Rural crime concerns in Manitoba

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Residents of a small Manitoba town are raising the alarm tonight over rising crime rates. This after troubling statistics show crime in rural areas of the province are the second highest in all of Canada. CTV's Harrison Shin spoke with residents of Ashern about what they want done.

[00:00:19]A small community 2 hours northwest of Winnipeg, here in Ashern, crime is on people's minds. There's been lots of vandalism in the last month or so, for sure.

[00:00:29]Uh lots of businesses have been broken into. To the level residents created a new Facebook group just to voice concerns.

[00:00:36]>> We get posts in the group saying that either their shed's been kicked in, bikes have been stolen, businesses are being robbed, people are calling the police. On Tuesday, Statistics Canada released a study about the crime severity index. In the latest data from 2024, Manitoba has the second highest for rural areas. That index weighs crimes in terms of severity. Manitoba came in at 180, down 4 points from 2023.

[00:01:01]Saskatchewan topped the list at 219. Not surprising, which is very sad, cuz your community should be safe. We're a small town, everybody kind of knows everybody.

[00:01:11]You look out for your neighbors, and that's not happening right now.

[00:01:14]Residents like Kopp say they don't have enough police officers in the area.

[00:01:18]Manitoba Justice Minister Matt Wiebe says more needs to be done for rural communities. We know that there's a lot of issues uh that are driving crime, and we want to be tough on the root causes as well. So, our whole government is working towards making our your community safer, and uh we're going to make sure that the resources uh are there in place to make sure you and your family are safe. For Kopp, she'd like to see more officers in town.

[00:01:40]>> We have businesses that are being robbed daily, small businesses, small town owners. If the police and the government aren't doing anything to protect them, our small businesses are going to close.

[00:01:53]>> Harrison Shin, CTV News, Ashern, Manitoba.