Three shot dead in one day in John Tory’s Toronto

Between 7:00 pm on Monday and 10:30 pm on Tuesday, a span of less than 28 hours, Toronto saw Michael Opong Berchie, Cam Thanh-Tat, and an unidentified third man shot dead on the streets of the city.

The murders represent the seventh, eighth, and ninth murders in the city since the beginning of 2021. Another man was shot dead on Saturday in the city as well. Four people in total have been murdered in the city during the first ten days of February alone, nearly reaching the entire total from January, during which five Torontonians were murdered.

Annual murders have skyrocketed in Toronto since Mayor Tory took office in 2014. During his first full year as mayor in 2015, 59 people were murdered in the city. By 2018, the year which saw the most murders in Toronto's history, 96 people were murdered over the course of the year.

The rise in murders corresponds with an even larger rise in shootings. In 2014, the year Tory took office, the city recorded 177 shootings. By 2020, that number had increased to 460.

Tory has blamed the rise in crime in his city on gang violence.

"We're seeing again elevated levels of what I understand to be principally gang-related activity with retaliations going on – with a lot of this going on social media, which is unusual now but you get this taunting going on, which is not an excuse for it," Tory said on Wednesday.

He also suggested that criminals being released on bail has helped fuel rising murders.

"There continues to be a problem with people who are arrested, often in connection with firearms charges who are let out on bail and offend again," Tory said.

Tory has previously lobbied the federal government to implement stronger gun control with some success. The Trudeau government last year implemented gun control through an order-in-council, targeting law-abiding gun owners for confiscation rather than gun smugglers.

Many observers, including former Toronto police chief Mark Saunders, have argued that the spike in gun violence does not come from law-abiding gun owners, noting that 82 percent of handguns in Toronto were illegally imported from the United States.

Tory eventually admitted himself that the spike in gun crime would not be solved by a handgun ban due to the illegally imported nature of most guns used in the city's gang violence.