For car thieves, Toronto is a “candy store” and drivers are fed up

When Dennis Wilson wants to take a ride in his new SUV, he has to reserve an extra fifteen minutes. That’s about how long it takes to remove the car’s steering stick, release four tire chocks and lower a yellow bollard before backing out of the driveway.

His Honda CR-V is also equipped with two alarm systems, a vehicle tracking device and, for good measure, four Apple AirTags. The remote access key fob rests in a Faraday bag to block illegal unlocking signals.

As a finishing touch, he mounted two motion-sensitive spotlights on his house and pointed them at the driveway in his modest Toronto neighborhood.

But Wilson is confident that all these security gadgets will do nothing more than delay what seems inevitable: Toronto’s hardened car thieves won’t be deterred by the defensive equipment, and they’ll make off with this Honda SUV just as they did with his predecessor – and his insurance replacement, which they returned to steal.

“I don’t think I stopped them in any way,” Mr. Wilson said. “All I did was make it take an extra ten minutes to steal my car.”

While there has been a rise in car thefts across Canada – up 24 per cent by 2022, according to the most recent national statistics of the year – the scourge has hit the Toronto area especially hard, creating a mix of paranoia, vigilantism and resentment has arisen.

Car thefts in Canada’s largest city are so widespread, up 150 percent in the past six years, that the issue has become something of a common bond among car owners. If they are not victims of a theft or thefts themselves, many people seem to know someone whose car was stolen, and almost everyone can immediately imagine one of the headlines about car theft that news media have had ample opportunity to publish.

Social media groups have been formed to crowdsource help for car sightings. But the comments are full of people telling owners to resign themselves to the fact that their car is probably already in a shipping container headed overseas.

“Organized crime is growing bolder and the international black market for stolen cars is expanding,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a hastily convened car theft summit in Ottawa this month.

The meeting was intended to reassure Canadians that the government was aware of the issue and was considering a number of responses, including increasing penalties for car thieves, investing in the border agency and banning key fob imports -hacking equipment.

The government is not only aware of the problem, it has not been spared: two government-issued Toyota Highlanders were stolen three times in Ottawa from the current and previous Ministers of Justice.

Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party, has repeatedly criticized Mr Trudeau on the issue, accusing the government of being excessively lenient on bail and sentencing of offenders.

Police have received new funding, including for better surveillance equipment, but the profit motive for thieves – as much as 20,000 Canadian dollars, or $14,800 per car – has so far made the problem intractable.

Car thefts have escalated to “national crisis” levels, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, an industry group, which says insurers will have paid out a record 1.2 billion Canadian dollars, or about $890 million, in theft claims in 2022.

For victims it is a dizzying and sometimes traumatizing experience.

“I couldn’t process the truth that the car was stolen,” said Kamran Hussain, whose leased 2022 Toyota Highlander was stolen in January. Mr Hussain’s work as a field employee in the telecom sector requires access to a car. He borrows one from a friend while he considers what to do next.

“Either I have to buy a new car or I have to change jobs,” he said. “I have no other choice.”

Demand for vehicle tracking from Ontario insurers has roughly doubled in the past two years at Tag Tracking, a Montreal-based company, says vice-president Freddy Marcantonio. Quebec insurers often require the Tag System for high-risk cars in the province, which has struggled with car thefts for decades, largely because many thieves prefer the Port of Montreal because they can quickly get their hot wheels out of the country can get.

Thanks in part to the well-known presence of tracking systems in Quebec, thieves have turned to Toronto for easier plunder.

“It’s like getting a credit card and telling a kid to go to a candy store and buy whatever they want, and that’s why they moved to Ontario,” Mr. Marcantonio said. “It’s a free market there for them.”

But just as criminals have changed their behavior – “I like to say they have a PhD in car theft,” Mr. Marcantonio said – so have Toronto car owners. Many are motivated to take a step as simple as clearing the clutter from their car. garages so they can store their cars overnight.

Homeowners are also increasingly looking for solutions to protect their driveways, and some are winning praise of the police for installing bollards, as Mr Wilson has done.

Last year, Achoy Ladrick founded Bollard Boys GTA – for Greater Toronto Area, an acronym unfortunately shared with the popular video game Grand Theft Auto.

“With this company I’ve been able to bring that confidence back and bring that peace of mind back to people,” said 23-year-old Mr Ladrick, adding that a customer had four bollards installed after three Range Rover thefts.

Thieves’ bread and butter are the most prosaic cars, like Mr. Wilson or the Ford F-150 trucks. Luxury cars are trophies.

Some wealthy collectors store their cars in secret locations with 24-hour security and dogs at night, but thieves can still win.

Nick Elworthy wanted to get every detail of his Ferrari just right, from the stitching to the unique color, a candy apple red that’s a little deeper than the sports car’s signature color. He only drove it a few times before it was stolen last summer.

But police in Ottawa stumbled upon it when an officer saw a Range Rover being backed into a shipping container on a rural property. A second car in the container was Mr Elworthy’s Ferrari.

“I was absolutely ecstatic when I got the call from that officer,” he said. “I literally jumped up and down.”

Most drivers discover that they have been victimized when confronted with the initially baffling location of an empty parking lot.

When Myra White couldn’t find a 2021 Jeep Wrangler she was sure she had parked on a residential corner in downtown Toronto, she questioned her memory before realizing it had been stolen. To her surprise, police found it in a rail yard, with a smashed rear passenger window.

“I’m trying to figure out what we’re going to do with the car when we get it back because I obviously don’t want this to happen again,” said Ms. White, an executive at a Toronto logistics company. “It’s something endemic to the city.”

For the exasperated Mr. Wilson, there has been one recent consolation from being a Toronto car owner: this year’s mild winter means he doesn’t often have to get out his heat gun or defrost spray to defrost his multiple locks.

Considering he bikes to work — and considering all he needs to do to fend off the thieves who covet his Honda — he said he’s made up his mind about what his next step will be if he’s victimized again .

“If they steal this car, I think I’m done,” he said, adding, “If they come with their antenna and put it by the window, the only two key fobs they’re going to pick up are the two cars. that they have already stolen. I left it for them.”