TORONTO - One might think no thief would be foolish enough to try and steal a vehicle from Alison Tuckett’s Toronto, Ont. driveway with its thirteen security cameras, motions sensors with alarms and each of her vehicles having both a wheel clamp and a steering wheel lock, and they would be very wrong.
In fact, the vehicles outside their home in East York have been targeted more than two dozen times in the past four years, the security footage shown to CTV News showed.
“I’ve lost count… Multiple,” said Tuckett to CTV News when asked about the number of car theft attempts she’s experienced. “We catch them all the time on the cameras when they come around.”
Tuckett and her husband Wolfgang Ott said their first vehicle was stolen from their driveway in 2022. Since then, they beefed up security, investing thousands of dollars in devices to prevent theft.
Even then, that hasn’t stopped would-be thieves from snooping around their neighbourhood.
“We’ve put motion sensors in the driveway and in the vehicles, but they’ve still come back just after they try to steal it,” said Tuckett. “They did $6,500 worth of damage to it, to try and steal it.”
“We’ve actually caught people who may be pretending to walk their dog, and blatantly taking a photo of vehicles… But it’s not just us. They also walk up the road and take photos of other vehicles around the neighbourhood.”
Tuckett says she and Ott have reported all the incidents to police but have not gotten anywhere when it comes to reducing the number of times they see theft attempts.
“We feel unheard. We feel victimized,” she said. “[The thieves] don’t care. They don’t care.”
However, measures like the ones taken by Tuckett and Wolfgang appear to be part of the reason why car theft numbers appearing to be steadily declining across Canada.
“It’s the public awareness piece, which is many, many different municipality police and also provincial police have brought it into front and centre to the public,” said Betty Ng, who is the director of investigative services at Équité Association.
“It’s what we call a layer approach. Parking your vehicle in the garage, parking your car in a well-lit area, have some kind of a vehicle tracker device or steering wheel lock, an audio alarm system, anything that can slow down the thieves.”
After vehicle thefts peaking in 2023, new data from Équité Association shows a year over year drop. There were 20,759 private passenger vehicles reported stolen across the country during the first six months of the year, down 10.1 per cent from 23,093 during the first half of 2025.
Looking at the annual figures, Statistics Canada reported 83,652 motor vehicle thefts in all of 2025, with the national rate falling 16 per cent to 201 thefts per 100,000 people. That followed another significant decline in 2024, after motor vehicle theft had increased for three consecutive years from 2021 through 2023.
“It’s multifaceted,” added Ng. “There’s no one silver bullet that can solve these issues.”
Collaboration between police driving down thefts
Government data showed vehicle thefts started surging during and shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic, with crime groups willing to fill the void in the market left behind by the supply chain issues.
“We saw, during the pandemic and post-pandemic, the value of auto theft exceeding $1 billion across the country,” said Elliott Silverstein, director of government relations at CAA Insurance, in an interview with CTV News Sunday
“What we saw, post-pandemic or during the pandemic was really that vehicles were being stolen roughly every once every five minutes across the country at its absolute worst.”
Another major reason why vehicle thefts have been going down after that post-pandemic spike, is because of a new mandate to create more co-ordination between different police services.
“We actually saw that this was something that was missing, more information sharing and collaboration between police forces,” said Lucas Malinowski, president and CEO at Global Automakers of Canada. “Because these crime groups, they’re not keeping their activities to a single municipality or even a single province, they’re often working across municipal lines and provincial lines.”
“They’ve been successful in identifying new trends because where they may pop up in one municipality, we could see those approaches traveled to other municipalities,” he said.
The changes were sparked by a National Summit on Combatting Auto Theft in Ottawa in February 2024, bringing together federal, provincial and municipal governments, police, border officials, automakers, insurers and other industry representatives.
The goal was to improve information sharing across different municipalities and provinces, strengthen enforcement and examine changes to Canada’s laws aimed at disrupting organized crime groups involved in stealing and exporting vehicles.
Vehicle standards need to be changed to defend against thieves
Shortly after the summit, Ottawa committed millions of dollars to increase the Canada Border Services Agency’s capacity to detect and search shipping containers for stolen vehicles and improve intelligence sharing with Canadian and international law-enforcement agencies.
Changes to the Criminal Code created new offences targeting vehicle theft involving violence or organized crime, carrying a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison – with law enforcement also stepping up their presence at ports and rail yards used to move stolen vehicles out of the country.
“We have seen a great effort by law enforcement to really focus on the issues across the country. We’ve seen provinces like Ontario provide direct funding to police, to be able to have the programs and the equipment necessary to catch the thieves,” said Silverstein.“We’ve seen some efforts to crack down at the ports. But what we’ve also seen is a greater amount of education and awareness among consumers. They now have a better sense of what to watch out for.”
Silverstein believes there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done to update vehicle standards, which would ensure more vehicles are protected right out of the factory line.
“It’s still costing Canadians and insurance companies hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and there’s still more work to be done,” he added.“The [vehicle] standards have not been updated since 2007… so, there’s been a lot of there’s been a lot of efforts in recent years. That involves talking to automakers, working with experts, looking at the technology and really try to provide a solution long-term."
Car theft victims’ advice to Canadians
Dave Howell had his vehicle stolen while visiting his granddaughter in Montreal, Que., and now carries around a digital car immobilizer, which only allows the car to turn on if it’s brought inside the car itself.
“When we get out in the morning, I’m looking at the parking lot saying ‘dude, where’s my car?’” said Howell in an interview with CTV News Saturday night.
“I think it’s important that people understand that there are people that are desperate enough to want to steal cars. And I think it’s important that you take whatever precaution that you can, in order to try to avoid that.”
While Debbie Brown from Cornwall, Ont. who had her Toyota Rav4 stolen a couple of years ago, now puts a steering wheel lock on her new SUV.
“My lesson learned is that I know have a [steering wheel] club when I go out shopping because Cornwall seems to be a hub. They’re stealing them out of shopping centres. They’re stealing them out of bingo halls. Mine was stolen out of the driveway,” said Brown.
She claims police told her that thieves try and target vehicles parked in homes that are close to highways, so they can have a direct line to nearby ports – including the Port of Montreal, which became a hotbed for stolen vehicle shipments.
“I think you told me a little bit yesterday about how the parts are kind of universal, but also my vicinity Port of Montreal as well, since Cornwall is right along the [Highway] 401,” she said.
For Tuckett and Ott, even though the national numbers for car thefts seem to be declining, they say they haven’t noticed a reduction in potential car thieves roaming their neighbourhood. They say they’re “frustrated” that police haven’t been able to bust them yet, even with the security footage they’ve provided from their over dozen cameras.
“We did this to get more information because if we report it to the police, they obviously ask for a licence plate number… So, we got the cameras to read the license plate numbers and [the police] don’t seem to really care or pay attention, so it’s just become very frustrating,” said Tuckett.
