 105,000 cars were stolen in Canada, approximately one car every five minutesAmong the victims was Canada’s own federal justice minister, whose government-owned Toyota Highlander XLE was stolen twice.
Interpol included last May Canada among the top 10 countries for car theft out of a total of 137 in its database, a “remarkable” development, a spokesman said, considering that the country only began sharing its data with the international police organization in February.
Authorities say once these cars are stolen, they are either used to carry out other violent crimes, sold domestically to other unsuspecting Canadians or shipped overseas for resale.
Interpol says it has detected more than 1,500 cars worldwide that have been stolen in Canada since February, and about 200 more continue to be identified each week, usually at ports in other countries.
Car theft is such an epidemic that it was declared “national crisis” by the Insurance Bureau of Canada, which says insurers have had to pay out more than C$1.5 billion (US$1.1 billion) in vehicle theft claims last year.
The problem forced police jurisdictions across the country to issue public bulletins on how to protect vehicles from theft.
Meanwhile, some Canadians took their own measures by doing everything from place trackers in their cars until hire private security in their neighborhoods.
Some who can afford it even installed retractable bollards at the entrances to their homes – similar to those seen in banks and embassies – to try to deter thieves.
Robberies everywhere
Nauman Khan, who lives in Mississauga, a city just outside Toronto, started a bollard installation business after he and his brother were victims of car thefts.
Khan said the robbers broke into his home while his wife and young children were sleeping in an attempted robbery. They were looking for the keys to his Mercedes GLE parked out front, he said, but ran away when he confronted them.
After that experience, which he described as “traumatic,” they sold their cars except for two “humble” family vehicles.
At his business, Khan now hears similar stories from across the Toronto region.
“It’s been very busy,” he said. “We had a client whose street had so many home invasions that He hired a security guard every night outside his house because he just didn’t feel safe,” he added.
The pervasiveness of carjackings in Canada is surprising given how small the country’s population is compared with the U.S. and U.K., countries with high rates of such crimes, said Alexis Piquero, director of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
“[Canadá] “It also doesn’t have as many port cities as the US,” he continued.
While the US, Canada and the UK have experienced a Increase in car thefts since the covid-19 pandemicCanada’s robbery rate (262.5 per 100,000 people) is higher than that of England and Wales (220 per 100,000 people), according to the latest available data for each country.
It is also quite close to that of the US, which stands at around 300 vehicle thefts per 100,000 people, according to 2022 data.
The increase in recent years is partly due to a global shortage of cars as a result of the pandemic, which increased the demand for both used and new vehicles.
There is also a growing market for certain car models internationally, making stealing them one of the main sources of income for organized crime groupssaid Elliott Silverstein, director of government relations for the Canadian Automobile Association.
Lack of port controls
Silverstein noted that the way the companies operate ports of canada makes them more vulnerable to this type of theft than other countries.
“In the port system, there is a greater focus on what is coming into the country than what is going out,” he said, adding that once vehicles are packed into shipping containers at a port, it becomes harder to track them down.
However, the police have managed to recover some stolen cars.
In October, the Toronto Police Service announced an 11-month investigation that seized 1,080 vehicles worth an estimated 60 million Canadian dollars (US$44 million). More than 550 charges were laid as a result.
And between mid-December and late March, border and police agents found Nearly 600 vehicles stolen at the Port of Montreal after inspecting 400 containers.
Such operations, however, can be difficult to carry out given the volume of goods moving through the port, according to local experts. Some 1.7 million containers passed through the Port of Montreal in 2023 alone.
He port staff It also does not have the authority to inspect containers in most cases, and in customs-controlled areas only border officials can open a container without a court order.
At the same time, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has been grappling with a chronic staff shortage, according to a report submitted by its union to the government in April.
Outdated technology is also a problem.
Patrick Brown, mayor of Brampton, another Ontario city hard hit by car thefts, recently visited the Newark container terminal in New Jersey to compare inspection tactics between the US and Canada.
Brown told the newspaper National Post that the US authorities have “scanners. They measure density. They work closely with local authorities.”
“These are things we don’t do in Canada,” he said.
Goodbye to the truck of your dreams
The Canadian government announced in May that it will invest millions to strengthen the CBSA’s ability to search shipping containers. Police will also receive additional money to combat car theft.
But Silverstein believes one missing piece of the puzzle is the automakers themselves.
“Everyone is talking about trying to recover vehicles, and a lot of my focus has been on why we’re not making vehicles harder to steal in the first place,” he said.
Meanwhile, car owners like LaFreniere are still debating what to do to keep their vehicles safe.
After his Ram Rebel pickup truck was stolen, he replaced it with a Toyota Tundra, a vehicle LaFreniere described as his “dream truck.”
This time, he installed an engine immobilizer to prevent thieves from being able to start the car easily. He also equipped it with a tracker in case it gets stolen, and added a security baton to the steering wheel just in case.
The thieves were undeterred. Last January, two people showed up in LaFreniere’s driveway, this time to steal the Tundra. They found it more difficult and resorted to smashing the back window to get in.
The shattering glass woke LaFreniere and he called 911. But the robbers managed to escape.
He paid to repair his new truck and then sold it.
The whole ordeal, he said, was nothing short of “daunting.”
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