A poll commissioned for CSIS last January found that 57 per cent of respondents felt that Canada is a more dangerous place than it was five years earlier.Arlyn McAdorey/The Canadian Press

I am one of those people who suffers from an acute, yet ephemeral, fear of flying, which washes over me the precise moment I feel the plane’s wheels lift off the tarmac. “What type of idiot risks her life in a metal box flying 30,000 feet above the ground?,” I think to myself as I look around the cabin, seeking comfort in the seemingly calm faces of the imputed idiots around me. I forget about this fear right around the moment the plane completes its ascent, only to be suffused with it yet again when the pilot announces he is ready to steer the flying metal box back down to Earth.

This type of anxiety is an example of the risk-fear paradox, which describes an incongruence between a statistical risk of harm, and fear about that harm. Everyone knows you are much more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the airport than in a plane crash, but your feelings – to borrow and invert a phrase – generally don’t care about facts.

Canadians, particularly those living in urban centres, may be experiencing something of a risk-fear paradox when it comes to crime. A poll commissioned for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in January, 2025, found that 57 per cent of respondents felt that Canada is a more dangerous place than it was five years earlier. An

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