Crime, Part two:
To hear Mr. Harper tell it, when he insists the Conservatives have made Canada safe by putting "real criminals behind bars," you'd think we were all cowering in the corner. But in fact very few people are afraid they personally will be victims of crime.

Statistics Canada's 2009 criminal-victimization survey (of nearly 2,000 Canadians aged 15 and over) found that 93 per cent of us feel "somewhat" or "very" safe from crime, a number that hasn't changed in five years.

Ninety per cent of us feel fine walking alone in the dark. Eighty-three per cent aren't afraid to be at home alone at night. A quarter of the people surveyed actually reported being the victim of a crime in the previous 12 months (theft, most commonly), yet most of them still weren't afraid of criminals.

But that's a dreary survey. To see what I mean in the flesh – and blood – let me take you to booming Abbotsford, B.C., an hour's drive west of Vancouver in the spread-eagled Fraser Valley.

For two years running, in 2008 and 2009, this once-tiny farming town had the highest murder rate of any community in Canada over 100,000 people – 5.22 murders per 100,000 residents. A deeply religious town (more than 80 churches), Abbotsford is also in the riding of former Reform Party MP Randy White, one of the original sheriffs on the law-and-order landscape.

But Abbotsford straddles a long stretch of undefended border, and it's a Tunnel of Love for drug smuggling and gang activity. Pot, meth and E go south; coke, guns and freshly laundered cash come back. Some of Canada's most insouciant crime clans and gangs have operated here. Residents like to boast that back in the day, one in five houses in many parts of Abbotsford was a grow-op – a number the police don't deny. Eight of the nine murders that occurred in 2009 were gang-related. Somebody should write a TV series about the place.

Yet if you imagine Abbotsford as a hideous bullet-pocked hole, you are very wrong: It's a pleasant, friendly, utterly middle-class, suburban city. The parking lots are stuffed with brand new fully loaded $60,000 trucks. Herds of good-looking families roam the sidewalks. The city library is luxurious, bustling – only a brochure pinned to the message board advertising a "support group for people grieving the loss of those who died by homicide" hints at the city's shadow.

No one I meet professes to be alarmed by the city's criminals. In the food court of the local mall, an 89-year-old woman makes a few dubious remarks about seeing East Indians (heavily represented in this part of B.C.) in crime stories, but she says she's never concerned for her own safety. "I just kept my head down and my nose clean."

"I don't think anyone worries about it until it happens to you," her companion, a man in his 70s, adds. He has a Cockney accent like a small tray. "But nowadays with cellphones, you can get ahold of the cops pretty quick."

Then I run into Bill and Pam, a couple who own and operate five long-haul semis. They earn upwards of half-a-million dollars a year for their trouble. Bill is in his 60s, and full of news: Three of his pals have just been sentenced to 60 years in the U.S. for smuggling cannabis. (So it's not surprising that the couple asked me not to print their last name.)

He's been offered the chance to do so many times, and has been tempted. But he likes his freedom too much. "It's so easy to do, so easy to get away with. You can make $75,000 a trip. Seven hockey bags will bring you 50 grand." He guesses the cops catch 10 per cent of what crosses.

Bill's buddy Ted was nabbed with 1,300 kilos under the floor of a truck full of cattle, a messy spot the border guards normally don't care to search. Some smugglers stuff it in PVC pipe, cover it with wood chips, haul it under the city garbage – common knowledge in Abbotsford. But even though meth labs have blown up across the street from where he and Pam were standing, Bill has never "particularly worried" he might be a crime victim.

"Most of the murders are targeted," Pam explains. Her fingers are thick with nice gold rings.

But as personally unthreatened by crime as they say they are, everyone I meet wants the government to be tough on crime. Darshan Singh Dheliwal and his pals consider Stephen Harper "a child" and "not progressive" enough to vote for, but they still think Canada "has to be more like America. Not less than 10 years jail."

Bill isn't a Harper devotee – he's voting Conservative this year for the first time – but he still says things like "if you get 15 years, you should serve 15 years." It's the easiness and showiness of the drug money and the way it beggars traditional notions of work and reward that upset him.

"I just hate seeing all these kids, rolling in and playing Joe Cool because that's the only way you can make it. You can't make it here" – he nods at the mall's fast-food stands – "at $8 an hour. Abbotsford's like New York City now – a city I love, but everybody's trying to sell you something."