Under the Canadian constitution, the power to establish criminal law and rules of investigation and trying crimes is vested in the federal government. The provinces are responsible for law enforcement (although provincial policing in many jurisdictions is contracted to the federal and national Royal Canadian Mounted Police), and while the power to prosecute offences belongs to the federal government, responsibility for prosecutions is delegated to the provinces for most types of criminal offences. Laws and sentencing guidelines are uniform throughout the country, but provinces vary in their level of enforcement.^{[citation needed]}

There were 2,452,787 crimes reported in 2006; 48% were property related crimes and 12.6% were violent crimes. At a rate of 7,518 reported incidents per 100,000 people, the crime rate in 2006, the latest year for which there is statistics, was the lowest crime rate in twenty-five years. The crime rate has been in general decline since 1991.

The province with the lowest crime rate in 2006 was for the third straight year Ontario with 5,689 per 100,000, followed by Quebec with 5,909 per 100,000. The province with the highest crime rate for the 9th straight year was Saskatchewan with 13,711 per 100,000. Regina is the city with the highest crime rate followed by its provincial counterpart Saskatoon. Quebec City, Trois-Rivières, and Saguenay have the lowest crime rates of any city and are all located in Quebec. The three northern territories have higher per capita crime rates than any province.

Canada ( /ˈkænədə/) is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean. Spanning over 9,900,000 km² (3,800,000 sq mi), Canada is the world's second-largest country by total area, and its common border with the United States is the longest land border in the world.

The land that is now Canada has been inhabited for millennia by various Aboriginal peoples. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and French colonial expeditions explored, and later settled, along the region's Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy; the Canada Act 1982 severed the vestiges of legal dependence on Britain.

William Sefton Fyfe, CC FRSC FRS (born 4 June 1927) is a New Zealand geologist and Professor Emeritus in the department of Earth Sciences at the University of Western Ontario. He is widely considered among the world’s most eminent geochemists.

Born in Ashburn, New Zealand, he received his B.Sc. degree in 1948, his M.Sc. degree in 1949, and his Ph.D. degree in 1952 all from the University of Otago, where he taught in the Geology department as a lecturer. He performed research at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Professor at Berkeley, Imperial College London and the University of Manchester before arriving at the University of Western Ontario in 1972. From 1986 until 1990 he was Dean of Science at the University of Western Ontario.

William Patrick Fyfe (born 27 February 1955) is a Canadian serial killer convicted of killing five women in the Montreal area of Quebec, although he claims to have killed four others. He allegedly killed his first victim in 1979 at age of 24.

He was born in Toronto, Ontario. He was raised by an aunt and moved from Central Canada to Montreal in 1958. As an adult, he worked as a handyman.

A finger print left on a door frame at Mary Glen's house and DNA evidence led police to charge Fyfe for the murders. The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) arrested him on 22 December 1999, while he was returning to his pick-up truck after eating at a Husky Truck Stop near Barrie Ontario. He has confessed to only a portion of the crimes he is suspected of committing.

Fyfe's preliminary hearing began on 6 November 2000. Jean Lecours was the crown prosecutor heading up the case against Fyfe. He is now serving a life sentence in a psychiatric hospital in Saskatchewan. The four last victims he admitted to, only after being incarcerated.