National auto theft numbers may be falling, but Western Canada – and Alberta in particular – is showing patterns that could worry crime analysts.
Équité Association’s 2025 Auto Theft Trend Report found that Western Canada recorded an 11% year‑over‑year drop in private passenger vehicle thefts, with Alberta down 14%. Trucks remained the most stolen vehicle type in both Western Canada (38%) and Alberta (40%).
On the surface, that looks like good news. But recovery data tells a more complex story.
Alberta’s recovery rate has slid steadily from 78% in 2022 to 77% in 2023, 73% in 2024 and just 71% in 2025. Équité interprets that decline as evidence (among other things) of increased exports and re‑VINning – and says the province is increasingly being used as a gateway for stolen vehicles.
“Per capita, Alberta actually has a higher theft rate than Ontario and Quebec,” said Bryan Gast (pictured), national vice president of investigative services at Équité Association.
“There’s a lot of attention on Ontario and Quebec – large population, high number of targeted vehicles, proximity to the port of Montreal… Those numbers are high, but, per capita, Alberta actually has a higher theft rate.”
Recovery rates, he argued, are one of the best indicators of what stolen vehicles are being used for.
“If the recovery numbers are higher, then it means they are used for criminal purposes [since the criminals] later dispose of the car,” he explained. “It’s being recovered, whether… it was a joyride and then just left on the side of the road, or they use it to commit an armed robbery and then leave [it] on the side of the road.”
The ones that are lost are the ones that worry Gast.
“It’s those ones that are never seen again,” he added. “Why aren’t they seen again? It could be because their identity has been masked through a re‑VINning process, or they’ve been containerized and they’re no longer in Canada. They’re just not to be found.”
In Alberta’s case, fewer vehicles are being found.
“The fact that the recovery rates are dropping from the 80s into the 70s [means] less and less of those vehicles are being recovered,” Gast said. “And we’re recovering Alberta vehicles at the ports, both out west and out east – so Halifax, Montreal and BC.”
Those findings line up with Équité’s broader assessment that Alberta continues to be a feeder province to register stolen and re-VINed vehicles for the rest of Canada. Lower recovery rates, combined with more Alberta‑plated vehicles turning up in port seizures, suggest criminals are changing how they exploit the province.
“They’re stealing vehicles for a different purpose,” Gast said. “In Alberta they’re using the Alberta registry for first registry and then transferring it other places in the country.”
He believes pressure in traditional hotspots may be pushing organized crime to look west.
“Maybe that’s to do with [the fact] that there continues to be a lot of focus in Ontario and Quebec, and they’re looking for the least resistance type of thing,” he said. “That’s the important thing about trends and patterns – we can see what they are and we can make sure that we work with our law enforcement partners to identify these trends and have operations in place to deal with them.”
For insurers and brokers with significant Alberta books, the shift has several implications:
Gast said Équité’s investigators and analytics teams are already working with partners across the country to stay ahead of those shifts.
“We can see what [the trends] are and we can make sure that we work with our law enforcement partners to identify these trends and have operations in place to deal with them,” he said.
For Alberta, the message is that a headline decline in thefts doesn’t necessarily mean the province is less central to Canada’s auto crime problem. In many ways, it now sits closer to the heart of it.
